The Salient and Boesinghe
The Salient had been the running sore in our armies’ side since the first. Now that we had men, guns, and material, it looked as if it might be staunched at last. A battalion does not think beyond its immediate interests—even officers are discouraged from trying to run the war by themselves—but it did not need to be told that it had not been fattened up the last few weeks for Headquarters’ pleasure in its appearance. Men know when they are “for it,” and if they forget, are reminded from the doors of crowded estaminets and canteens, or from the tail-boards of loaded lorries as their comrades fleet by in the dusk. They were not surprised when orders came for a shift.
On the evening of the 30th May they were taken by train from their camp, via Amiens, Abbeville, and Boulogne and St. Omer to Cassel in thirteen or fourteen hours, and from Cassel marched back along the well-known pavé nearly to St. Omer again and billeted between La Crosse and the dingy wide railway-crossing at Fort Rouge. All the country round was busy raising crops; every old man, woman, and child working as long as light lasted. Their only available training-ground was the Forest of Clairmarais, with its two characteristic wooded hills that stand up behind St. Omer. Here they were taught “wood-fighting” in addition to other specialties, and the mess found time to give a dinner of honour to a friendly Field-Ambulance (Irish in the main) to whom they had, on various occasions, owed much. Scandal asserts that the guests departed, in the dawn, on their own stretchers. Here, too, on the 6th June they entered for the Brigade horse-show and won first prize for the best turned out limber-and-pair, and seconds for water-cart and cooker-and-pair—no small thing when one considers what is the standard of excellence in Brigade transport.
On the next day (June 7), the nineteen mines of Messines went up together in the dawn. The three army corps (Second Anzac and Ninth and Tenth Corps) loosed behind them, broke forward over Messines and Wytschaete, and the whole German line from Armagh Wood to Plugstreet was wrenched backwards from a mile to two miles all along. Messines was a singularly complete and satisfactory affair, including some seven thousand prisoners and, better still, a multitude of dead, killed off in counter-attacks. It opened the road for the Third Battle of Ypres which was to win more breathing-space round the wreck of the city. Unlike Arras, where there was almost unlimited space for assembly in subterranean caves and cellars, every preparation in the Salient had to be carried out under the enemy’s eyes on known and registered ground lacking shelter above or below. Thus the attack, which was to cover a front of fifteen miles, demanded as much effort and pre-arrangement as any operation that had till then been undertaken in the whole course of the war. Those were made and carried through among, and in spite of, the daily demands of continuous local operations, with the same thoroughness and fixedness of purpose as when the Brigade competed for its little prizes and trophies at Renescure horse-show.
On the 12th June the Battalion marched thirteen miles for musketry to Moringhem in the bare, high down-country behind Acquin, where two men collapsed with heat-stroke. A century ago the drill-book laid down that unaimed battalion-fire from “Brown Bess” should never be opened at over four hundred yards. They practised slow and rapid firing with fixed bayonets at two and three hundred; company sharp-shooters using figures at the same range.
On the 16th June the first drawing in towards the Salient began. They camped that night at Ouderzeele north of Cassel, after such heat as made several of the men fall out by the way, and on the 17th bivouacked in sheds and shelters in the woods south-east of Proven on the Poperinghe road, where the cultivation, all unaffected by the war half a dozen miles off, was as thick as ever, and, except for “specialist” training in the woods, it was difficult to find the men work. The men bore this quite calmly.
As a sign of the times Lieutenant H. Hickie, who had been on leave, arrived and “again took over his duties as Quartermaster” on the 20th June. Lieutenant J. H. Nash left on the same date for the Army Central School, and on the 22nd Captain R. Rodakowski and Lieutenant W. Joyce were detailed for courses of instruction at Le Touquet Lewis Gun School.
On the 23rd June, Major-General Sir A. J. Godley, commanding the Second Anzac Corps, came over on a visit to the Battalion and inspected the men, and day by day the pieces required for the next move on the chessboard of war were pushed into their places along the Salient. The Fifth Army—of four corps and some divisions—under General Gough was to take the weight of the affair between Klein Zillebeeke and Boesinghe, while the First French Army—First and Fifty-first Divisions—would relieve the Belgians from Boesinghe to Noordschoote and extend the line along the Yser Canal north of Ypres to Steenstraate. The Guards Division was to lie next them on the extreme left of our line at Boesinghe.
