Thus the year drew slowly to a close. On Christmas Day the brigades took part in an artillery bombardment carried out along the whole Corps front to show that "Peace on Earth, Goodwill toward Men" was not considered to apply to Germans. In reply, the enemy increased in violence his sniping with whizz-bangs of any portion of duckboard track and road where he might catch ration parties or artillery teams toiling up with ammunition from Plateau Siding, and then, on December 31st, the 166th Brigade arrived from Airaines and relieved the batteries of the 156th. By the system already outlined one brigade of each Divisional Artillery was kept in rest, and beneath the envious eyes of the 162nd Brigade, whose turn was not yet, the 156th turned their backs to the mud and marched away to the rest and comparative comfort of G.H.Q. reserve.
The first fortnight of January proved uneventful. The same harassing fire was continued, the same mud prevailed everywhere and the greatest problem of all to be contended with at the time was not the enemy, but the weather. An alarming increase in the number of cases of trench-feet and frost-bite began to show itself, not only in the infantry but in the artillery. For the infantry special drying rooms were erected and dry socks were issued to every man on leaving the trenches, but the gunners were thought to be better off, and for them there were no such arrangements. Consequently there fell upon brigade and battery commanders a very great strain, a strain which had to be withstood at the time when more work began to show itself in the offing.
More work there certainly was. On January 2nd General Blane, on the relief of the 33rd Division by the 40th, had handed over control of the brigades to the C.R.A. 40th Division and had gone with headquarters into rest at Belloy-sur-Somme. On January 10th there came a warning order from his headquarters that a sideslip of the division to the right was about to take place, and that brigade commanders were to visit the French positions along the actual borders of the Somme next day. Close on the heels of this came directions for the batteries to withdraw from the line, the 166th getting away first on January 12th, followed by the 162nd Brigade four days later, and January 16th found both brigades in rest at their wagon-lines—Camp 21, west of Maricourt.
The following six days were spent at these wagon-lines, and during the period yet another reorganisation of the Divisional Artillery took place. Since September 1916 there had been three brigades, the full establishment of a brigade being three six-gun 18-pdr. batteries and one four-gun 4·5 in. howitzer battery. It was now decreed that a Divisional Artillery should consist of two brigades, each brigade to be of the same composition as before but with six-gun howitzer batteries, and not four as previously. To bring this about the 166th Brigade was broken up. One section of D/166 went to D/156, the other to D/162; A/166 (Captain Littlejohn) marched to Mirvaux and became part of the 26th Brigade, while B/166 (Captain Dust) joined the 93rd Brigade at Morlancourt and was merged in that unit. The Divisional Artillery did not lose all its old friends, however, by this breaking up. Major Barstow was transferred to the 156th Brigade, as was also Lieut.-Colonel Stewart who, with the whole of the staff of the 166th Brigade H.Q., came to 156th H.Q.; the late headquarter staff of that brigade took over the nominal command of 166th Brigade—now a brigade in name only and not in substance—and awaited orders at Belloy as to future movements.
While this change-about had been going on, the batteries at Camp 21 had been busy in other respects as well. Cold, dry weather had set in, and, remembering the mud of Bouchavesnes and realising that similar conditions existed in the positions which were shortly to be occupied on the banks of the Somme itself, teams had been out every day making use of the good going occasioned by the hard weather, and filling up the ammunition pits at the battery positions which by now had been reconnoitred by battery commanders themselves. It was the only advantage which the 162nd Brigade, deprived by this move of the rest for which it was nearly due, managed to gain over the 156th Brigade who were now marching up from the rest area to the new wagon-lines around Vaux Wood and Eclusier.
On January 22nd the move into action began. From the wagon-lines west of Frise the batteries marched up to take over the defence of the line from the River Somme itself on the right to the junction with the 4th Division, some three-quarters of a mile south of Bouchavesnes, on the left. The infantry had relieved the French 17th Division two days previously and had been supported temporarily by the French batteries, but now on the 24th the guns came up and, taking over from the groups of Commandants de St. Paule, Le Gros and Rouziers of the 30th, 29th and 49th Regiments of Artillery, assumed responsibility for the support of the line from eight o'clock on the morning of the 24th. Under the control of General Blane at P.C. Jean the batteries were split up into two groups; the left group, commanded by Lieut.-Colonel Stewart, consisted of the 156th and the 14th Brigades, while the 162nd and the 33rd Brigades, at first under the control of Lieut.-Colonel Nevinson but ultimately, from the 31st, commanded by Lieut.-Colonel Harris, went to form the right group, each group covering one brigade of infantry in the front line.
