On the 26th June four men were sniped. On the 27th June wire-cutting by our guns drew heavy retaliation from the enemy. Lieutenant F. L. Pusch, D.S.O., as brave a man as the War made, who had only come up from the Entrenching Battalion a few days before, was sniped and killed at once. He had gone with his orderly to pick up a wounded man in a trench, and both were hit by the same bullet. The sniper did his best to kill Private Carroll, who dragged the wounded man and the officer’s body under cover. Private Carroll was awarded the Military Medal for this. Four dead and seven wounded were that night’s total.
The 28th June was the worst of that tour. The enemy opened on the trenches and supports through night and day with everything available, down to aerial torpedoes, killing five men and wounding eight.
The casualties for a “quiet” twelve days’ tour, including three days only in the front line, were three officers and forty-seven other ranks killed and wounded. Some of the credit of this must go to the German snipers, who, working without noise or display, gave the Battalion the idea there was nothing much doing. The brutal outcry of artillery, its visible effect on the ground—above all, the deadly accuracy of the single aimed shells on the well-registered trench from which none must move—upset men sometimes more than repeated single casualties in the front line, which can be hurried off round the traverses without rousing more than a few companions.
They lay for a week beneath the trees near Poperinghe and started inter-platoon bombing competitions to “accustom the men to throw overarm without jerking.” These little events forbade monotony, and were sometimes rather like real warfare, for not every one can be trusted to deliver a ball accurately when he is throwing in against time.
The Somme
Meanwhile, Verdun had been in the fire since February, there was no sign of the attacks on it weakening, and France and the world looked uneasily at that dread point of contact where men and stuff consumed as the carbon of arc-lights consumes in the current. It was time that England should take the strain, even though her troops were not fully trained or her guns yet free to spend shells as the needs of the War demanded. What had gone before was merely the initial deposit on the price of national unpreparedness; what was to come, no more than a first instalment. It was vital to save Verdun; to so hold the enemy on the western front that he could not send too much help to his eastern line or his Austrian allies, who lay heavy on the Italian Army: most vital, to kill as many Germans as possible.
The main strength, the actual spine of the position, so far as the British front was concerned, was some twenty-five miles of high ground forming the water-shed between the Somme and the rivers of southern Belgium, which ran, roughly, from Maricourt in the south, where our line joined the French, to Gomiecourt in the north. Here the enemy had sat untroubled for two years, looking down upon France and daily strengthening himself. His trebled and quadrupled lines of defence, worked for him by his prisoners, ran below and along the flanks and on the tops of five-hundred-foot downs. Some of these were studded with close woods, deadlier even than the fortified villages between them; some cut with narrowing valleys that drew machine-gun fire as chimneys draw drafts; some opening into broad, seemingly smooth slopes, whose every haunch and hollow covered sunk forts, carefully placed mine-fields, machine-gun pits, gigantic quarries, enlarged in the chalk, connecting with systems of catacomb-like dug-outs and subterranean works at all depths, in which brigades could lie till the fitting moment. Belt upon belt of fifty-yard-deep wire protected these points, either directly or at such angles as should herd and hold up attacking infantry to the fire of veiled guns. Nothing in the entire system had been neglected or unforeseen, except knowledge of the nature of the men, who in due time, should wear their red way through every yard of it.
Neither side attempted to conceal their plans. The work of our airmen would have been enough to have warned the enemy what was intended, even had his own men overlooked the immense assembly of troops and guns in a breadth of country that had been remodelled for their needs, above ground and below. Our battalions in the Salient, where the unmolested German aeroplanes bombed them, knew well enough that, in the phrase of the moment, “everything had gone south,” and our listening-posts in the front line round Ypres could tell very fairly when a German “demonstration” was prompted by natural vice or orders to cover a noisy withdrawal of their guns in the same direction. It did not need placards in English, “Come on, we are ready for you!” which were hoisted in some of the German trenches on that Somme front to make men wiser than they had been for weeks past.
Side by side with this elaborate and particular knowledge, plus a multitude of camp-rumours, even more circumstantial, was the immense incuriousness that always exists in veteran armies. Fresh drafts would pour out from England filled with vain questions and the hope of that immediate “open warfare,” so widely advertised, to be told they would know all about it when their turn came, and that, meantime, deep trenches were not bad things after all. When they had looked for a little on the full face of war, they were content to copy their elders and ask no questions. They understood it was to be a wearing-out battle. Very many men had already been worn out and cast aside in the mere detail of preparation, in building the light and broad-gauge railways of supply and the roads beside them; in fetching up and installing timber, hutments, hangars, telephones, hospitals, pipe-lines for water, and the thousand other necessities of mechanical war. As it happened to individuals, so, they knew, would it be with the battalions, brigades and divisions of all the armies which General Rawlinson on the 1st of July moved up against that fortress of a whole countryside, called in history “The Somme.”
And while that storm gathered and broke, the Battalion went on with its horrible necessary work in the Salient till the hour should come for it and its Division to be cast into the furnace and used up with the rest.