"The men are extraordinarily quiet, and I thought at first somewhat subdued, and put it down to the big marches they had had. But when I came to talk to them I found they were like new schoolboys, taking in everything, deadly keen, and only afraid of one thing—letting down their unit in any way. I have never seen any men with such quiet confidence in themselves, in spite of their efforts to hide it."
The attachments lasted five days, the 107th Brigade being the only one which was not divided between two divisions in the line. Its attachment being complete, the 108th was sent up, two battalions to the 4th Division and two to the 48th, further north. Then, towards the end of the month, the 109th Brigade had its turn with the same two Divisions. Meanwhile the R.E. Headquarters and the three Field Companies had moved to Arquèves, to work on the new Third Army Line, later to become important as the Amiens Defences. At this task they were soon joined by the 16th Rifles (Pioneers), while they also had as companions French Territorials. All worked hard and well, though in the light of subsequent experience their trenches were far too narrow, and their traverses too small by half. The troops not under instruction in the line were kept hard at work training, officers from the 4th Division having come to initiate them into the mysteries of bombing—mysteries to which they took in kindly fashion. One instructor declared that the national sport of the Ulsterman, the throwing of kidney-stones in street riots, was an admirable preparation for bombing. Another introduction was to gas helmets, the horrible bags of those days without even mouth-pieces. Passing through a gas-chamber in these bags was unpleasant, though accepted as a necessity, but "doubling" and marching in them, as ordered by some zealous instructors, was purgatory, and resulted in some of the men being violently sick. On October the 21st the Division, except for such infantry and artillery as were under instruction in the line, moved slightly further west, toward Abbeville, to a more comfortable and spacious area about Bernaville and Canaples, with Headquarters at Domart-en-Ponthieu.
The Higher Command had decided that the 36th Division was not to enter the line as a formation for the present. The Battle of Loos was not long past, when troops fresh from England had been pushed into the fight at its fiercest and after very long marches, with disastrous results. It was determined that in future divisions should be given a chance gradually to accustom themselves to the conditions. Another decision which had been arrived at was that New Army and Territorial Divisions should receive an admixture of thirty per cent. of regular infantry by the transfer of brigades. Orders were received for the transfer of one brigade to the 4th Division. The 107th, in the command of which General W. M. Withycombe, C.M.G., had succeeded General Couchman, was selected to go. The 12th Brigade of the 4th Division was transferred to the 36th Division in exchange.
By November the 4th the 107th Brigade, with its Light Trench Mortar Battery, which had just arrived from England, and the 110th Field Ambulance, were clear of the 36th Divisional area. On the 7th the 12th Brigade marched in to take its place. The 2nd Lancashire Fusiliers of this Brigade were transferred to the 108th Brigade in exchange for the 11th Rifles, and the 2nd Essex to the 109th in exchange for the 14th Rifles. These inter-divisional changes lasted a month only. Any advantages they may have had were found insufficient to counterbalance the dislike of the break-up of their old formations felt by battalions of both Divisions.
The Division as now constituted passed a winter very different from that of its expectations. Late in November it moved down to Abbeville, with Headquarters at Pont Remy, on the bank of the Somme just outside that city. For the time it was concerned more with sanitation than with war. Never was such cleaning of streets, such draining of middens, such wholesale carting away of manure-heaps, as when the Ulster Division marched into an area. The inhabitants wondered and gaped, and a humorist wrote home that the troops "were sweeping onward through village after village in the North of France."
Some writers—among them, it is to be regretted, a well-known dramatist and critic of Ulster birth—have spoken unfavourably of the French peasant and his attitude to the troops. There can be few men of the 36th Division who look back upon the peasant-farmer of the Somme with anything but affection and admiration. For their part, the villagers testified by their letters and expressions of regret, whenever a unit moved, how good had been the terms between troops and civilians. The Calvinistic Ulsterman was sometimes a little startled and pained at first on finding a countryside so liberally besprinkled with shrines and crucifixes, but, if he were a countryman, especially, he made the surprising discovery that these countrymen of the Somme were very like himself. They thought twice before speaking once; they had a certain dourness; they did not wear their hearts on their sleeves, though they were furnished with those organs in the proper places.