Battery positions on the south of the Somme had been very difficult to find, for on clear days Mt. St. Quentin, which was in German hands, commanded the whole of the countryside, and the concealment of flashes was a practical impossibility. After a certain amount of debating Major Fetherston's battery (A/162) took up a position just south of Buscourt Cemetery, with D/162 (Major Belgrave) two hundred yards in front under the shelter of a bank; C/162 (Major van Straubenzee) lay between Buscourt Cemetery and the river, while Major Benett-Stanford established his battery (B/162) with four guns to the south-east of these positions, the remaining section being detached for enfilade work about seven hundred yards south of Feuillières. With Brigade headquarters situated in an old German second-line trench one hundred yards behind "C" battery, the whole of the 162nd was thoroughly compact and well together and, from the point of view of administration, excellently placed.
The 162nd was the only brigade of the 33rd Division lying south of the Somme. The batteries were, in fact, the first British guns to return there since the very early days of the war, and it fell to them now to occupy the extreme right of the British line in France, just as they also occupied the extreme left of that same line on the beach at Nieuport some six months later. The batteries of the 156th Brigade all lay to the north of the river, "A" and C/156 (Major Talbot and Major Lomer) to the east of Howitzer Wood and 2,000 yards N.W. of Clery-sur-Somme, "B" and D/156 (Major Studd and Major Barstow) south of the same wood, and from here they continued the good work of harassing the enemy in the position to which he had been forced back by the offensive of the foregoing months.
On January 25th battery commanders studied and registered their new zones. The German line here ran from the river Somme to the west corner of Limberlost Wood, and on through Freckles Wood in a north-easterly direction. Observation stations north of the river were situated on the high ground west of Hersfeld Trench, while to the south of the river, from a high hill running sheer down to the water about 1,200 yards due west of Halle, a magnificent enfilade view right down on to the front covered could be obtained, and also an extensive back area view of the country round Péronne, Mont St. Quentin, Feuillaucourt, Allaines and along the Paris-Lille road in the direction of Nurlu. The line just here offered an extraordinary feature which was to be found in very few other places along the front; owing to a big "hair-pin bend" of the river and to the fact that the two arms of the bend enclosed a marsh, the trenches ran straight down to the river on the north side and there ceased altogether, reappearing on the southern bend again some 2,500 yards further down. It was impossible to dig trenches or to keep men in the marshes enclosed by the bend of the river, and similarly it was practically impossible for men to get across to raid our lines, but a danger—and a very serious one—now presented itself, for a spell of intensely cold weather set in; the river, the canal and the marshes were all frozen solid, and the situation suddenly arose that between the batteries and the German lines there lay nothing but two isolated machine-gun posts. Our old ally, the marsh, which had hitherto proved a safe defence against hostile raids on the guns, now offered a perfectly secure passage. So feasible in fact did a raid appear, that plans were actually being formulated for a descent upon the German batteries opposite this bend by our people—plans which in the end had to be abandoned, as two howitzer batteries, at the request of the infantry, shelled the frozen river and with sixteen rounds cut a channel thirty yards wide across the ice.
The weather had indeed turned intensely cold. Every night some thirty degrees of frost were registered, and the ground was deeply covered, in snow. It was, of course, exceedingly healthy, but involved a great deal of suffering, while the handling of guns and ammunition, the cold metal of which seemed to bite right into the flesh, was a matter to be taken by no means lightly. Fortunately there was but little activity at the time. Hostile minenwerfers and rifle-grenades worried our infantry to a large extent, but prompt retaliation, coupled with the arrival into action of X, V and Y/33 trench mortar batteries, reduced this source of trouble to a minimum. Apart from this the batteries were more or less left to themselves to register such targets as they chose until February arrived, bringing with it a more definite sequence of events.