The Somme Advance
By the middle of March the German line was giving all along; and when the Battalion moved up into Brigade Reserve on the 12th, they understood an advance was close at hand. Their allotted and sketchy stretch of trench, which they took over from the 4th Grenadiers (on the 13th March), was at Sailly-Saillisel, of evil associations, and on the 14th, on information received after patrolling under Lieutenant E. Budd and Lieutenant Bagenal, the German front line ahead was reported clear and at once occupied. Then they were committed to a muddle of German works in the direction of Le Mesnil-en-Arrouaise, which were named after the Idols of the Tribes. There was nothing to see or to steer by except devastated earth, mud, wire, scraps of sand-bags, heaped rubbish and carcases. The whole line went forward on the 15th, the 1st Battalion Irish Guards in touch by patrol with their 2nd Battalion on their right and on the left with the 2nd Coldstream. No one knew exactly what was in the enemy’s mind, or how far his retirement was extending, but an hour after the Battalion had started they came under long-range machine-gun and heavy artillery fire while they were consolidating “Bayreuth” trench. Major G. E. S. Young was so badly wounded this day by a shell, which came through a company headquarter’s dug-out he was visiting, that he died in a hospital a fortnight later and was buried at Grovetown cemetery, and Lieutenant Walter Mumford, M.C., was slightly wounded in the leg. The next trench, “Gotha,” was also under gun-fire. They simply moved forward, it seemed, into registered areas, where they were held up, as by a hose of high explosives, till the enemy had completed his local arrangements. Then his artillery on that sector would withdraw across clean, hard country; some long-range machine-gun or sniping work might continue for a while; and then all would be silent, with the sudden curious silences of the Somme, till the next step forward was made on our side and dealt with as above. Thus the Battalion worked through the emptied German trenches and dug-outs, and on the 20th March held a line from Le Mesnil-en-Arrouaise to Manancourt on the Tortille River. The German retreat was as orderly as an ebb-tide. In the north, Bapaume had been taken on the 17th March by the First and Second Australian Division, and Péronne was occupied on the 18th by the Forty-eighth Division. Beyond Bapaume our troops entered the third and last—Beugny-Ytres—line of German trench and wire-work that lay between them and the Hindenburg defences four or five miles behind it across open country. From Péronne southward to close upon Germaine, where we were in touch with the French, our advance-parties had crossed the Somme and spread themselves, as far as the state of the ground allowed, in—it could hardly be called pursuit so much as a heavy-footed following-up of the enemy, and making our own roads and tracks as we moved. We found everything usable thoughtfully destroyed, and had to reconstruct it from the beginnings, ere any further pressure could be exercised.
The German front before Arras was unaffected by their withdrawal, and here preparations of every conceivable sort were being piled up against the approaching battle of the Ancre where from Croisilles to Vimy Ridge our Third and First Armies broke through on a front of fifteen miles on April 9, and after a week’s desperate fighting, hampered as usual by the weather, carried that front four miles farther eastward, captured 13,000 prisoners and 200 guns; and, through the next month, fought their road up and into the northern end of the Hindenburg Line near Bullecourt whose name belongs to Australia.
On the 23rd of March the Battalion was taken out of its unmolested German trenches and marched to Combles, where it was used in road-making between Frégicourt, Bullet Cross-roads and Sailly-Saillisel, till the 5th of April. There was just one day in that stretch without rain, hail or snow, and when they were not road-making they buried dead and collected salvage and were complimented by the commanding officer of engineers on their good work. As the men said: “It was great days for the Engineers—bad luck to ’em—but it kept us warm.”
Their total losses for March had been one officer, Major G. E. S. Young, killed and one, Lieutenant Walter Mumford, M.C., slightly wounded; fourteen other ranks killed and forty wounded—fifty-six in all or less than 10 per cent. of the Battalion’s strength at the time. Second Lieutenant H. V. Fanshawe joined on the 30th March.