On November the 26th two of the Field Companies, the 121st and 150th, were returned by the Third Army, and began to assist and supervise the infantry at work in the villages. In view of the projected spring offensive, not actually launched till after midsummer, all these back areas were being prepared to accommodate large bodies of troops in some comfort. Bunks were put into barns, the holes which had appeared in the lath and mud walls, through shortage of male labour in the villages, were repaired, and excellent horse-lines, with standings of chalk and stone, were built. The timber was cut locally and sawn by the troops themselves, using their own saw-mill.
On November the 27th the Ulster Divisional Artillery, so called at that date to distinguish it from the London Territorial Artillery, which was known as the 36th Divisional Artillery, landed at Havre, and joined the Division in the area east of Abbeville. It had remained at Bordon since the departure of the Division. Its training was not yet complete, and it was to have a course of gunnery at Cayeux, on the coast, south of the mouth of the Somme, before entering the line. The only other important event, from the military point of view, to be recorded before February, was the formation of the 108th and 109th Machine-Gun Companies, from personnel and guns withdrawn from the battalions. To replace the guns each battalion was issued with four Lewis guns, which number was gradually increased till, a year later, it had been quadrupled.
Christmas 1915 was celebrated by the troops in their billets with sport and festivities. Many units had bought suckling pigs from the farmers, and fattened them in anticipation of the event; none had failed to provide some luxuries. The villagers took part in the merrymaking, and in most of the officers' messes the people of the house drank with their guests the toast of victory. For very many of the men in those Somme villages it was one of the happiest Christmases they had ever spent, and one on which they looked back in after years with delight. Within a few days the services of the Pioneers were lost for a long period to the Division. They were ordered to construct, under the Chief Engineer of the Third Army, a broad-gauge railway line between Candas and Acheux. For the rest, there was little change in the daily life of the Division. On New Year's Day it moved back again to the area about Domart, roughly that in which it had been previously billeted. The same work—wood-cutting, repairing and "bunking" of barns, construction of horse-lines—continued, with the exception that it was done in different villages. When the work was well in hand some training was interspersed with it. Not till January the 30th was the Division ordered to hold itself in readiness to take over a portion of the line. It had passed the worst of the winter by no means disagreeably.
The 107th Brigade had existed in a fashion less idyllic. On arrival in the 4th Division area two of its battalions, the 8th and 15th Rifles, were transferred to the 10th and 11th Brigades respectively, while in exchange it received three battalions, the 1st Rifle Brigade, 1st Royal Irish Fusiliers, and 2nd Monmouths. Three days later it took over the left sector of the 4th Division front, astride the Mailly-Maillet—Serre Road, the Brigade Headquarters being in the former village. Here for upwards of two months it remained, alternating with the 10th Brigade in six-day tours in the line. In November the weather was indifferent; by December it became very bad indeed. Men sank in the mud so that they had to be dug out by their comrades with spades. The communication trenches were so deep in water that they were for the most part impassable. Movement from front to rear had to take place after dark, in the open. "Trench feet," a disease then generally known as "frost-bite," though caused by constant immersion of the feet in water far above freezing-point, became prevalent. Rubber thigh boots, most precious of boons to men in such sectors, were all too rare as yet, and had to be doled out with parsimony. Battle casualties were light in this sector, but the life in it was very far from pleasant. On New Year's Day the Brigade, now returned to its original formation, exchanged it for the right sector of the front held by 4th Division, south of the Mailly-Maillet—Serre Road. Of this sector the chief peculiarity was a tiny parallelogram of trenches jutting out from the British line on the high ground east of Beaumont Hamel, known as the Redan. It was a most unpleasant corner. In the first place, it was not more than fifty yards from the German lines, and the mine-craters which fringed its eastern edge, which were occupied at night by British posts—a doubtful policy, as it appears to-day—were in constant danger of surprise. During the 107th Brigade's tour one post was, indeed, bombed by the enemy and a man taken out of it. In the second place, the Redan was the scene of constant mining, and the bugbear of battalions in reserve, which had to send up large working-parties to carry sandbags filled with chalk for the miners. It was the one point in our trenches which received fairly constant attention from German gunners, and the average weekly casualties in this tiny lozenge were probably higher than on the whole of the rest of the 4th Division's front. One of the best pieces of work performed by the 107th Brigade during this period was the construction, by the 8th Rifles, in one night, of a trench a hundred yards in length and protected by a double "apron" of wire, which denied to the enemy ground which would have given him important observation. The digging and wiring were carried out without arousing the least suspicion among the German sentries.