On the evening of the 30th May they were taken by train from their camp, via Amiens, Abbeville, and Boulogne and St. Omer to Cassel in thirteen or fourteen hours, and from Cassel marched back along the well-known pavé nearly to St. Omer again and billeted between La Crosse and the dingy wide railway-crossing at Fort Rouge. All the country round was busy raising crops; every old man, woman, and child working as long as light lasted. Their only available training-ground was the Forest of Clairmarais, with its two characteristic wooded hills that stand up behind St. Omer. Here they were taught “wood-fighting” in addition to other specialties, and the mess found time to give a dinner of honour to a friendly Field-Ambulance (Irish in the main) to whom they had, on various occasions, owed much. Scandal asserts that the guests departed, in the dawn, on their own stretchers. Here, too, on the 6th June they entered for the Brigade horse-show and won first prize for the best turned out limber-and-pair, and seconds for water-cart and cooker-and-pair—no small thing when one considers what is the standard of excellence in Brigade transport.
On the next day (June 7), the nineteen mines of Messines went up together in the dawn. The three army corps (Second Anzac and Ninth and Tenth Corps) loosed behind them, broke forward over Messines and Wytschaete, and the whole German line from Armagh Wood to Plugstreet was wrenched backwards from a mile to two miles all along. Messines was a singularly complete and satisfactory affair, including some seven thousand prisoners and, better still, a multitude of dead, killed off in counter-attacks. It opened the road for the Third Battle of Ypres which was to win more breathing-space round the wreck of the city. Unlike Arras, where there was almost unlimited space for assembly in subterranean caves and cellars, every preparation in the Salient had to be carried out under the enemy’s eyes on known and registered ground lacking shelter above or below. Thus the attack, which was to cover a front of fifteen miles, demanded as much effort and pre-arrangement as any operation that had till then been undertaken in the whole course of the war. Those were made and carried through among, and in spite of, the daily demands of continuous local operations, with the same thoroughness and fixedness of purpose as when the Brigade competed for its little prizes and trophies at Renescure horse-show.
On the 12th June the Battalion marched thirteen miles for musketry to Moringhem in the bare, high down-country behind Acquin, where two men collapsed with heat-stroke. A century ago the drill-book laid down that unaimed battalion-fire from “Brown Bess” should never be opened at over four hundred yards. They practised slow and rapid firing with fixed bayonets at two and three hundred; company sharp-shooters using figures at the same range.
On the 16th June the first drawing in towards the Salient began. They camped that night at Ouderzeele north of Cassel, after such heat as made several of the men fall out by the way, and on the 17th bivouacked in sheds and shelters in the woods south-east of Proven on the Poperinghe road, where the cultivation, all unaffected by the war half a dozen miles off, was as thick as ever, and, except for “specialist” training in the woods, it was difficult to find the men work. The men bore this quite calmly.
As a sign of the times Lieutenant H. Hickie, who had been on leave, arrived and “again took over his duties as Quartermaster” on the 20th June. Lieutenant J. H. Nash left on the same date for the Army Central School, and on the 22nd Captain R. Rodakowski and Lieutenant W. Joyce were detailed for courses of instruction at Le Touquet Lewis Gun School.
On the 23rd June, Major-General Sir A. J. Godley, commanding the Second Anzac Corps, came over on a visit to the Battalion and inspected the men, and day by day the pieces required for the next move on the chessboard of war were pushed into their places along the Salient. The Fifth Army—of four corps and some divisions—under General Gough was to take the weight of the affair between Klein Zillebeeke and Boesinghe, while the First French Army—First and Fifty-first Divisions—would relieve the Belgians from Boesinghe to Noordschoote and extend the line along the Yser Canal north of Ypres to Steenstraate. The Guards Division was to lie next them on the extreme left of our line at Boesinghe.
On the 25th June, the Battalion moved from Proven into the edge of the battle-area near Woesten, a couple of miles or so behind Boesinghe itself, and came under the fire of a long-range German naval gun which merely cut up the fields round them. Both sides were now hard at work in the air, trying to put out each other’s eyes; and a German aeroplane brought down one of our observation-balloons hideously alight, close to Woesten camp. All the Salient hummed with opposing aircraft, the bombing of back-areas was cruel and continuous, and men had no rest from strain. But our batteries, profiting by the help of our machines, hammered the enemy line as it had not been hammered there since war began. Oil-drums, gas and thermite shells were added to the regular allowances sent over, and, whenever chance offered, raiding-parties dove in and out of the front lines sharking prisoners for identification. The Battalion’s share in this work was the usual fatigue—“unloading trucks” and the like, beneath intermittent artillery-fire which, on the 29th June, ended in three direct hits on the farm-house (Roussel farm) near Elverdinghe, where they lay. One man was killed outright and three others wounded. Their regular routine-work of death had begun again.
On the 1st of July they went into line on the Boesinghe sector, relieving the 2nd Coldstream on the west or near sector of the Yser Canal. Their trenches were of the usual built-up, sand-bagged type. Headquarters were at Bleuet farm, well under fire of all kinds, and though they managed their relief at night with little shelling, early next morning, Lieutenant E. Shears was killed by shell. It was a bad sector in every way, for not only did the Battalion link on here to the Belgian army—later relieved by the French—on their left, and any point of junction of Allied forces is always severely dealt with, but the enemy were kept in tension by constant raids, or the fear of them, all along the line. This meant that their SOS signals went up on the least provocation and their barrages followed with nervous punctuality. Added to this, fatigue-work was very heavy, not only in repairs but in supply; and the necessary exposure of the carrying-parties led to constant casualties.
On the 5th July, for instance, at two in the morning, gas shells fired from projectors (the Germans were searching the line in earnest that night) fell on a working-party of No. 4 Company. Nineteen men were at once prostrated, of whom one died then and there, and two a few days later; while Lieutenant Bagenal was slightly affected. (It is difficult, especially in the dark, to keep working-parties, who have to work against time, inside their gas-masks.) They were shelled for the rest of the day with no further casualties.
On the 6th July Major Hon. H. R. Alexander, leaving for England to attend the officers’ course at Aldershot, Captain R. R. C. Baggallay took over the command, and on the 8th July they were relieved by the 3rd Coldstream and bivouacked at Cardoen farm, where they spent two days nominally resting—that is to say, supplying one hundred and ten men each night for the detestable work of carrying-parties to the front line. Lieut.-Colonel Rocke, D.S.O., commanding since May 24, returned from leave on July 8, but unluckily on the 11th, when the Battalion was in line, in the wreck of Boesinghe Village (Headquarters at Boesinghe Château), slipped and broke his shoulder while going round the trenches, and Captain Baggallay again took over command. There was steady well-ranged shelling all that day, particularly on Boesinghe Château, in the rear of which the aid-post and headquarters of No. 1 Company lay. Battalion Headquarters were shelled for half an hour separately. No. 3 Company’s Headquarters in the support-line were wrecked by direct hits, and the entire company shelled out, while the whole of the back lines were worked over, up and down. All repairs had to be built up with sand-bags, for the ground was too marshy to give useful dirt, and the labour was unending.