On the 6th April they changed over to railway construction on the broad-gauge track between Morval and Rocquigny. The men camped at one end of Le Transloy village and Battalion Headquarters in the only house (much damaged) that still stood up. Here they stayed and slaved for a week, in hail and snow and heavy frosts at night; and were practically reclothed as their uniforms were not in the best of condition. (“Ye could not have told us from—from anything or anybody ye were likely to meet in those parts, ye’ll understand. But—one comfort—we was all alike—officers an’ all.”) A village that has not been too totally wrecked is a convenient dump to draw up. The men “improved” their camp and floored their tents out of material at hand, and were rewarded by finding usable German stores among the ruins. One sees how their morale held up, in spite of dirt, iron-rust and foul weather, from the fact that they went out of their way to construct—even as they had done at Ypres—“a magnificent Irish Guards Star of glass and stones all surrounded by a low box-hedge.” Nor was it forgotten that they were soldiers; and, in spite of the railway-work, and the demands of the Sappers, some of the “specialists” and occasionally a company could be trained at Le Transloy. Even training is preferable to “fatigues,” and on the 15th of April they were taken in hand in good earnest. They marched twelve miles in pouring rain to a camp at Bronfay where “a very strict course of platoon training for all ranks was undertaken.” It began with twenty minutes’ walking or running (in the usual rain or snow) before breakfast at 7.30, and it continued with a half-hour’s break till half-past twelve. “Even after three days there was an appreciable improvement in drill and smartness,” says the Diary, and when their Brigadier inspected them on the 22nd April he was pleased to compliment. Of afternoons, every one seemed to lecture to every one else according to their seniority; the Brigadier on “Outposts”; the commanding officer—Major R. Baggallay—on “Advance and Rear Guards,” the officers to the platoon-sergeants on every detail of life-saving or taking, and when their own resources failed, the C.O. of the 2nd Coldstream lectured all officers and sergeants of the 1st Brigade on “the attack in open warfare.” It was a very thorough shaking-up—foot and transport—from the “specialists” to the cook’s mate; and it culminated in No. 5 Platoon (Lieutenant E. Budd) being chosen to represent the Battalion at the Brigade Platoon competition in Drill, Arms Drill, Musketry, Bayonet-fighting and a tactical exercise. The 2nd Grenadiers platoon won, but No. 5 justified itself by taking a very close second place. Survivors, who remember, assert that the platoons of those days were in knowledge, strength, and virtue immeasurably above all known standards of fighting men. (“And in the long run, d’ye see, they went with the rest. All gone! Maybe there’ll be one or two of ’em left—policemen or tram-conductors an’ such like; but in their day an’ time, ye’ll understand, there was nothing could equal them.”)
The lighter side of life was supplied by the 3rd Coldstream’s historic and unparalleled “Pantomime,” which ran its ribald and immensely clever course for ten consecutive nights when the cars of the Staff might be seen parked outside the theatre precisely as in the West End.
On the 1st May they resumed work on the Etricourt-Fins railroad and made camp among the ruins of the village for the next three weeks in fine hot weather. The officers and N.C.O.’s were exercised freely at map-reading (which on the Somme required high powers of imagination), sketching reports and compass-work and occasionally officers and N.C.O.’s made up a platoon and worked out small tactical exercises—such as the rush-in and downing of a suddenly raised machine-gun after a barrage had lifted. The men were kept to the needs of railway and transport, but it was an easy life in warm, grassy Etricourt after months of mud and torn dirt. A swimming bath was dug for them; there were wild flowers to be gathered, and an orchard in blossom to show that the world still lived naturally, and their work was close to their parade-grounds. Men spoke affectionately of Etricourt where shell-holes were so few that they could count them.
A home-draft had brought the Battalion six pipers who on the 4th of May “played at Retreat for the first time,” and thereafter followed the Battalion’s fortunes. As everybody knows, Irish pipes have one drone less than the Scottish, but it is not commonly understood that the piper in his close-fitting saffron kilt plays them almost without any movement of the body—a point of difference that has puzzled very many Scots regiments. That immobility, as the Pipe Major observed on an historic occasion, is “one of the secrets of the regiment.”
On the 20th of May they marched—not without some discomfort from an artillery brigade which was trying to use the same road at the same time—from Etricourt to Curlu on the Somme, where they were once more billeted in houses. Here, after so many weeks of making their own camps to their own minds, they were introduced to other people’s housekeeping, and found the whole village “left in a filthy condition by previous troops.” So they cleaned it up and trained and learned from the Divisional Gas Officer of Transport how gas-helmets should be adjusted on horses—to which some of the scared beasts hotly objected; and they bathed by companies in the warm Somme, making a picnic of it, while the long-drawn battle of the Ancre in the north died down to mere bloody day-and-night war among the villages covering the Hindenburg Line and its spurs. The talk in the camps turned on great doings—everything connected with the front-line was “doings”—against Messines Ridge that looks over the flat shell-bitten Salient where there is more compulsory trench-bathing than any man wants. It had commanded too much of that country for too long. At its highest point, where Wytschaete village had once stood, it overlooked Ypres and the British positions around, and was a menace over desolate Plugstreet far towards Armentières. Rumour ran that arrangements had been made to shift it bodily off the face of the earth; that populations of miners had burrowed there through months, for miles; that all underground was riddled with workings where men fought in the dark, up and down tunnels that caved, round the sharp turns of boarded and bagged galleries, and on the lips of black shafts that dropped one into forty-foot graves. Yet, even were Messines Ridge wiped out, the enemy had large choices of commanding positions practically all round the Salient, and it seemed likely, by what news sifted into their area, that the Guards might be called upon before long to help in further big doings, Ypres way—perhaps a “break-through” towards Lille.