On the 25th June, the Battalion moved from Proven into the edge of the battle-area near Woesten, a couple of miles or so behind Boesinghe itself, and came under the fire of a long-range German naval gun which merely cut up the fields round them. Both sides were now hard at work in the air, trying to put out each other’s eyes; and a German aeroplane brought down one of our observation-balloons hideously alight, close to Woesten camp. All the Salient hummed with opposing aircraft, the bombing of back-areas was cruel and continuous, and men had no rest from strain. But our batteries, profiting by the help of our machines, hammered the enemy line as it had not been hammered there since war began. Oil-drums, gas and thermite shells were added to the regular allowances sent over, and, whenever chance offered, raiding-parties dove in and out of the front lines sharking prisoners for identification. The Battalion’s share in this work was the usual fatigue—“unloading trucks” and the like, beneath intermittent artillery-fire which, on the 29th June, ended in three direct hits on the farm-house (Roussel farm) near Elverdinghe, where they lay. One man was killed outright and three others wounded. Their regular routine-work of death had begun again.
On the 1st of July they went into line on the Boesinghe sector, relieving the 2nd Coldstream on the west or near sector of the Yser Canal. Their trenches were of the usual built-up, sand-bagged type. Headquarters were at Bleuet farm, well under fire of all kinds, and though they managed their relief at night with little shelling, early next morning, Lieutenant E. Shears was killed by shell. It was a bad sector in every way, for not only did the Battalion link on here to the Belgian army—later relieved by the French—on their left, and any point of junction of Allied forces is always severely dealt with, but the enemy were kept in tension by constant raids, or the fear of them, all along the line. This meant that their SOS signals went up on the least provocation and their barrages followed with nervous punctuality. Added to this, fatigue-work was very heavy, not only in repairs but in supply; and the necessary exposure of the carrying-parties led to constant casualties.
On the 5th July, for instance, at two in the morning, gas shells fired from projectors (the Germans were searching the line in earnest that night) fell on a working-party of No. 4 Company. Nineteen men were at once prostrated, of whom one died then and there, and two a few days later; while Lieutenant Bagenal was slightly affected. (It is difficult, especially in the dark, to keep working-parties, who have to work against time, inside their gas-masks.) They were shelled for the rest of the day with no further casualties.
On the 6th July Major Hon. H. R. Alexander, leaving for England to attend the officers’ course at Aldershot, Captain R. R. C. Baggallay took over the command, and on the 8th July they were relieved by the 3rd Coldstream and bivouacked at Cardoen farm, where they spent two days nominally resting—that is to say, supplying one hundred and ten men each night for the detestable work of carrying-parties to the front line. Lieut.-Colonel Rocke, D.S.O., commanding since May 24, returned from leave on July 8, but unluckily on the 11th, when the Battalion was in line, in the wreck of Boesinghe Village (Headquarters at Boesinghe Château), slipped and broke his shoulder while going round the trenches, and Captain Baggallay again took over command. There was steady well-ranged shelling all that day, particularly on Boesinghe Château, in the rear of which the aid-post and headquarters of No. 1 Company lay. Battalion Headquarters were shelled for half an hour separately. No. 3 Company’s Headquarters in the support-line were wrecked by direct hits, and the entire company shelled out, while the whole of the back lines were worked over, up and down. All repairs had to be built up with sand-bags, for the ground was too marshy to give useful dirt, and the labour was unending.
On the 12th July they were shelled more heavily than the previous two days on exactly the same places, and their transport, which till now had had reasonable luck, was caught fetching up water and rations. The four company quartermaster-sergeants and the mess-sergeant were wounded, a horse and groom killed, and, later on, the transport officer was slightly gassed. (“’Tis the Transport, ye’ll understand, that has to take all Jerry’s back-chat after dhark, an’ no chance of replyin’.”) By night they found carrying-parties to fill dumps—five of them—each dump seeming to those serving it more exposed and undesirable than the other four put together.
On the 14th of July there was a German raid, preceded by an hour’s “box” barrage of trench-mortars, .77’s, and machine-guns, on two platoons of No. 4 Company then in the front line behind the canal. A shrapnel-barrage fell also on the supports. A “box” barrage is a square horror of descending fire cutting off all help, and ranks high among demoralising experiences. Luckily, the line was lightly held, and the men had more or less of cover in dug-outs and tunnels in the canal bank. A Lewis-gun post in a covered emplacement, almost on the bed of the canal itself, was first aware, through the infernal racket, of Germans crossing the canal, and fired at them straight down the line of its bed. They broke and disappeared in the rank weed-growth, but there was another rush over the parapet of the line between two sentry groups in the firing-bays. The trenches were alive by then with scattered parties stumbling through the black dark, and mistaking each other for friends or enemies, and the ruin of the works added to the confusion. As far as can be made out, one officer, Lieutenant H. J. B. Eyre, coming along what was left of a trench, ran literally into a party of the enemy. His steel helmet and revolver, all chambers fired, were found afterwards near the wreck of a firing-bay, but there was no other trace. It was learned later that he had been mortally wounded and died that evening. In trench-raids, when life, death, or capture often turn on a step to the left or the right, the marvel was that such accidents were not more frequent.
