On the 12th July they were shelled more heavily than the previous two days on exactly the same places, and their transport, which till now had had reasonable luck, was caught fetching up water and rations. The four company quartermaster-sergeants and the mess-sergeant were wounded, a horse and groom killed, and, later on, the transport officer was slightly gassed. (“’Tis the Transport, ye’ll understand, that has to take all Jerry’s back-chat after dhark, an’ no chance of replyin’.”) By night they found carrying-parties to fill dumps—five of them—each dump seeming to those serving it more exposed and undesirable than the other four put together.
On the 14th of July there was a German raid, preceded by an hour’s “box” barrage of trench-mortars, .77’s, and machine-guns, on two platoons of No. 4 Company then in the front line behind the canal. A shrapnel-barrage fell also on the supports. A “box” barrage is a square horror of descending fire cutting off all help, and ranks high among demoralising experiences. Luckily, the line was lightly held, and the men had more or less of cover in dug-outs and tunnels in the canal bank. A Lewis-gun post in a covered emplacement, almost on the bed of the canal itself, was first aware, through the infernal racket, of Germans crossing the canal, and fired at them straight down the line of its bed. They broke and disappeared in the rank weed-growth, but there was another rush over the parapet of the line between two sentry groups in the firing-bays. The trenches were alive by then with scattered parties stumbling through the black dark, and mistaking each other for friends or enemies, and the ruin of the works added to the confusion. As far as can be made out, one officer, Lieutenant H. J. B. Eyre, coming along what was left of a trench, ran literally into a party of the enemy. His steel helmet and revolver, all chambers fired, were found afterwards near the wreck of a firing-bay, but there was no other trace. It was learned later that he had been mortally wounded and died that evening. In trench-raids, when life, death, or capture often turn on a step to the left or the right, the marvel was that such accidents were not more frequent.
A wounded German was captured. He had no marks of identification, but said he belonged to a Schleswig regiment, and that the strength of the raid was intended to be two hundred. It did not, as the men said, “feel” anything like so many, though the wild lights of explosion that lit the scene showed large enemy parties waiting either in the bed of the canal or on the opposite bank. These, too, vanished into the dark after their comrades in the trenches had been turned out. Probably, it was but an identification fray backed by a far-reaching artillery “hate” that troubled all the back-areas even up to Elverdinghe.
Our front-line casualties in the affair were but one officer and one man missing and one wounded. Yet the barrage blew the men about like withered leaves, covered them with mud, plastered them with bits of sand-bags, and gapped, as it seemed, fathoms of trench at a stroke, while enemy machine-guns scissored back and forth over each gap. The companies in the support-line who watched the affair and expected very few to come out of it alive, suffered much more severely from the shrapnel-barrage which fell to their share.
It was their last tour in the trenches for ten days, and it closed with heavy barrages on the front and back lines, while they were being relieved by the 1st Coldstream. This continued till our guns were asked to reply, and after ten minutes made them cease. The Battalion left the trenches in a steady downpour of wet and entrained from Elverdinghe for Proven, whence they moved into the training-area at Herzeele, where a representation of the ground to be attacked on the day of battle, with its trenches and farms, was marked out, and had to be studied by company commanders, N.C.O.’s, and men according to their rank and responsibility. The officers’ mess at Herzeele was in the quaint old three-storied tower, built when the Spaniards held rule in the Low Countries.
From the 16th to the 23rd July their mornings were spent at every sort of drill—smoke-helmet drill, musketry, wiring, Lewis-gun, etc., and their afternoons in going over the training-ground and practising attacks. All that time the weather was perfect. As soon as they moved away to Proven and into the battle-area on July 25 heavy rain began, which, as on the Somme, where the devil duly looked after his own, was destined to baulk and cripple the battle. For an introduction to their next month’s work, the Battalion, roused at 2 A. M. on that day by gas-alarms from the front, provided over five hundred men for working-parties to get stuff into the front line; lost ten men killed by shell-fire and one officer, Lieutenant H. H. Maxwell (who had come unscathed through the raid of the 14th), and seven men wounded; and next evening moved to their own place, a distance of two and a half miles, with two hundred yard intervals between the platoons, under casual shell-fire.
