The strain was beginning to tell. They had had to transfer Lieutenant F. S. L. Smith and 2nd Lieutenant J. Kane to the 2nd Battalion “owing to shortage in that Battalion on account of sickness,” and their own coolies were in need of rest and change. The strongest cannot stand up beyond a certain point to exposure, broken rest, alarms all round the clock; laborious physical exertions, knee or mid-thigh deep in mud; sweating fatigues, followed by cooling-off in icy blasts or a broth of snow and chalk-slime; or—more undermining than any bodily stress—the pressure that grows of hourly responsibility. Sooner or later, the mind surrenders itself to a mill-round of harassing obsessions as to whether, if one had led one’s platoon up or down by such and such a deviation—to the left or the right of a certain dead horse, for example—if one had halted longer there or whipped up more cautiously elsewhere—one might have saved such and such a casualty, entombment in the mud, or some other shrieking horror of the night. Reason insists that it was not, and could not have been, one’s own fault. Memory brings back the face or the eyes of the dying, and the silence, always accusing, as the platoon goes forward. When this mood overtakes an officer he does well to go into rest for a while and pad his nerves, lest he arrive at that dreadful stage when he is convinced that his next turn of duty will see all his men destroyed by his own act. Between this last stage and the dragging weariness, the hoarse Somme cold, and the foul taste in the mouth which are mere signs of “beginning to be fed up,” there is every variety of derangement, to be held in check by the individual’s own character and that discipline which age and experience have devised to hold him when everything else has dropped away. It is the deadly journey, back and forth to the front-line with material, the known and foreseen war in darkness and mud against the natural perversity of things, that shifts the foundations of the soul, so that a man, who scarcely regards death hunting him at large by the hour, will fall into a child’s paroxysms of rage and despair when the wire-strand rasps him across the knuckles or the duckboard for the hundredth time tilts sideways underfoot. “Ye’ll understand,” says the voice of experience, “the fatigues do it in the long run.” All of which the Diary will dismiss with: “A few fatigues were found in this area.”
The Somme was one overwhelming fatigue.
1917
THE SOMME TO GOUZEAUCOURT
The beginning of the year saw the British armies, now more than fifty divisions strong, holding a front of a hundred and ten miles from Ypres to within a short distance of Roye. Thus, allowing for changes imposed by the fluctuations of war and attack, they lay:
The Second Army had the Salient: the First centred on Armentières; the Third (Gough’s) carried on to the south of Arras, where the Fifth held all along the valley of the Ancre and a portion of the old British line on the Somme. The Fourth joined the French left wing near Roye, and the French pressure worked in with ours.
From the Salient to the Somme battle-front, our line’s business was to draw as much as possible of the enemy’s strength. Therefore, our raids on that part of the line, during the latter half of 1916, were counted by the hundred; and in all that time, at no point on any given day there, could the Germans feel secure against our irruptions.
On the Somme our pressure was direct and, except for the weather, worked as continuously as a forest fire in fallen pine-needles. A fold of the hills might check it there; a bare ridge or a sodden valley hold it elsewhere for the while; but always it ate north and east across the stricken country, as division after division gathered, fought, won foothold, held it, dug in, and gave place to their unspent fellows beneath the cover of the advancing guns. Here is a mere outline of the work of a few weeks:
The affairs of the 15th and 25th of September (1916), when the Fourth Army pushed the line past Lesbœufs and Flers and beyond Gueudecourt on the right, knocked out, as we know, both battalions of the Irish Guards for the time being.
On the 27th and 28th of September the Second and First Canadian Divisions, with the Eleventh and Eighteenth of the Second Army Corps, captured Thiepval, the Stuff and Schwaben redoubts on the left of the line; while the Fifty-fifth and New Zealand Divisions made possible an advance on Le Sars and Eaucourt l’Abbaye villages in the centre, which, after four days’ continuous fighting by the Forty-seventh, Fiftieth, and Twenty-third Divisions, ended in the taking of Eaucourt l’Abbaye and Le Sars.