The post had been reconnoitred earlier in the evening and was known not to be wired. All the raiders, with blackened faces and bayonets and stripped uniforms that betrayed nothing, were in position on the forming-up tape five minutes before zero. The moon forced them to crawl undignifiedly out in twos and threes, but they lined up with the precision of a football line, at one-yard intervals and, a minute before zero, wriggled to within seventy yards of their quarry. At zero the barrage came down bursting beautifully, just beyond the enemy post, and about two seconds ere it lifted the raiders charged in. No one had time to leave or even to make a show of resistance, and they were back with their five prisoners, all alive and quite identifiable, in ten minutes. The waiting stretcher-parties were not needed and—best of all—“retaliation was slight and entirely on Ayette.” (One is not told what Ayette thought of it.) The motive of the raid was “to secure identity alive or dead.” But when all was over without hurt, one single shell at morning “stand-to” (May 28) killed 2nd Lieutenant L. H. L. Carver in a front-line trench.
They held the raided post under close observation that day and the next (May 29), and discovered that it had been reoccupied by a machine-gun party. As they particularly did not wish it to put out wire or become offensive, they dosed it with constant bursts of their own machine-gun and were rewarded by hearing groans and cries, and our listening-patrol in No Man’s Land saw a man being carried away.
On the 31st May the enemy set to, in earnest, to shell all reserve-lines and back-area for six hours; as well as the first-line transport in Adinfer Wood after dark, when wounded horses are not easy to handle. Their relief by the 2nd Grenadiers was badly delayed by heavy shelling all the way from the front line to Monchy, but instead of any number of casualties, which might reasonably have been expected, the Battalion got through unscathed.
The month’s list was heavy enough as it stood. Five officers had been wounded and three killed in action; seventeen other ranks killed, and forty-eight wounded, and all this in the regular wear-and-tear front-line routine with nothing more to see than a stray German cap here and there. Twenty-two men were sent down sick, and the Diary begins to hint at the prevalence of the “Spanish fever,” which was in a few months to sweep France and all the world.
June was a month of peace. It opened in reserve-trenches at the south-west end of Monchy-au-Bois, and when they next went up into line, a new route had been surveyed round the dreaded corner of Adinfer Wood which saved some shelling of reliefs.
On the 4th June the C.O., Lieutenant-Colonel Pollok, left the Battalion to take over command of Sixth Corps Army School, and Major R. R. C. Baggallay assumed command. Likewise three stray Germans were captured opposite one of our posts.
On the 5th Major Gordon arrived from the 2nd Battalion for duty as Second in Command.
They were relieved by the 1st King’s Regiment on the 6th June—a somewhat hectic performance, as the front-line track-ways were intricate, needing guides at almost every turn of them, and, for the run-up, one guide per platoon. After which, about one in the morning, it was discovered that the King’s had come in without their Lewis-guns. Some divisions were in the habit of leaving and taking over the Lewis-guns in situ ; but the Guards Division always went in and out of the line with their very own weapons. One cannot delay a clear June dawn and, as the relieved Battalion had to get off in tightly packed and horribly conspicuous lorries, and as the last platoon could not reach those lorries till 3 A. M., it was touch-and-go whether daylight would not reveal them “like a Sunday School treat” to the German guns. But luck held. The last lorry was safe in Bavincourt Wood five miles behind Monchy before day had stripped the landscape, and the 1st King’s were left to meditate on the wealth and variety of the Irish tongue, as delivered on empty stomachs in whispers down packed trenches.
The Battalion billeted at Bavincourt when the 2nd H.L.I. had got out of their quarters, and since, like the other camps, Bavincourt was regularly bombed, made earth walls round their Nissen huts, and slits near them to be used against ’planes or too extravagant shell-fire. Here they stayed till the end of the month, cleaning, refitting, and training (in open warfare principally; and, this time, they were not to be disappointed) at Lewis gunnery, bombing, and general physical smartening-up. When the Brigade Sports took place at Saulty they won every event but three, and when the Corps Commander, the following week, inspected the different ways in the divisional methods of carrying the eight Lewis-guns of each company all on one limber, “the method employed by the Battalion was considered the best, and all units were ordered to copy.” They had rigged a sort of false top on a rear-limber which accommodated all eight guns together.