Of the noble army of women, who, since 1917, have formed part of that great force behind the fighting lines I have been rapidly sketching—what shall one say but good and grateful things?
In 1917, as our car wound through the narrow streets of Montreuil, I remember noticing a yellow car in front of us, unlike the usual Army car, and was told that it contained the new head of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, and that 10,000 women were now to be drafted into France, to take the place of men wanted for the fighting line. And a little later at Abbeville I found General Asser, then Inspector-General of the Lines of Communication, deep in the problems connected with the housing and distribution of the new Women's Contingent. "Two women want the accommodation of three men; but three women can only do the work of two men." That seemed to be the root fact of the moment, and accommodation and work were being calculated accordingly. Then the women came, and took their place in the clerical staffs of the various military departments, of Army or other Headquarters, in the Army canteens, in the warehouses and depôts of the ports. It is clear that, during the concluding year of the war, they rendered services of which British women may reasonably be proud; and in the retreat of last March, by universal testimony, they bore themselves with special coolness and pluck. Many of them were suddenly involved in the rush and confusion of battle, which was never meant to come near them. They took the risks and bore the strain of it with admirable composure. The men beside whom they marched or rode when depôts canteens, and headquarters disappeared in the general over-running of our fighting lines, took note! It was yet another page in that history of a new Womanhood we are all collaborating in to-day. And I will add a last touch, within my personal knowledge, when in January, at Montreuil, in a room at G.H.Q., an officer of A. described to me how he had recently interviewed a gathering of women belonging to Queen Mary's Auxiliary Army Corps, and had asked them whether they wished to be immediately demobilised. Almost without exception the answer came: "Not while we can be useful to the Army." They had enlisted for the war; the war was not over, in spite of the Armistice; and, though it would be pleasant to go home, they still stuck to their job.
Thus hastily I have run through the labour of various kinds which was the base and condition of the fighting force. I have left myself room for only a few last words as to that Directing Intelligence which was its brain and soul—i.e., the Staff work of the Army—from the brilliant and distinguished men at General Headquarters immediately surrounding the Commander-in-Chief, down to the Brigade and Battalion Staffs, the members of which actually conduct the daily and nightly operations of war from the close neighbourhood of the fighting line. In a preceding chapter I have given a general outline of the duties falling to the Staff of the First Army in the attack on the Hindenburg line. The range and variety of them was immense. But their success, no less than the success of the campaign as a whole, depended on the faithful execution of all the minor Staff work of the Army, from the battalion upward. The skill, precision and personal bravery required from the officers concerned are not as much realised, I think, as they ought to be by the public at home. An officer engaged as a Brigade-Major in the fight on the Ancre, September, 1917, has written me a detailed account of four days' experience in that battle, involving the relief of one brigade by another, and a successful but difficult attack, which gives a vivid idea of Staff work as carried on in the actual fighting line itself. We see, first, the night journey of the four infantry battalions and their machine-gun company and trench-mortar battery, from Albert to Pozières by motor-bus, then the four-mile march of the troops in darkness and rain along a duck-board track, to the trenches they were to relieve. The Brigade-Major describes the elaborate preparation needed for every movement of the relief and the attack, and the anxiety in the Brigade Headquarters, a dug-out twenty feet below the ground, when the telephone—which is constantly cut by shell fire—fails to announce the arrival of each company at its appointed place. Presently, the left company of the battalion on the left is missing. In the darkness, and the congestion of men moving up to and back from the trenches on the narrow track, clearly something has gone wrong. The Brigade-Major sets out to discover the why and wherefore. The attack is to start at 6 A.M., and from 9 P.M. till nearly 5 A.M.—that is, for close on eight hours, the Brigade-Major is up and down the track, inquiring into the causes of delay—(a trench, for instance, has been blown in at one point, and the men forced into the mud beside it)—watching and helping the assembly of the troops, and "hunting" for the company which has not arrived, and is "apparently lost." About five he returns to his brigade, hoping for the best.