A wounded German was captured. He had no marks of identification, but said he belonged to a Schleswig regiment, and that the strength of the raid was intended to be two hundred. It did not, as the men said, “feel” anything like so many, though the wild lights of explosion that lit the scene showed large enemy parties waiting either in the bed of the canal or on the opposite bank. These, too, vanished into the dark after their comrades in the trenches had been turned out. Probably, it was but an identification fray backed by a far-reaching artillery “hate” that troubled all the back-areas even up to Elverdinghe.
Our front-line casualties in the affair were but one officer and one man missing and one wounded. Yet the barrage blew the men about like withered leaves, covered them with mud, plastered them with bits of sand-bags, and gapped, as it seemed, fathoms of trench at a stroke, while enemy machine-guns scissored back and forth over each gap. The companies in the support-line who watched the affair and expected very few to come out of it alive, suffered much more severely from the shrapnel-barrage which fell to their share.
It was their last tour in the trenches for ten days, and it closed with heavy barrages on the front and back lines, while they were being relieved by the 1st Coldstream. This continued till our guns were asked to reply, and after ten minutes made them cease. The Battalion left the trenches in a steady downpour of wet and entrained from Elverdinghe for Proven, whence they moved into the training-area at Herzeele, where a representation of the ground to be attacked on the day of battle, with its trenches and farms, was marked out, and had to be studied by company commanders, N.C.O.’s, and men according to their rank and responsibility. The officers’ mess at Herzeele was in the quaint old three-storied tower, built when the Spaniards held rule in the Low Countries.
From the 16th to the 23rd July their mornings were spent at every sort of drill—smoke-helmet drill, musketry, wiring, Lewis-gun, etc., and their afternoons in going over the training-ground and practising attacks. All that time the weather was perfect. As soon as they moved away to Proven and into the battle-area on July 25 heavy rain began, which, as on the Somme, where the devil duly looked after his own, was destined to baulk and cripple the battle. For an introduction to their next month’s work, the Battalion, roused at 2 A. M. on that day by gas-alarms from the front, provided over five hundred men for working-parties to get stuff into the front line; lost ten men killed by shell-fire and one officer, Lieutenant H. H. Maxwell (who had come unscathed through the raid of the 14th), and seven men wounded; and next evening moved to their own place, a distance of two and a half miles, with two hundred yard intervals between the platoons, under casual shell-fire.
They camped (July 27) in support near Bleuet farm, and, that evening, had word that our aeroplanes reported no Germans could be seen in the German front-line system, and that the 3rd Coldstream had sent patrols forward who were already established across the canal. As a matter of fact, the enemy was holding his front line in chains of single posts, preferring rather to fight for it than in it; and was relying on his carefully hidden ferro-concrete block-houses—later known as “pill-boxes”—which, as he had arranged them in the torn and marshy landscape, and along the line of the Ypres-Staden rail, could hold up and dissipate any average infantry attack. They were impervious to anything except direct hits of big stuff. Their weakness was the small size of the slit through which their machine-guns operated, and a certain clumsiness in the arrangement of the gun itself, which made it difficult to depress. Consequently, cool heads could crawl up and under, and rush the thing at close quarters.
Whether the enemy believed there would be no serious attack at the junction of the French and British arms in the Boesinghe sector, or whether he drew his men out of the front line to give room for his barrages, may never be known. It is certain, however, that he left his front line immediately facing the Guards Division empty, and that miscalculation enabled the Guards to launch their attack without having first to fight their way across the canal. The Coldstream had possessed themselves promptly of the evacuated trenches, and there stayed for some time before the enemy realised what had happened, sent aeroplanes to locate the raiders, and tried—without success—to shell them back again. It was a quick, well-thought-out coup that saved very many good lives.
