CHAPTER VII.
WITH THE FIRST ARMY.
(a) Ferme du Bois Sector.
The Battalion arrived at Merville about 8-0 a.m. on March 8th. A very cold night had been spent on the train, snow was falling on arrival, and the hot tea which was served at the station was very welcome. A short march brought the Battalion to the village of La Fosse, where the next night was spent in fairly comfortable billets. Apart from a little difference of opinion between the Commanding Officer and a very ill-tempered Frenchman, who said he would rather have Germans than British in his barn, the day was uneventful. The next day the Battalion relieved the 12th Battalion London Regt, in Brigade Reserve to the Ferme du Bois Sector. As the same billets were occupied on and off for over two months, some description of them is necessary.
Battalion H.Q. and one company were lodged at Senechal Farm, near Lacouture. This was one of the large moated farmhouses, so common in the district, and consisted of the usual hollow rectangle of buildings, surrounding a pond and a midden. It was supposed to accommodate 500 men, but never more than about half that number occupied it while the Battalion was in the area. A second company was quartered in a similar, but smaller, farm about half a mile distant; a third occupied billets in the village of Lacouture; and the fourth was in houses on King’s Road, on the way to the trenches. Considering how near the Battalion was to the front line, these billets were quite comfortable. The country around was very flat and intersected by ditches; much of it was under cultivation, and the inhabitants hardly seemed to realise that there was a war. The owner of Senechal Farm, who was a very important man in the district, certainly did very well out of the troops; not only did he receive considerable sums for billets, but an estaminet, which he ran on the premises, was well patronised, and must have been a very profitable concern. Dotted about the district were a number of fortified posts, some in a very bad state of repair. The Battalion was required to find “caretakers” for about ten of these posts, and the “flat cart”—that cart which carried on so long with the transport, in spite of its official “destruction” about once every three months—came in very useful for taking rations to these men.
On March 13th the Battalion relieved the 1/5th Battalion Duke of Wellington’s Regt. in the Right Sub-sector of the Ferme du Bois Sector. Here it remained, inter-relieving with the same battalion, usually every six days, until the latter part of May. This period was very uneventful. The line was exceptionally quiet—almost the quietest the Battalion ever held. Casualties were very slight; in fact, on occasion, a six-day tour in the line was carried through without a man being injured.
Owing to the low-lying and damp condition of the country trenches could not be dug, and the defences consisted entirely of breast-works. The material for these had been obtained from “borrow-pits,” which quickly filled with water and so became additional obstacles to the enemy. Millions of sandbags must have been used in the building of this line. The shelters occupied by officers and men were built into the parados, and were comparatively comfortable. Such a line was quite satisfactory, indeed almost luxurious, in quiet times. But it was the worst type possible to occupy in a bombardment, for none of the shelters were more than splinter-proof, and breast-works are poor protection against shell fire.
The Battalion front was well over 2,000 yards in length—by far the longest it had held up to that time. Two continuous lines of breast-works, each garrisoned by two companies, formed the main defences. The front line was held by seven platoon posts, three on the right company front and four on the left. Each post was complete in itself, was well wired front and rear, and was only in communication with neighbouring posts by means of patrols, which moved along the unoccupied parts of the line at stated times. At night the entrances to these posts were blocked by chevaux de frise, and sentries challenged everyone who approached along the front line. Between the two companies there was an unoccupied gap, 500 yards long.
The support line was held rather more continuously, but long stretches were quite unoccupied. Three communication trenches connected the front line with the Rue du Bois—Rope Street, Cadbury Street and Cockspur Street. When the Battalion first took over the sector the hard winter weather was just breaking. The whole country-side was very wet and many of the trenches, particularly the communication trenches, were deep in water. But, before the Battalion left, the sector had dried up considerably.
Battalion H.Q. was in a nameless farm on the Rue du Bois. This farm had suffered little from enemy shelling and there were several quite comfortable rooms in it. All headquarter personnel lived either in the farm buildings or in shelters which had been erected in the orchard. Few of the latter were even splinter-proof, but the locality was never shelled. It was one of the most comfortable H.Q. ever occupied by the Battalion and much work was done to improve it. It was customary for the resting battalion to provide a platoon each day to work under the orders of the battalion in the line. During one of his tour’s, the Adjutant of the 1/5th Battalion made use of this working party to build a new sandbag dugout for himself. Apparently he was pleased with the work for he named the dugout “Deodar House,” after the secret nomme de guerre of his own battalion, quite overlooking the fact that the work had been done by men of another unit. But the men of the 1/4th Battalion had their revenge. When they were next in the line they painted every scrap of the woodwork outside the Farmhouse red—their battalion colour—much to the disgust of the other battalion which preferred its own colour—green. At this time there was a perfect mania for naming places and nailing up notice boards so that there should be no mistakes. An energetic police corporal, having a prisoner for whom he wanted to find a job of work, built a small sandbag ammunition store, and was so pleased with the finished article that he placed upon it a big notice-board—“The Binns Redoubt.”
The Transport Lines were at Vieille Chapelle and everything was so quiet that ration limbers were brought up nightly along the Rue du Bois, as far as Battalion H.Q. Each company had its trench kitchen in the support line and hot meals were provided for all men with little more difficulty than if the Battalion had been back in rest. The canteen was set up at Battalion H.Q., and a “hawker” went round the front line daily to sell cigarettes, etc. to the men, within two hundred yards of the enemy.