At Beaumetz-les-Loges they lay till the end of the year, cleaning up, refitting, drilling, and not forgetting their football—the 2nd Scots Guards beat them in the third round of the Divisional Football Competition at Arras—or their company Christmas dinners. These were the fourth that the Battalion had eaten within sound of the weary guns, but if any one had told them that their next would be celebrated in stately steam-heated barracks at Cologne, hospital would have been his portion. They could not have been called happy or hopeful at that time; for they knew, as all our armies did, that the year’s gain had been small, and the work ahead of them, now that the German divisions, released from Russia were pouring westward, would be heavy. But for the moment they were free of the Somme and its interminable duckboards that led men to death or hard work; its shell-holes floored with icy snow-water, the grave-like chill of its chalk trenches, and the life-sapping damps of the uplands on which they had lain out from nights till mornings.
Here is a memory of those days presented by the teller as a jest. “Aye! Gouzeaucourt and Gonnelieu! I’m not like to forget ’em. I was back from leave, ye’ll understand; no more anxious to die than the rest of us. An’ there was some new men, too—new young lads just come over. My kit was all new, too, me bein’ back from leave. Our C.S.M. dhrew me attention to it one of those merry nights we was poachin’ about in No Man’s Land. ‘’Tis a pity,’ says he, ‘ye did not bring the band from Caterham also,’ says he. ‘’Twould have amused Jerry.’ My new kit was shqueakin’ an’ clicking the way they could have heard it a mile. Aye, Gouzeaucourt an’ the trenches outside Gonnelieu! Jerry was usin’ trench-mortars at his pleasure on us those nights. They was crackin’ on our heads, ye’ll understand. An’ I was in a bay with two men. Wan was a new young man, an’ the trench-mortars was new to him. Cowld? It was all of that! An’ Jerry crackin’ this dam’ trench mortar-stuff of his on our heads at will. It put the wind up me! Did I tell you the other man in the bay was dead! He was. That finished me new young man. He kep’ trying to make himself smaller an’ smaller against the trench-mortars. In the end of it, he laced his arrums round his ankles—he did—an’ rocked to an’ fro, whishperin’ to the Saints. Shell-shock? Oh, yes, ’twas all that. Presintly I heard Mr. —— comin’ the rounds, walking outside the trench. Ye see more where ye’re outside a trench, but ’tis no place I’m fond of without orders. ‘An’ are ye all cozy down there, Sergeant?’ says he. Yes, ‘cosy’ was his word! Knowin’ him well, ‘Why wud we not be cosy, Sorr?’ says I, an’ at that he dhrops into the bay to have a look. We was cosy enough, all three of us—the dead man dead an’ stiffenin’ in the frost, an’ this fine new young lad of ours embracin’ his own ankles an’ rockin’ back an’ forth, an’ me so sorry my leave was up. Oh! we was the cosiest party in the whole dam’ front line that night; and for to make it all the cosier, my new young man, as soon as he set eyes on Mr. ——, he flung his arrums around his neck, an’ he let out a yell, an’ he hugged him like a gurrl. I had to separate ’em! I’ve laughed at it since, an’ so did Mr. —— an’, begad, I remember laughin’ at it at the time. Ay, ‘cosy,’ Mr. —— said. That was the word! So I laughed. Otherwise there was not much laughin’, ye’ll understand, at Gouzeaucourt an’ them ‘cosy’ trenches before Gonnelieu.”
1918
ARRAS TO THE ARMISTICE
The lull lasted till the 2nd of January when they marched via Warlus to Arras and were billeted in the prison there. Battalion Headquarters were in a luxurious house in the Rue d’Amiens, with a whole roof and all windows repaired with canvas. It was hard frosty weather, binding everything tight—of the kind that must be paid for when thaw comes.