On the 28th July the Battalion, after various contradictory orders, was sent forward in the evening to relieve the left of the 3rd Coldstream in the outpost-line. There was a report that the enemy meditated an attack on that Battalion at their junction with the Thirty-eighth Division on their right. (It must be remembered that the French, who had had some difficulty in getting their guns forward, were not in place, and their First Division lay on the left of the Guards.) Up, then, went the Battalion in the evening and took over the outpost-line from Douteuse House, to where it joined the French forces. Two platoons of No. 2 Company, under Captain R. Rodakowski, crossed the canal in the mud on improvised bridges of slabs of wood nailed across rabbit-wire and canvas, and lay up in an old German front line. The other two platoons occupied the old British front line on the canal bank. Battalion Headquarters and aid-post were at the Château, as usual. No. 1 Company (Captain W. C. Mumford, M.C.) in support, and No. 4 Company (Captain Law, M.C.) had a couple of platoons forward and two back. They were all shelled equally through that night with gas and lachrymal shells, plus barrages on headquarters and the various lines of support. The gas was responsible for six casualties, chiefly among signallers and orderlies, whose work kept them on the move. Nothing could be done to strengthen the newly occupied trenches, as there was no wire on the spot; for the R.E. parties, trying to bring it up, were pinned till daylight by back-barrages.
On the 29th July a patrol was sent out to look at a concrete blockhouse which our artillery reported they were unable to destroy with the guns that were in use at the moment. The patrol drew fire from the blockhouse, went on into the dark, and found that the enemy’s line behind it was held by small posts only. Returning, it would seem that they were fired at again, an N.C.O. and a man being wounded, but they wounded and captured a prisoner, who said that the post held twenty men. Whereupon that blockhouse was “kept under observation” by small parties of our men, under Lieutenant Budd, M.C. Next morning they observed five or six of the enemy lying out in shell-holes round the blockhouse, which was too small for the whole of its garrison. This overflow was all sniped in due course, till the blockhouse, with fourteen unwounded prisoners, surrendered, was absorbed into our outpost-line, and held against the enemy’s fire. Considering that fire at the time—which included 5.9’s, 4.2’s, and .77’s—it was a neatly expeditious affair. The Battalion was relieved by the 1st Grenadiers and the Welsh, and went back to camp in the Forest area to spend the 30th July preparing themselves and their souls for the morrow’s work.
The Guards Division lay, as we know, between the First French Division on its left and our Thirty-eighth Division on its right; the line of the Ypres-Staden railway with its blockhouses marking the limit between the two British divisions. This was an awkward junction, which caused trouble later. Four objectives were laid down. The first was the nearest German system of trenches, which had lain under searching artillery-fire for some time, and would not be difficult; the second, six hundred yards farther on, ran parallel to the Pilckem road; the third an imaginary line a hundred yards beyond the well-known Iron Cross Kortikaar-Cabaret road, beyond Pilckem Ridge, and the last went up to the Steenbeek River. The total depth of the run was about two miles from the canal bank.
The 2nd (Ponsonby’s) and the 3rd (Seymour’s) Brigades were to take the first three objectives, after which the 1st (Jeffreys’s Brigade), following close behind, was to come through and take the fourth. The 2nd Brigade, which was on the right of the division, held the front from the Ypres-Staden railway-bridge over the canal to Boesinghe Bridge. The 3rd Brigade continued the line to the left for six hundred yards. The 1st Brigade, less the 1st Irish and the 3rd Coldstream, which were under the direct orders of General Feilding, G.O.C. Guards Division, was in reserve.
Our barrages, conceived on a most generous scale, were timed to creep at a hundred yards in four minutes. They were put down at 3.50 A. M., July 31, a dark, misty morning on the edge of rain, and the whole attack went forward with satisfying precision so far as the Guards Division was concerned. The various objectives were reached at the given times, and level with the French advance. By eleven o’clock the farthest was in our hands, and what difficulties there were arose from the division on the Guards’ right being held up among unreduced blockhouses enfilading them from the railway line.
Meantime, the 1st Battalion Irish Guards spent the day, after breakfast at a quarter-past five, in reserve round the little two-roomed, sand-bagged and concreted Chasseur farm, where there was an apple-tree with all its leaves on; under half an hour’s notice to move up if required. But no order came. They were shelled intermittently all day, with a few casualties, and Captain F. S. Law was slightly wounded. The evening, as pessimists prophesied, closed in heavy rain, and the ground began to go. They stayed where they were till the afternoon of the 1st August, when word came to take over the line held by the 3rd Grenadiers and the 1st Coldstream on the first, second, and third objectives.
