Three days in Arras prison saw them back again in support just in time to get the full benefit of another day’s thaw. It was a quiet tour. One man was killed by a trench-mortar, one badly wounded by a rifle-grenade, seven by shell-splinters outside a dug-out, and five men gassed. The enemy confined himself to long-range trench-mortars and an “increase in aerial activity.” He was noticed to “object very strongly to our air-craft crossing his lines.” Never was enemy more anxious not to draw attention to his moves. And, far behind our line at Arras and elsewhere, men dug and entrenched and sketched works of defence to meet the German rush, while the front trenches sat still and looked across deserts, apparently empty of life, till a head moved in the open. It was a season without parallel in our armies’ experience—this mere waiting for a certain blow to be dealt at a certain time. No written history records the psychology of those spring days. The Diary is concerned with the Battalion’s own sorrow. Here is the story, as written: “During the month [February] the Household Battalion was disbanded and eighty men were allotted to the Battalion. This marks the beginning, and is the first official recognition of the fact that the Irish Guards cannot keep up the supply of Irish troops. A most regrettable epoch in the history of the regiment.” On the heels of this comes, comically enough, almost the sole personal expression of feeling in the entire Diary. They went, on the last day of February, into rest at Gordon Camp, christened after the 9th Gordons who made it. “It is without exception the most comfortable and best-laid-out camp I have ever been in. Everything that one could possibly wish for is here—even an officer’s bathroom with porcelain bath and hot and cold water laid on.” It was an all-too-short interval in cold and dirty work; for on the 2nd March the Scarpe trenches reclaimed them—Fampoux, Colt Reserve, Pepper and Pudding—in snow, sleet, and unbroken monotony of working-parties.
On the 6th March the Diary notes that the 2nd Grenadiers, whom they relieved the next day, carried out a raid, successful in itself, and doubly so as drawing no retaliation on their own line. It resulted in two identifiable prisoners and a machine-gun. But battalions do not approve of their neighbours raiding when the enemy is “nervous.”
The March Push
Their next front-line turn—6th to 10th March—was utterly uneventful, and on the 12th they, being then in Stirling Camp, were ordered to “stand to” for the expected German offensive. It proved to be no more than a light shelling. So the still fine days, in line or in support, ran out till the dawn of the 21st March when the great shells suddenly descended on Arras, and rumours, worse than any shelling, followed their tracks. Says the Diary: “The German offensive has begun.”
The evacuation of the town, during the next two days, was a nightmare of flying masonry, clouds of dust, the roar of falling brick-work, contradictory orders, and mobs of drifting civilians, their belongings pushed before or hauled after them; and no power to order them where to go. Arras, always in the front line, had been safe so long, it was inconceivable that there should be real danger now. Might they not camp out and return to-morrow? But the enemy were reported almost in sight, and ready to open on the town with their field-guns. They had broken through, men said, under cover of the heavy morning fog—broken through everywhere along the line of all our old gains from Lens to St. Quentin, and their whole strength was behind the blow. No one could understand it, though all men argued; and while the refugees fled forth, expostulating, blaming, but seldom weeping, that sunny day, eight hundred shells fell purposefully on the dishevelled town. By evening word came that our Somme line had not only broken but gone out—infantry, artillery and uncounted stores—between Chérisy and Demicourt in the north. South of that, the old Cambrai Salient, which had not been hardly tried, was standing but would have to withdraw or be cut off, because, from Gouzeaucourt to La Fère, ten miles and more south of St. Quentin, the German tide had swept in from one to three miles deep, and was racing forward. It is not difficult to imagine what manner of reports the mere truth gave birth to, while the Battalion waited on in the Communal College where it was billeted, and was not encouraged to wander about the rocking, sliding streets.
By the evening of the 22nd March men began to understand it was no mere break-through but a collapse such as had never befallen British arms in the history of her people. Officers were sent out in the morning to reconnoitre the support-line of a third system of defence between Wancourt and Hénin-sur-Cojeul. But Hénin-sur-Cojeul was already under the hand of the enemy, who had gained three more miles in a few hours and, left and right, were widening the breach.
The morning of the 22nd March had been foggy again till noon and, under that cover, the Germans had again broken in on our surprised or withdrawing divisions. Report said that whole battalions and even brigades had been cut off by the flood; their wireless working faithfully so long as it stood, and the sound of their small-arm fire continuing for a while after their last words had ceased. Late that evening orders came for the Battalion to move at midnight from Arras to Boisleux-St. Marc, some six miles due south of the town on a line more or less prepared against eventualities, and, with their brigade, to give what help they could to the divisions who might be falling back on that front. This was all that could be made out of the mass of contradictory orders that afflicted them, and the growing crop of rumours and alarms that upset men almost more than any countermanded orders.
The Battalion set to work on the 23rd March to dig a support-line in rear of what was called the Army Line which ran in front of Boisleux-St. Marc while the evacuation of Arras was being completed and “all details and drummers marched to the Reinforcement Battalion at Agnez-les-Duisans,” on the Scarpe well to the west of Arras. (“In those days we was throubled the way a man is disthressed in dhreams. All manner of things happening, ye’ll understand, and him the only one able to do nothing. But I wisht I’d been a musicaner.”)
The Diary for the 24th March merely says, “remained in same positions,” and refers to “repeated rumours.” They sent their first-line transport back out of harm’s way, and went on digging. Yet the 24th was a day no rumour could have painted much blacker than it was. From directly in front of the Guards Division at Boisleux, the line of the German gains in the past forty-eight hours dropped straight south to the Somme at Cléry, and thence skirted its western bank to Ham, where it broke across to the wide marshes of the Oise below La Fère. Two thirds of the hard-bought ground of the Somme campaign, the scores of villages whose names smelt of blood, were lost, and the harvesting of the remainder was a matter barely of hours.