Their three weeks’ training came to an end on the 11th November, when they moved thirteen miles, in torrents of rain, to the village of Ecques, which was filled with Portuguese troops, and began a long march. They did not know their destination, but guessed well where they were going.
Some had all the reasons in the world to know that the Division would relieve the French on half a dozen different named sectors. Others were certain that it would attack independently quite elsewhere. Even Italy, where the Caporetto disaster had just taken place, was to the imaginative quite within the bounds of luck. But their line of route—twelve or thirteen miles a day in fine weather—dropped always south and east. From Ecques it crossed the Lys at Thérouanne; held over the worn road between St. Pol and Béthune, till, at Magnicourt-le-Comte, came orders that all kits were to be reduced and sent in to St. Pol. Elaborate reasons were given for this, such as lack of transport owing to troops being hurried to Italy, which dissipated the idea of light wines and macaroni entertained by the optimists, and deceived no one. If they turned left when they struck the St. Pol-Arras road, it would not be the French whom they were relieving. If they held on south, it would be the old Somme ground. And they held on south to Beaufort, marching by daylight, till the 18th of October found them in a camp of huts outside Blaireville and well in the zone of aeroplane observation. They moved under cover of darkness that night to a camp of tents at Gomiecourt between wrecked Bapaume and battered Arras.
The bare devastated downs of the Somme had taken them back again, and they were in the Fifth Corps, Third (Julian Byng’s) Army. It was revealed at Divisional Headquarters conference on the night of the 19th that that army was on the eve of attack. There would be no preliminary bombardments, but an outrush of tanks, with a dozen infantry divisions on a six-mile front from Gonnelieu to the Canal du Nord near Hermies.
The affair might be a surprise for an enemy whom our pressure on the Salient had forced to withdraw a large number of troops from the Somme front. If the tanks worked well, it ought to result in the breaking through of the triple-trench system of the Hindenburg Line, which had been immensely strengthened by the Germans since their leisurely retirement thither in April. We might expect to push on across their reserve system three or four miles behind the Hindenburg Line. We might even capture Cambrai twelve thousand yards from our jumping-off place, though that would be a side-issue; but, with luck, our attack would win us more high ground towards the north and the north-east, whence we could later strike in whichever direction seemed most profitable. Secrecy and hard-hitting would be of the essence of the contract, since the enemy could bring up reinforcements in a couple of days. Meantime the Guards Division would stand by at two hours’ notice, ready to be used as required. If Cambrai were taken, they would be called upon to hold it and make good. If it were not, then the battle would rank as a raid on a big scale, and the Division might be used for anything that developed. That same day Major Baggallay, M.C., carried out a road reconnaissance of the front at Doignies and Demicourt north of Havrincourt Wood. The situation there betrayed nothing. “Apparently the whole of that front-sector was habitually very quiet.”
Twenty-four hours later, it was alive and roaring with our tanks rooting through the massed wire of the Hindenburg Line, the clamour of half-a-dozen divisions launched at their heels and the smashing fire of our guns in advance of them and their covering smoke-screens; while far to the north and south dummy attacks, gas and artillery demonstrations veiled and confused either flank. The opening day was, beyond doubt, a success. The German line went out under the tanks, as breakwaters go out under the race of a tide; and from Gonnelieu to north of Hermies three systems of their defence were overrun to a depth of four or five miles. By the 21st November our attack had punched out a square-headed salient, ten miles across the base, the southerly side of which ran along the high ground of the Bonavis Ridge, more or less parallel to the St. Quentin-Escaut Canal from Gonnelieu to Masnières, which latter place we held. The easterly side lay from Masnières through Noyelles-sur-l’Escaut and Cantaing to Fontaine-Notre-Dame and Bourlon Wood. This latter, as the highest point of command, was the key of the position on our north flank. Thence, the northerly flank of the salient ran roughly westward from the wood, south of Mœuvres till it joined our original front north of Boursies. About one half of the salient was commanded by German guns from the north of Bourlon Wood, and the other half from the south in the direction of the Bonavis Ridge.
Besides these natural disadvantages there were large numbers of our cavalry hopefully disposed on the main routes in readiness for the traditional “break-through,” the harrying of enemy communications, etc. November on the Somme is not, however, quite the best season for exploits of horse, sabre and lance.