They moved out in rain into the usual wilderness of shell-holes filling with water, but for the moment were not shelled. No. 4 Company went by daylight to its positions on the first objective—Cariboo Wood and some half-wiped-out German trench-systems in a partly destroyed wood. The other companies waited till dusk before distributing themselves on the Green line—the third objective—which was about a thousand yards this side the Steenbeek River. While the move was in progress, a brigade of the Thirty-eighth Division reported that they had been shelled out of their advanced positions on the river and were falling back, which, as far as could be seen, would leave the right flank of the Guards Division in the air. If this were so, and the dusk and the rain made it difficult to judge, it was imperative to put everything else aside and form a defensive flank along the railway line that separated the two divisions. The companies were diverted accordingly, hastily re-directed in the dark, and, when all was done, the brigade that had made the trouble went back to its original position on the further objective. There was small choice of sleeping-places that night. Such German blockhouses as came handiest were used for battalion and company headquarters while the companies lay out in the wet and talked about the prospect of hot meals. They were not very severely shelled, but when August 2 broke in heavy rain and the brigade on their right continued to send up SOS’s at intervals, thereby obliging them to maintain their flank on the railway line, they felt that “conditions were becoming exceedingly trying,” as the Diary says. Then came a relief, which was at least a change. The 1st Scots Guards relieved the two platoons of No. 4 Company back in Cariboo trenches, where the shelling was light; and later, as darkness fell, set the other companies free to go forward and relieve the 2nd Grenadiers at the front of things. The change-over took five hours, and in the middle of it the brigade on their right once more sent up SOS’s, which brought down a German barrage, and necessitated every one “standing to” for developments. It proved a false alarm, and “no action was taken by the enemy”—an omission which it is conceivable the Guards Division rather regretted. Beyond question that Brigade had been badly held up among the blockhouses, and had been savagely shelled in and out of shell-holes that bewilder troops; but—till their own trouble comes—no troops go out of their way to make excuses for a nightmare of SOS’s. (“There’s enough fatigues, ye’ll understand, when you’re out o’ the line. Extra fatigues in action, like defensive flanks, is outrageous.”)
They were shelled and rained upon throughout the whole of the night of the 2nd August, and on the evening of the 3rd, still in ceaseless rain, were relieved by the 1st Scots Guards and marched through mud, water and darkness, over broken ground “beyond description” to Elverdinghe Siding, where they were packed into trucks at five in the morning and taken to Poll Hill Camp near Bandaghem for training.
Their casualties, all things reckoned, had been very light. They had gone into action on the 31st July with 26 officers and 1002 other ranks and had lost only 2 officers and 125 other ranks from all causes.
The total casualties for the twelve battalions of the Guards Division in the action had been 59 officers and 1876 men in two days; and rain falling without a break for the next four days drowned out the sad fight. The enemy’s line had been pushed back from Bixschoote, through Frezenberg, Westhoek, Stirling Castle, and Shrewsbury Forest down to Hollebeke. At that stage our armies, as had happened so often on the Somme, were immobilised. The clay ground was cullendered and punched by the shells into chains of pools and ponds. All valleys and hollows turned into bogs where, if men wandered from the regular tracks across them, they drowned or were mired to death. If they stayed on the plankings the enemy’s guns swept them away. When all had been done that man could do, the first phase of the Third Battle of Ypres closed in a strengthened conviction that all the powers of evil were in strict alliance with Germany. Our armies held off seven counter-attacks along the line, settled themselves in it and then, perforce, waited for the weather to clear.
It rained on and off till the 15th August, and, as most of the corn in the fields round Poll Hill Camp had, owing to the wet, not been cut, training-ground was limited just at the very time when the new German system of holding a line with a chain of carefully camouflaged posts called for a change in attack methods. So the Battalion was practised in “surprise situations”—i.e. discovering invisible enemies with machine-guns in shell-holes that turned the advancing line into a ragged scattering “scrum.” Their dummy barrages were slowed, too, as the Diary says, “to enable the surprise situations to be dealt with and to give time for the line to re-form behind the barrage after having dealt with these situations.” This was a kind of work for which, like bombing, the Irish had considerable natural aptitudes. It was summed up, unofficially, thus: “In the ould days, a trench was a trench, ye’ll understand, an’ something to lay hould upon. Third Ypres was failin’ into nothin’ and then findin’ ’twas two pill-boxes an’ a fort on your flank.” Therefore, the specialists in the shape of the Lewis-gunner and the “mopper-up” who dealt with the débris of attacks were important persons and were instructed accordingly when the Battalion was not indented upon for working-parties on the gun-tracks and bridges round Boesinghe.