The Ytres sector was looked back upon as a “bon” front by comparison with others with which acquaintance was made later. Here the Divisional Concert Party, which afterwards achieved fame under the title of “Th’ Lads,” was first organized. “Th’ Lads” soon became a feature which the Division could ill have spared, and the delightful entertainments given under the fine trees of Little Wood are recalled with genuine pleasure.

From July 9 to August 22 the Divisional Headquarters were in the Third Army reserve area at Achiet-le-Petit, where the 127th Brigade was stationed, with the 125th Brigade at Gomiecourt and the 126th at Courcelles. This area, which was visited by the King on July 12-13, had been wholly devastated. What had once been a village was now a heap of broken bricks and rubble; a few stark walls standing grimly against the skyline and a name painted in bold black lettering on a white ground informed the passer-by what village had once stood here. The fields were scarred with trenches and shell holes, and all the indescribable debris of an abandoned battlefield was spread around. Most of the troops were under canvas, but as there were not enough tents for all a number had to live in little “shacks” made of odd bits of corrugated iron and any other scrap material available. The fine weather continued and the six weeks in this area partook of the nature of a holiday, though the days were fully taken up by intensive training, special attention being paid to training in attacks upon fortified posts and strong points. Instructional visits were made to the scarred battlefields of the Somme, Brig.-General Henley taking a number of his officers to Thiepval and giving his personal experiences of the fighting there. The various training stunts—battalion, brigade, and divisional—enabled the troops to gain a thorough knowledge of the ground in this area, and this familiarity with the topography stood them in good stead when seven months later they were called upon to withstand the German onrush on this very ground. Time was found for divisional and brigade sports, inter-battalion football and cricket matches, boxing contests in the large crater at Achiet-le-Petit; and the visits of “Th’ Lads” to the Brigade Headquarters were keenly appreciated. There had never been such a time for sports as this, and it was hard to realize that “there was a war on.” Newly-painted vehicles, perfectly turned-out animals, bands playing, troops spick-and-span, all combined to lend a gala aspect to this period.

On August 22 the period of rest came to an end, and the Division entrained for the most detested of all fronts—Ypres.

CHAPTER VI
YPRES
(September 1917)

The Division reached Watou, a village in the Poperinghe area, on the 23rd of August, and, with the exception of the artillery, which went straight into the line near Potijze Château, under the 15th Division, remained in that district for a few days’ training prior to going into the line at Ypres, rather more than a dozen kilometres to the east. Parties of officers and other ranks from all units were attached to units of the 15th Division in order to learn the geography of the sector. Except for the nightly bombing raids by hostile air squadrons this would have been an uneventful week.

At the end of August the Territorials from East Lancashire marched from Poperinghe into the Flemish city which had become a tragic household word throughout the British Isles. The name of Ypres had a deeper, fuller significance for the men and women at home than that of any other foreign town, and however queerly it might be pronounced the word was rarely uttered without stirring emotions of pride, admiration, horror and pity. In the streets and country lanes of the homeland were vast numbers of men, clad in garments of bright blue or grey, who had been maimed and battered in defence of the ruins of an ancient city of which they had never even heard before the autumn of 1914; the wards of hundreds of hospitals were filled with the wounded and gassed, who spoke unwillingly of the horrors of Ypres; and thousands of British homes mourned the loss of one or more who had fallen there. Ypres stood for death and mutilation and agony, and all that was most cruel and horrible in war. To wives and parents it was the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where their husbands and sons fought a never-ending fight with the Powers of Darkness, and never gave ground, yet never gained the victory.

On July 31, 1917, the Third Battle of Ypres had opened with a terrific bombardment of the Hun positions, which had lasted ten days and had obliterated every sign of life and every green thing that grew. But the ill-luck that dogged the British arms had been consistent; the fine weather on which the complete success of the long-prepared offensive largely depended, came to a sudden end, and when the troops made the attack an unusually heavy rainstorm had turned the scarred, shell-pitted ground into a vast quagmire, and the thousands of shell-holes into ponds. The tanks, from which so much had been anticipated, struggled gallantly against the adverse conditions, but many of them were “bellied” at an early stage, and some of those which went furthest into the Boche lines suffered the ignominious fate of conversion into German pill-boxes and sniper-posts. A little ground had been gained, a great deal of unavailing heroism had been shown, there had been much slaughter of British and Germans, and that was all.

Sooner or later almost every fighting unit of the B.E.F. had been moved to Ypres. Veterans, indeed, considered that no soldier had been properly “blooded” until he had taken his place in the line at the famous salient; and there were probably few soldiers with any length of service in France or Flanders who had not passed the traffic-man at the cross-roads leading to Hell Fire Corner, where the tide of motor ambulances ebbed and flowed so regularly. On the night of September 1 the 42nd Division passed through the Menin Gate on their way to the front trenches, now between four and five kilometres from the town. The Menin Road had been subjected to almost incessant shelling for more than two years. The German gunners had registered every square yard of it, and of every other road and track that led towards the front, and the men declared that if a large fly crossed the Menin Road in the daytime the Boche would at once put down a barrage of 6-inch shells. At night their guns would search every stretch of the road systematically on the chance—which was almost a certainty—of getting a bag. Night after night rations and ammunition were brought to the troops in the trenches through a hail of shells, which too often caught men, animals and vehicles and blotted them out. Night after night the roads were converted into shell-holes, but still the work of repairing them went on unceasingly; the gunners brought their teams along at the gallop; the transport men arrived with their precious loads and returned to pass through the inferno again, and often the ration limbers came back bearing burdens very different from those they had borne on the outward journey. And for every hundred struck by Death amid that never-ending hail of shells a thousand tricked him by hairbreadth escapes. At dawn there would often be a brief respite—a semblance, or rather a mockery, of peace. For an hour or two the crashes and rumblings ceased, as though the guns were pausing for breath through the very violence of their fury, and, while pausing, were plotting some still more devilish form of hate.