Meantime, the Battalion spent the 20th November, and till the evening of the 21st, at two hours’ notice in camp near Barastre, and on the 23rd November moved to bivouac just west of the village of Doignies behind Demicourt on the edge of the “habitually very quiet sector” before mentioned. The 1st and 3rd Brigades Guards Division had been detailed to relieve two brigades of the Fifty-first Division in the line attacking Fontaine-Notre-Dame village at the extreme north tip of the salient a dozen miles away; and on the evening of the 23rd November they received verbal orders to get away from Doignies. At the moment the Battalion was moving off, came written orders that the whole of its first-line transport should accompany it; so a verbal order was sent to the transport officer to bring it on in rear of the Brigade column. That was the beginning of some not too successful Staff work and some unnecessary wanderings in the dark, complicated by the congestion of the roads and the presence of the ever-hopeful cavalry. The Battalion, its transport all abroad, crossed the Canal du Nord from Doignies and waited by the roadside till Lieut.-Colonel Follett, commanding the Brigade, rode into Graincourt, picked up guides from the 152nd Brigade, brought on the Battalion another couple of thousand yards to the cross-roads at La Justice, found fresh guides from the Gordons and Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and moved downhill straight into line at Cantaing mill after “a good and quiet relief,” at 3.20 A. M. on the morning of the 24th. Fighting had been going on day and night since the 20th for the possession of Bourlon Wood and village, where the Fortieth Division had been worn to a skeleton in alternate attack and counter-attack, but there was no trouble that dawn or day on the Cantaing sector where the Battalion lay and listened to the roar of the battle a mile and a half to the north. Their concern was to improve their line and find out where on earth the Staff had lost their first-line transport. It appeared that varying orders had been given to the transport for the different battalions, complicated by general instructions to follow their own units by the light of nature; and there the orders stopped. Naturally, as the roads boiled with traffic, all transport was promptly stood aside to let troops get ahead, with the result that after many adventures in the dark, including the collapse of a bridge over the Canal du Nord when half the loads had crossed, the Battalion’s transport got into Ribecourt at five in the morning, still without any orders, found that no one knew where Brigade Headquarters might be, billeted themselves in a wrecked farm and managed to get into touch with their Battalion in the afternoon of the 24th. About this time, the Fortieth Division with the tanks attacked Bourlon village, captured the whole of it, only to be fought out by the enemy on the following day. The Wood had not at that time gained its dark name in history. All that the waiting Battalion at Cantaing reports on the 25th November, while wood and village fumed like the infernos that they were, is “no fighting on the battalion front, although there was heavy fighting on the left.”
It broke out again on the 26th towards evening (the fifth day of continuous battle), when the 4th Grenadiers of the 3rd Guards Brigade were sent up to support the Fortieth Division and, on the way thither, went through a heavy German barrage as though they were on parade.
But the high ground above Bourlon Wood and Fontaine-Notre-Dame gave the enemy an artillery and observation command which enabled them to sweep our front and back areas in the northern half of the salient almost as they chose. Pressure, too, was beginning to develop on the flanks. The forty-eight hours in which the enemy could bring up fresh troops had grown to nearly a week, and they had used every hour of it. In no way could the situation be called healthy, but were the Bourlon Ridges won, at least our gain of ground might be held. So it was decided that the 2nd Guards Brigade, 3rd Grenadiers, 1st Coldstream, 2nd Irish Guards and 1st Scots Guards, together with the 4th Grenadiers and the Welsh Guards borrowed, should on the 27th attack Fontaine village and Bourlon Wood. They did so attack; they were cut to pieces with machine-gun fire in the advance; they were shelled out of Bourlon Wood; they were counter-attacked by heavy reinforcements of the enemy; they had no reinforcements; they fell back on Fontaine village in the evening; they withdrew from it in the darkness and fell back on La Justice. It was a full failure with heavy casualties and the news went back, with the speed of all bad news, to the 1st Brigade, which had been relieved on the 26th, the 1st Irish Guards lying at Ribecourt in the ruined farm where their transport had taken refuge. They should have been in a trench outside the village, but a battalion of another division was found in possession of it, and so was not disturbed.