Then, half an hour before the moment appointed for the advance, "we heard a bombardment starting. The enemy had either discovered the hour of our attack, or were about to attack us." The Brigadier and his Brigade-Major anxiously go up to the top of their dug-out to survey the field. It is clear that the British line is being heavily attacked. Messages begin to arrive from the battalion commander on the left to say that all communication with his companies has now been cut. The commander on the right also rings up to report heavy casualties. Then the telephone wires on both sides are broken, and the Staff signal officer goes out to repair them under fire. At last, precisely at the moment appointed, five minutes past six, in the rainy autumn dawn, our own guns—an enormous concentration of them—open a tremendous fire, and the earth-shaking noise "helps men to forget themselves, and go blind for the enemy." Then steadily the artillery barrage goes forward, one hundred yards every four minutes, and the infantry advance behind it, past the German front trench, to a ravine about three hundred yards further, which is known to be strongly held. The final objective is a strong German position protecting a village in the valley of the Ancre.
Meanwhile, in the headquarters' dug-out, messages come pouring in "by telephone, by lamp-signal, by wireless, by pigeon, by runners, and reports dropped from aeroplanes." The progress of the battle is marked on the maps spread out on a table in the dug-out, and the Brigadier has to decide when his reserve battalion must be sent forward to assist. Information is scanty and contradictory, but "at half-hourly intervals the situation, as we believed it to be, was telephoned to our Divisional Headquarters and to the brigades on either flank." Reports come in of success at certain places and a check at others; also of a German counter-attack. All reports agree that casualties have been heavy. The ravine, indeed, has been taken with seven hundred prisoners, but the situation is still so obscure that "the Brigadier sent me out to find out the real situation."
"So I started out with an orderly." The direct route to be taken was under fire and had to be circumvented. "I was making for an old dug-out in a small ravine, where some men of our left attacking battalion had suffered heavily whilst assembling prior to the attack. The area was still being shelled, and we made a bolt for the dug-out, which we reached safely." In the dug-out is the commander of the support battalion, who reports that the commanders of the attacking battalions have gone forward to the big ravine. "I found out all I could from him, and then went forward with him to the ravine." On the way the Staff officer notices that the wire entanglements in front of the German trenches are still formidable and have not been properly cut by our artillery. "When we reached the big ravine we crawled down the steep bank to the bottom of it, and the first sight that we saw was the entrance to a German dug-out, with its previous occupants lying at the mouth of it.... I then found the commander of the left attacking battalion, who had established his headquarters in an old German dug-out." From him the Brigade-Major hears a ghastly tale of casualties. Not a single officer left, with any of his four attacking companies! Yet in spite of the loss of all their company officers, and of the fact that the left company of the battalion had been practically wiped out before the attack started, the greater portion of the battalion, led by their regimental sergeant-major, had reached their final objective.... "It was certainly," says the Brigade-Major quietly, "a very magnificent performance."
Meanwhile he finds the commander of the right battalion further up the ravine. The greater portion of the support battalion is also in the ravine. Here there were elements of three battalions, considerably disorganised, suffering from want of sleep and a terribly hard time. The commanders, dead beat, want reinforcements, and take a pessimist view. The Brigade-Major, coming fresh, thinks, on the contrary, that there are already too many men on the ground, who only want reorganising. To satisfy himself he goes forward, with the adjutant of the right battalion, to find out "exactly where our leading troops were and in what condition."
"I satisfied myself of the exact situation, and having visited the troops of the brigades on both flanks, went back to the ravine, and from one of the battalion headquarters telephoned to my Brigadier and told him what I had found out. I mentioned that both the battalion commanders said they needed more troops to reinforce them, but added that in my opinion there were already sufficient troops on the spot, and that all that was necessary was that they should be placed under the command of one officer, and reorganised by battalions, to hold their present positions. I told him everything I knew, and tried to give him a good idea of the condition of the troops on the spot. He then sent orders to me that the senior battalion commander was to assume command of all troops on the brigade front, and that under his orders they were to be reorganised into battalions and companies, in order that the defence should be as strong and efficient as possible. I then returned to Brigade Headquarters to tell my Brigadier more fully what I had seen."