At that moment our line, on the Somme side, ran from Lens just behind Oppy, through Rœux, five miles east of Arras, south to Bullecourt, south-easterly towards Boursies, round the Flesquières-Ribecourt Salient that Cambrai fight had won for us, curved back between Gonnelieu and Gouzeaucourt, and thence dropped, skirting St. Quentin and the valley of the Oise, to the junction with the French at Barisis, south of that river. This length, of close on seventy miles, was held, from Barisis to Gouzeaucourt, by Byng’s Third Army, and from Gouzeaucourt to Gavrelle, by Gough’s Fifth Army. North of this, the First Army took on. The working and reserve strength of the Third and Fifth Armies at the opening of 1918 was twenty-nine infantry and three cavalry divisions. So far as our arms were concerned, everything on the French and Belgian fronts was at a standstill. The Somme had cost very heavily throughout the year, and there was, or was said to be, a scarcity of men. The situation appears to have been met by reducing the number of battalions in the brigades from four to three apiece. This released the odd battalions to make what, on paper, and in the journals, looked like additional brigades, but threw extra work, which nowhere appeared as news, on the whole of the army administration in the field. Sir Douglas Haig’s despatches refer guardedly to the reorganization, which he hints “to some extent affected” the fighting efficiency of the units concerned. The sentiments of commanders more directly concerned were, perhaps, less publishable; for it rarely improves an old army in the field to lace it at the last moment, before a general attack, with new brigades composed of battalions suddenly disassociated from the units with whom they have been working. But thus was created the Fourth Guards Brigade, by lopping off the 4th Grenadiers, the 2nd Irish Guards, and the 3rd Coldstream from their respective brigades, and attaching them to the Thirty-first Division. Further, it was necessary for the British armies to take over another stretch of nearly thirty miles from the French on the right—approximately from Barisis to Vendhuille on the Oise—and this brought the British front up to one hundred and twenty-five miles total length.
Our enemy lay less under such burdens. His released divisions, aeroplanes, and guns were decently entraining from the Russian front, and arriving on the Somme in good order, a fact of which our Staff, and in a very short time all our armies, were perfectly aware. (“We could feel Jerry pilin’ up and pilin’ up against us in those days, ye’ll understand.”) So, as may have been pointed out, every one stood by to prepare for the worst. The Guards Division, now of nine battalions, instead of twelve, was assigned to the defences before Arras, the hinge on which the coming trouble might be expected to turn. Their trench and post system ran north and south across the Scarpe with its lagoon and marshes, by Rœux—all old and much used ground, but which had the advantage of being served both by canal and a light rail from Arras.
The Battalion, which had trained and bombed in the town till the 8th January, relieved the 3rd Grenadiers in the reserve trenches of the right sub-sector of this defence, on the 9th January, in heavy snow. Lancer Avenue, which commanded a fine view of our own lines and the enemy’s, and posts K, L, and M just off it (all south of the river), took half the strength. The remainder garrisoned Crump and Cordite Reserve trenches on the north, and supplied an isolated and unpleasant post (F) between the river and the lagoon which could only be reached with comfort after dark, when an officer, twenty men, a Lewis-gun, and a couple of signallers watched there in case an enterprising enemy should be minded to raid along the tow-path.
Next day it thawed and the old horrors of Ypres Salient were their portion. The snow vanished, leaving terrible mud. The day passed quietly. Nos. 1 and 3 Companies had to find “a carrying-party for front companies in the evening.” The story behind the entry tells itself. The enemy did not add himself to their burdens. A patrol, under 2nd Lieutenant H. A. Collett, went out the next night (January 11) five hundred yards into No Man’s Land—from F post—saw and heard nothing. F post was always a ghostly sort of place, where bullets whistled by without explanation between the furred tree-trunks along the tow-path; and the marshy ground behind it was filled with shell-holes, rusty wire and the black dead of forgotten fights. The ruins of Rœux across the river, suddenly leaping to shape in the flare of Véry lights, looked down on it like the skeleton of a fortress on a stage, and single unexpected shells spattered mud across the cold waters.
On the 13th January they relieved the 2nd Grenadiers at the front in a fresh assortment of decayed posts—Scabbard Alley, Scabbard Support, Welford Reserve and the like, whose names even to this day make men who served there shiver. As thaw and rain worked on them, the trenches “all fell in great lumps.”