They camped (July 27) in support near Bleuet farm, and, that evening, had word that our aeroplanes reported no Germans could be seen in the German front-line system, and that the 3rd Coldstream had sent patrols forward who were already established across the canal. As a matter of fact, the enemy was holding his front line in chains of single posts, preferring rather to fight for it than in it; and was relying on his carefully hidden ferro-concrete block-houses—later known as “pill-boxes”—which, as he had arranged them in the torn and marshy landscape, and along the line of the Ypres-Staden rail, could hold up and dissipate any average infantry attack. They were impervious to anything except direct hits of big stuff. Their weakness was the small size of the slit through which their machine-guns operated, and a certain clumsiness in the arrangement of the gun itself, which made it difficult to depress. Consequently, cool heads could crawl up and under, and rush the thing at close quarters.
Whether the enemy believed there would be no serious attack at the junction of the French and British arms in the Boesinghe sector, or whether he drew his men out of the front line to give room for his barrages, may never be known. It is certain, however, that he left his front line immediately facing the Guards Division empty, and that miscalculation enabled the Guards to launch their attack without having first to fight their way across the canal. The Coldstream had possessed themselves promptly of the evacuated trenches, and there stayed for some time before the enemy realised what had happened, sent aeroplanes to locate the raiders, and tried—without success—to shell them back again. It was a quick, well-thought-out coup that saved very many good lives.
On the 28th July the Battalion, after various contradictory orders, was sent forward in the evening to relieve the left of the 3rd Coldstream in the outpost-line. There was a report that the enemy meditated an attack on that Battalion at their junction with the Thirty-eighth Division on their right. (It must be remembered that the French, who had had some difficulty in getting their guns forward, were not in place, and their First Division lay on the left of the Guards.) Up, then, went the Battalion in the evening and took over the outpost-line from Douteuse House, to where it joined the French forces. Two platoons of No. 2 Company, under Captain R. Rodakowski, crossed the canal in the mud on improvised bridges of slabs of wood nailed across rabbit-wire and canvas, and lay up in an old German front line. The other two platoons occupied the old British front line on the canal bank. Battalion Headquarters and aid-post were at the Château, as usual. No. 1 Company (Captain W. C. Mumford, M.C.) in support, and No. 4 Company (Captain Law, M.C.) had a couple of platoons forward and two back. They were all shelled equally through that night with gas and lachrymal shells, plus barrages on headquarters and the various lines of support. The gas was responsible for six casualties, chiefly among signallers and orderlies, whose work kept them on the move. Nothing could be done to strengthen the newly occupied trenches, as there was no wire on the spot; for the R.E. parties, trying to bring it up, were pinned till daylight by back-barrages.
On the 29th July a patrol was sent out to look at a concrete blockhouse which our artillery reported they were unable to destroy with the guns that were in use at the moment. The patrol drew fire from the blockhouse, went on into the dark, and found that the enemy’s line behind it was held by small posts only. Returning, it would seem that they were fired at again, an N.C.O. and a man being wounded, but they wounded and captured a prisoner, who said that the post held twenty men. Whereupon that blockhouse was “kept under observation” by small parties of our men, under Lieutenant Budd, M.C. Next morning they observed five or six of the enemy lying out in shell-holes round the blockhouse, which was too small for the whole of its garrison. This overflow was all sniped in due course, till the blockhouse, with fourteen unwounded prisoners, surrendered, was absorbed into our outpost-line, and held against the enemy’s fire. Considering that fire at the time—which included 5.9’s, 4.2’s, and .77’s—it was a neatly expeditious affair. The Battalion was relieved by the 1st Grenadiers and the Welsh, and went back to camp in the Forest area to spend the 30th July preparing themselves and their souls for the morrow’s work.