On the 13th the Allies recovered the important town of Soissons and forced the passage of the Aisne, on which river the enemy stood to fight, and there the combatants were still engaged on the 20th, for now the German retreat was over; on this day the British Expeditionary Force was reinforced by the British 6th Division (16th, 17th and 18th Infantry Brigades) which had landed on the 10th September, and the Buffs once more in their long history came into the presence of England’s foes.
All this time the Territorial Force was working hard to fit itself to help, and in a short time the bulk of it was sent to India to release our forces there which were promptly sent to France.
Meanwhile the new armies, whose numbers under the voluntary system were such as to fill every Englishman with pride, were straining every nerve to prepare themselves for war, and they were drafted off to the different fighting theatres as fast as they could be armed and equipped. The most wonderful fact of the early days of the war was the way that Kitchener’s appeal for recruits was answered. Thousands and thousands of quiet, peaceable citizens, who had never dreamed of anything to do with soldiering, much less of getting into uniform and themselves going off to fight, men from every rank of life, now thronged and jostled each other at the recruiting offices. They took long railway journeys at their own expense, or walked miles if they had no money, for the pleasure of standing, often for days, in queues waiting their turn to enlist. They faced the doctor with fear, hiding their disabilities, and passed the test with a sigh of relief.
What was true of England was true to an equal extent of the Colonies and oversea possessions, and the total number of soldiers raised, equipped and put into the firing line astonished ourselves almost as much as it dismayed the Germans, whose reckonings in this respect, as in all others, were completely at fault. The Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, the Allied Regiment of Canadian Militia, was represented in several of those gallant battalions which sailed in such numbers from their shores and which did such glorious service in France and Flanders.
The story of the struggle is so long, and the Buffs fought in so many theatres and places, that the clearest and best way of describing the deeds of the regiment appears to be the division of the eventful years of 1914 to 1918 into sections, so that the story of each battalion of the regiment may appear as clearly as possible between certain approximate dates. Of course, this system must be to a certain extent elastic, for, if a fixed date happened to be one during which a particular unit was in the midst of a very particular job, it would obviously be better to finish the description of that operation before drifting off to the doings of its brother Buffs somewhere else. The doings of the ten battalions, then, which together formed the regiment of Buffs, are what the reader is invited to consider in the following pages.
III. Move to France and the Battle of the Aisne
The 1st Battalion on the 4th August, 1914, was quartered at Fermoy in Ireland and the 2nd was in India. It is obvious, therefore, that as the 2nd Battalion had to come home, the 4th and 5th to complete their training, and all others to be not only trained, but raised before they could add their splendid quota to the glory of the Buffs, the story of the first period of the war up to the 17th November, 1914, must mainly concern the senior battalion of the regiment. This date is taken because it was then that the desperate attempt of the Germans to hack their way through to Calais and the Channel ports finally proved a failure, and in France and Belgium heavy, murderous and continuous fighting merged into stonewall tactics, if tactics they could be called: when each of the opposing sides dug themselves in and when the long, dull, trying period of trench warfare set in on the Western Front. Up to this date no attempt had been made to force the Dardanelles. In fact, Turkey had only become a declared enemy a very few days and Italy was still at peace.
The 1st Buffs were, as has been said, at Fermoy. Their brigade was the 16th and the Brigadier-General was E. C. Ingouville-Williams, C.B., D.S.O., himself a very well-known old Buff who, after being adjutant of the 2nd Battalion, distinguished himself as commander of a column in the Boer War and was promoted out of the regiment, as is sometimes the fate of soldiers who serve in a “slow-promotion” corps. The other battalions of the 16th Brigade were the 1st Leicestershire Regiment, 1st King’s Shropshire Light Infantry (K.S.L.I.) and the 2nd York and Lancaster Regiment; it will be useful to remember the names of these battalions as they must naturally be frequently referred to in the following narrative, and they were the close and very good comrades of our men.
The history of the 1st Battalion had, up to this time and since the commencement of the war, been briefly as follows: as early as the 29th July directions had been received that certain precautionary measures were to be taken at once, and on the 4th August the order for mobilization reached the battalion at Fermoy. Almost immediately the strength was augmented by 554 reservists, many of whom were wearing the Indian Frontier and South African Medals. Thus a very fine battalion resulted. The commanding officer, Lt.-Colonel H. C. de la M. Hill, was a well-known musketry expert, and he had with him Brevet-Colonel Julian Hasler, who had distinguished himself in both the campaigns alluded to, Major E. H. Finch Hatton, who won his D.S.O. in South Africa, Major R. McDouall, who also gained a D.S.O. in the same war, and many another good officer. The sergeants were very highly trained, so much so, indeed, that nearly all the survivors were made commissioned officers within a few months of the battalion reaching the shores of France. The privates, after the great influx of reservists, were composed of brisk and energetic youngsters, keen and bold, and steady old soldiers—invaluable as a stiffening.
It proved afterwards that “the dash was all on the side of the youngsters, but the old reservists were a great backbone in holding off the German advance—in trench warfare they were excellent—in fact, they liked it.”[1]