On the 6th, about 7 15 p.m., we received orders to move, and marched out at 8 p.m. to LILLERS, where we joined the rear of the Brigade at 2 47 p.m. Here began the worst march that any of us remember, over strange uneven roads, in pitch darkness. To us, marching in rear of the whole Brigade, it seemed interminable; halts were irregular, and by the time “ten minutes’ halt” came along to us it was time to move again, and it was impossible to maintain a steady pace. Added to this someone had seen fit to billet from the front of the column instead of the rear, which held us up at each billeting village and prolonged the march considerably. The last mile nearly finished us, but we stumbled into CALONNE-SUR-LE-LYS at 4 a.m.—dead beat—and slept it off.
We had a pretty easy time for the next few days, as, beyond being required to be ready to move at an hour’s notice, we were left alone. The weather was fine, and many of us bivouacked; we did a little training, and tried to teach the local people a little sanitation, a word which apparently did not exist in their language. We, on the other hand, learnt that faggots and soil had a market value; one Company, taking soil from a heap in a field, were pounced on by the owner for taking “ma bonne terre” to cover someone else’s smelly midden, and he was quite rude about it. The Officers’ Mess was in a private house on the main street; one night when an al fresco concert was in progress to the great delight of the troops, a man passing on the road enquired what was going on, and received the laconic reply, “Officers’ rum issue!”
METEREN, 1915.
On the 8th we were visited by Sir Douglas Haig and the Divisional Commander.
The gunfire about eight or nine miles away increased on the 9th to what must have been a very heavy bombardment—no doubt the second Battle of LA BASSEE.
On the 11th blankets and Officers’ kits were allowed to be removed from the waggons on which they had hitherto been loaded, and the state of readiness was relaxed. Respirators for poisonous gas (the old gauze and wadding affairs) were issued. On the 13th there was a thunderstorm, accompanied by torrential rain, which did not add to the comfort of the campers.
Just after midnight on the 14th, orders to move arrived, and after breakfast we fell in and moved to the starting point by CALONNE CHURCH, whence we marched as a Brigade to METEREN. We arrived there at 2 p.m., and got into billets about 3, mostly on the east and north-east sides of the town, the Mess as usual in an estaminet, whose landlord thought fit to start emptying his midden soon after we arrived, causing one man to say to another, who seemed in low spirits, “What’s up, Tommy? Avez vous mal de midden?”
The country was different from CALONNE, where the ground was flat and intersected by ditches full of frogs which croaked all night; here it was undulating, and windmills and hop fields became features. On the south side of the town were a number of graves of Officers and Men who had fallen in the fighting there on 15th October, mostly Royal Warwicks and King’s Own—it was said that the Huns had mounted machine guns on the tower of the church, which commands the country to the south and west, and had simply mown them down. How difficult we found it then to realise the story, and how peaceful the little town seemed to us. The Adjutant took the opportunity of teaching the Officers a little field sketching—a branch of our training which had hitherto been crowded out. Courses in those days were few and far between, and though we had learnt in the Regiment many things of which some of the systematically trained Officers of later days were conspicuously ignorant, there were gaps in our knowledge.