He recalled to the memory of local patriots that the 49th Division was composed of Field and Heavy Artillery raised from Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Otley and York; of Engineers from Sheffield; of three Infantry Brigades from the West Yorkshire, West Riding, Yorkshire Light Infantry, and York and Lancaster Regimental Districts; of Army Service Corps from Leeds and York; and Field Ambulances from Leeds and Sheffield. They had left for France in April, and had been ‘continuously in the fighting line ever since.’ It would stimulate local patriotism to know that a Staff Officer wrote of the Division:
‘I am very proud to have been connected with it. They are a real good lot, and I don’t think there is a better Division in the country.’
To the ‘amenities of war,’ as likewise to the ‘other side of the picture’, we shall presently come back: such facts may be recovered from written evidence; but what Lord Scarbrough and General Mends saw in the ‘smiling faces’, the ‘spirit of cheerfulness’ and the ‘sense of mastery over the enemy,’ is contained in no formal War Diary, and is the more valuable and vivid on that account. It brought comfort and encouragement to the West Riding in the dark days of the autumn of 1915; not merely to members of the Association, struggling, as we know, against the flood, but also to many wives and mothers, realizing that, ‘in a campaign like this,’ as the Report stated, ‘casualties come fast,’ and, lastly, to the various committees, Parliamentary Recruiting, Trades Union, and so on, which based their appeal for fresh efforts, in the last stages of voluntary enlistment, on the valorous record of the ‘boys’ who had already gone to the front. Alike in Flanders and in Gallipoli, that record was worthy of the West Riding.
CHAPTER V
THE DAY’S WORK
During January, 1916, the 49th Division was ‘in rest’: the first period of complete rest which the Division as a whole had enjoyed since the previous April, when it first entered the field.
Even before this complete rest the Division could look back on some months of comparative military inactivity. It had not been called upon to take part in the severe fighting at Loos in September, 1915; and no other big operations, on the scale of the warfare in May and June, had occurred since the Battle of Festubert. Yet there had been fighting every day. Every day of the intervening weeks and months between the close of the spring campaign and the order to rest in January had brought difficulties and dangers here and there, up and down the line of trenches in the neighbourhood of Ypres and the Canal, in which the 49th was engaged, and which it was essential to maintain as a barrier between the invader and the sea.
It is not easy to write the history of those days, when the Division was neither ‘in rest’ nor in action. We might review them in numerical sequence, long day after long day, when according to the Battalion chroniclers, ‘nothing of importance happened,’ or one unit relieved another, or there was an inspection by the Corps or Army Commander, or there was a ‘bombardment of the whole line, varying in severity throughout the day and night.’ These entries, and entries like these recur again and again in the Diary of every unit in the Division. Or, again, when autumn arrived, the weather compelled attention. ‘Rained. Trenches very bad; practically no work could be done. Heavy bombardment all day from 4 a.m.,’ is a typical entry in October; and we are left to read between the lines the accumulated miseries of that day’s work, in which the worst hardship of all was that ‘practically no work could be done,’ in evil trenches sodden with rain and shaken by continuous fire. Minor miseries, perhaps, and less epical in retrospect than the Homeric combats of the spring, or the campaign on the Gallipoli peninsula; yet real and serious enough in their hourly call on a man’s endurance to warrant an attempt at narration.
We are told, for instance, that Sir Herbert Plumer was pleased if the Second Army casualties did not exceed two hundred a day in ordinary trench work, and a division of this figure into the Army total will yield a quotient from which we may deduce the average chance of danger in a quiet time. Or we may observe that the British first line trenches were distant from the line of German trenches by about 80 to 150 yards, but that where the line bent back on the north to the bank of the Yser Canal the distance from the German line was only 30 yards, with a very nasty corner at the bend. We may note, too, the lack of rest at night: the constant flare of Very Lights across the trenches, and the incessant contest of wit (and luck) between the men repairing trenches or bringing up rations or ammunition and the snipers watching their opportunity.
