Battalion relief came when the 24th Battalion Royal Fusiliers (Second Division) took over from them and the Grenadiers and got into position for their attack the next morning. An early and obtrusive moon made it difficult to fetch away the front-posts, and though the leading company reached the Selle on its way back at a little after five, the full relief was not completed till half-past nine, when they had to get across-country to the main road and pick up the lorries that took them to “very good billets” at Carnières. Their own Details had seen to that; and they arrived somewhere in the early morning “beat and foot-sore,” but without a single casualty in relieving. Their losses for the whole affair up to the time of their relief were one officer (Captain and Adjutant J. B. Keenan) wounded in the face by a piece of shell, the sole casualty at Battalion Headquarters; ten other ranks killed; forty-two wounded, of whom two afterwards died, and two missing—fifty-five in all.
The companies were officered as follows:
Cleaning up began the next day where fine weather in “most delightful billets” was cheered by the news that the Second Division’s attack on Vertain had been a great success. In those days they looked no further than their neighbours on either side.
Every battle, as had been pointed out, leaves its own impression. St. Python opened with a wild but exciting chase in the wet and dark, which, at first, seemed to lead straight into Germany. It ended, as it were, in the sudden rising of a curtain of grey, dank light that struck all the actors dumb and immobile for an enormously long and hungry stretch of time, during which they mostly stared at what they could see of the sky above them, while the air filled with dirt and clods, and single shots pecked and snarled round every stone of each man’s limited skyline; the whole ending in a blur of running water under starlight (that was when they recrossed the Selle River), and confused memories of freezing together in lumps in lorries, followed by a dazed day of “shell-madness,” when all ears and eyes were intolerably overburdened with echoes and pictures, and men preferred to be left alone. But they were washed and cleaned and reclothed with all speed, and handed over to their company officers for the drill that chases off bad dreams. The regimental sergeant-major got at them, too, after their hair was cut, and the massed brigade drums played in the village square of Carnières, and, ere the end of the month, inter-company football was in full swing.
A draft of ninety-one other ranks joined for duty on the 22nd October. Lieutenant-Colonel Baggallay, M.C., came back from leave and, in the absence of the Brigadier, assumed command of the Brigade, and Captain D. W. Gunston joined.
The Break-up
On the last day of October they moved from Carnières to St. Hilaire and took over the 3rd Grenadiers’ billets in the factory there, all of which, house for house, officers and men, was precisely as before the attack on the 20th, ten days ago. But those ten days had borne the British armies on that front beyond Valenciennes in the north to within gun-shot of Le Quesnoy in the centre, and to the Sambre Canal, thirty miles away, in the south. Elsewhere, Lille had been evacuated, the lower half of western Flanders cleared, from the Dutch frontier to Tournai, while almost every hour brought up from one or other of the French and American armies, on the Meuse and the Argonne, fresh tallies of abandoned stores and guns, and of prisoners gathered in rather than captured. Behind this welter, much as the glare of a mine reveals the façade of a falling town-hall, came word of the collapse of Bulgaria, Turkey, and Austria. The whole of the herd of the Hun Tribes were on the move, uneasy and afraid. It remained so to shatter the mass of their retiring forces in France that they should be in no case to continue any semblance of further war without complete destruction. Were they permitted to slink off unbroken, they might yet make stand behind some shorter line, or manufacture a semblance of a “face” before their own people that would later entail fresh waste and weariness on the world.[9]
The weather and the destruction they had left in their wake was, as on the Somme, aiding them now at every turn, in spite of all our roadmen and engineers could do. Our airmen took toll of them and their beasts as they retreated along the congested ways; but this was the hour when the delays, divided councils and specially the strikes of past years had to be paid for, and the giant bombing-planes that should have taught fear and decency far inside the German frontiers were not ready.
A straight drive from the west on to the German lateral communications promised the quickest return. It was laid in the hands of the First, Third, and Fifth Armies to send that attack home, and with the French and American pressure from the south, break up the machine past repair.