On the 30th March the attack rolled up again from the south where it had met no particular encouragement, and barraged the Battalion’s sector with heavies for a couple of hours; causing forty-two casualties among the men and wounding Lieutenants Stacpoole and Bagenal. It then fell upon the 2nd Grenadiers and 1st Coldstream immediately to the Battalion’s left and right, and was driven off with loss. There were other attacks, but with less venom in them, before the Hun could be induced to withdraw. Half the Battalion spent the night digging a line of posts in support which they occupied by dawn.
On the last of March “nothing of importance occurred.” Everything, indeed, had occurred already. The old Somme salient which, English fashion, had become an institution, was completely reversed on the ominous newspaper maps. The Germans stood a-tip-toe looking into Amiens, and practically the entire spare strength of the British armies in France had been used and used up to bring them to that stand. The French were equally worn down. The American armies were not yet in place, and what reinforcing divisions were ready in England somewhat lacked training.
The Battalion, a straw among these waves, had in the month lost, besides officers, twenty-three other ranks killed and one hundred and seven wounded and one missing. It is even reported that there had been many days on which, owing to press of work, they had not shaved. (“That, ye’ll understand, is being dirty, an’ a crime. Believe me, now, there was times when we was all criminals, even Mr. —— an’ it disthressed him more than bloody war.”)
The fierceness of the enemy’s attack on the 28th March—ranging from Puisieux to north-east of Arras—had been, to an extent, his own undoing. For he had thrown his men in shoulder to shoulder in six lines at some spots, and our guns had caught them massed, forming up. But the check, severe as it was, did not choke off a final effort against the strained British and French cordon, on the 4th and 5th of April. The main weight of it, on the first day, fell south of the Somme, and on the second, north, from Dernancourt below Méaulte to Bucquoy which is on the same level as Gomiecourt. Except that the eastern side of Bucquoy was carried for a time, the northern attack was completely held, and so at last, after a heart-shattering fortnight, the Somme front came to rest. The Battalion, with its Headquarters under much too direct enemy observation near Boiry-St. Martin, reverted to its ancient routine of trench-work and reliefs under shell-fire.
The days included regular bursts of shelling, a large proportion of which was blue or yellow-cross gas, and when the Battalion lay in reserve they were kept awake by our energetic batteries on three sides of them.
Their St. Martin camp was a scientifically constructed death-trap. Most of it was under enemy observation and without ground-shelter. What shots ranged over our forward batteries or short of our rear ones, found their camp. When our 15-inch guns retaliated, from a hundred and fifty yards behind them, the blast extinguished all candles. The Diary observes: “The noise and the hostile retaliation made proper rest difficult.” That was on the 4th April, when the attack south of the Somme was in full swing.
On the 5th April their huts in Brigade-reserve were shelled for half an hour, with six casualties, and when they went into the line on a new sector, held by scattered posts, nearly every one of their guides lost his miserable way in the dark. Headquarters here were pitched in an old German trench and then—for they were not even rain-proof—shifted to the edge of Boiry-St. Martin village. A cellar had to be dug out and supported, and the rain descended on the mud-pie that it was, and when Headquarters, and all their papers, had established themselves, the enemy gas-bombarded the village with perfect accuracy. The Commanding Officer, Lieut.-Colonel R. V. Pollok, the Assistant Adjutant, Lieutenant J. N. Ward, and the M. O., Captain Woodhouse, had to be sent down suffering from yellow-cross gas after-effects.
Consider for a moment the woes of a battalion headquarters in the field. Late in January, Captain Gordon, the pukka Adjutant, riding to Arras for a bath, canters into a barrage of “heavies” and is wounded in the hand—a vital spot for adjutants. This leaves only the C.O. and the Assistant Adjutant, Lieutenant J. N. Ward, to carry on, and whatever the state of the front, the authorities demand their regular supply of papers and forms. No sooner has the Assistant Adjutant got abreast of things, than all Battalion Headquarters are knocked out in an hour. Luckily, they were only away for three or four days. The enemy added a small and easily beaten off raid to the confusion he had made in Orderly-Room; Major Baggallay took over the command, and Captain Budd, adequate and untroubled as ever, who had held the ghostly F Post on the Scarpe, acted as Adjutant. Officers were beginning to wear out now. Three “of the most tired” were sent down and replaced by substitutes from the Reinforcement Battalion.
The following officers joined for duty on the 10th April: Lieutenant M. Buller, Lieutenant (Acting Captain) W. Joyce, Lieutenant Hon. B. A. A. Ogilvy, and 2nd Lieutenants T. B. Maughan, P. R. J. Barry, H. J. Lofting, G. C. MacLachlan and J. C. Haydon.
It was on the morning of the 9th April that the enemy opened his second great thrust on the Lys, and the three weeks’ fighting that all but wiped out the Ypres Salient won him Messines, Kemmel, Armentières, Neuve Eglise, Bailleul, Merville, and carried him towards the Channel ports, within five miles of Hazebrouck. That the stroke was expected made it none the less severe. Spring on that front had chosen to be unseasonably dry. The lowlands in the Lys valley, normally their own best defences, gave passage to men and guns when they should have been still impassable. Whatever else may have betrayed them, the Germans had no cause to complain of the weather throughout the war, or indeed of the foresight of their adversaries. They had to deal chiefly with divisions that had been fought out in the Somme Push, reinforced with fillings from England and sent northward in a hurry. Sir Douglas Haig’s despatches give the relative disparity thus: