The Battalion relieved the 1st Scots Guards in the front line near Mœuvres on the 7th—a quiet relief followed by severe gassing. Here they passed two days in the delicate and difficult business of feeling all about them among the mass of old trenches, to locate enemy’s posts and to watch what points of vantage might offer. The wreckage of the houses round Mœuvres, into which the trenches ran, lent itself excellently to enemy activity; and men played blind-man’s buff round bits of broken walls wherever they explored. Their left was in the air; their right under the care of Providence; and their supports were far off. No. 3 Company (Captain G. L. Bambridge, M.C.), while trying to close a gap between the two front companies (3 and 1) by peaceful penetration with a bombing-party, found enemy in the trench, drove him up it as far as they could, built a barricade, and were then heavily counter-raided by a couple of officers and twenty men whom they ejected after, as the Company justly owned, “a good attempt.” The enemy “attempted” again about midnight on the 8th, when he was bombed off, and again on the afternoon of the 9th in an outlying trench, mixed up with smashed cellars and broken floors, where he captured two unarmed stretcher-bearers and three men who had not been in the line before. Though it does new hands no harm to realize that front-line trenches are not Warley Barracks (and stretcher-bearers, like orderlies, are prey to all the world), still the matter could not be passed over. Our trench-mortars attended vigorously to the enemy posts whence the raid had been launched, and in the afternoon sent a strong patrol to make the outraged trench secure. Later on, a platoon of No. 1 Company got into touch with the battalion (8th King’s) on their left, and took part in a small “bicker,” as it was described, but with no casualties.
They were relieved the same night, though they did not expect it, by the 1/5th Battalion Loyal North Lancs who had not made sure of their route beforehand, and so, in wet darkness, lost their way, failed to meet the guides at the rendezvous, and were heavily shelled. The relief dragged on till well towards dawn, when the battalions straggled off into some drenching trenches without any sort of accommodation. (“The whole thing the most appalling mess and agony I have ever experienced.”) The worst was when a stray light went up and showed the relieved Battalion under pouring rain playing “follow my leader” in a complete circle like caterpillars, in the hopeful belief that they were moving to their destination. They next took the place of the 3rd Guards Brigade in reserve-trenches near Edinburgh Support, where they stayed till the 14th September and were not even once shelled. Salvage and cleaning up was their fatigue—a dreadful job at any time, for the ground was filled with ancient offal as well as new—lost French of ’14 mingled grotesquely with the raw produce of yesterday’s bombing-raid. Yet men’s feelings blunt so by use that they will scavenge yard by yard over the very clay of the pit into which they themselves may at any instant be stamped, nor turn a hair at shapes made last year in their likeness. The Battalion was complimented by its Major-General on the extent and neatness of its dump. No mere campaigning interferes with the Army’s passion for elaborate economies. A little before this, the entire British Expeditionary Force was exhorted to collect and turn in all solder from bully-beef tins and the like. Naturally, the thing became a game with betting on results between corps; but when a dark, elderly, brooding private of the Irish spent three hours stalking a Coldstream cooker with intent to convey and melt it down, every one felt it had gone far enough.
On the 15th September they relieved the 1st Scots Guards in the old trenches west of Lagnicourt. There they managed to put in a little box-respirator drill which at the best is a dry fatigue, but, be it noted with gratitude, “beer was obtained for the men and sent up from transport-lines.” The whole area reeked of the various gases which the enemy were distributing with heavies. They hung in the hollows and were sucked up by the day’s heat, and no time or place was safe from them. Gas-discipline had to be insisted on strongly, for even veterans grow careless of a foe they cannot see; and the new hands are like croupy babies.
On the 17th September they relieved the 2nd Scots Guards in support, and No. 2 Company took over from a company of the Welsh Guards. Their trenches were in what had been the British front line of the old time—Fish Avenue, Sprat Post, Shark Support, Rat and Rabbit Avenue, and so forth.
There was desultory shelling on the morning of the 18th, and heavier work in the afternoon, causing six casualties, and slightly wounding Captain Vernon, Intelligence Officer. Then the silence of preparation for battle falls on the record. It was nothing to the Battalion that on the 18th September the enemy “apparently attacked south of the divisional front along the Bapaume-Cambrai road.” The dead must bury their dead on the Somme. They had their own dispositions to arrange and re-arrange, as men, for one cause or other, fell out and no unit could afford to take chances, with the Hindenburg Line ahead of them. (“An’ we knowin’ we was told off to cross that dirty ditch in front of ’em all.”) Their world, as with every other division, was limited to the Reserves behind them, who should come up to make good their casualties; their trench-mortar batteries alongside them; and their own selves about to be used in what promised to be one of the bloodiest shows of the war.
Those who were for the front line enjoyed a week to work and think things over. Those who were set aside for the second course were bombed by night and—went mushroom-picking in back-areas between parades, or played riotous cricket-matches with petrol-tins for wickets!
Their Divisional Commander, Major-General Feilding, had left on September 11 to succeed Sir Francis Lloyd in command of the London District, and General T. G. Matheson, C.B., had been appointed to the command of the Guards Division. The Battalion was full strength, officers and men, for there had been little during the past month to pull it down.
The Crossing of the Canal du Nord
Operations against the Hindenburg Line were to open on the 27th September with the attack of fourteen divisions of the First and Third Armies on a twelve-mile front from opposite Gouzeaucourt in the south to opposite Sauchy-Lestrée, sister to Sauchy-Cauchy—under the marshes of the Sensée River in the north. It would be heralded by two days’ solid bombardment along the entire fronts of the First, Third, and Fourth Armies, so that the enemy might be left guessing which was to hit first. When the First and Third Armies were well home, the Fourth would attend to the German position in the south, and heave the whole thing backward.
The share of the Guards Division in the northern attack was to cross the Canal du Nord at Lock Seven, north of Havrincourt, on a front of a mile; then work through the complicated tangle of the Hindenburg support line directly east along the ridge from Flesquières village to Premy Chapel which stands at the junction of the roads from Noyelles, Marcoing, and Graincourt, and to consolidate on the line of the Marcoing-Graincourt road. Meantime, the Third Division on their right would take the village of Flesquières; the Fifty-second Division would take the Hindenburg Line that lay west of the Canal in the bend of it, and would then let the Sixty-third through who would swing down from the north and attend to Graincourt and Anneux villages. The total advance set for the Guards Division was three miles, but, if the operations were fully successful, they were to push on to the outskirts of Noyelles; the Third Division to Marcoing; while the Fifty-seventh, coming through the Sixty-third, would take Cantaing and Fontaine-Notre-Dame. In the Guards Division itself, the 2nd Brigade was to move off first, and ferret its way through a knot of heavily wired trenches that lay between them and the Canal, take the Hindenburg support trenches, and then form a defensive flank to the left of the next advance till the Fifty-second and Sixty-third Divisions should have secured Graincourt. The 1st Brigade would pass through them and capture the trenches across the Canal to the north and north-east of Flesquières. If resistance were not too strong, that brigade was to go on to the spur running from Flesquières to Cantaing, and help the Sixty-third turn the Graincourt line. The 3rd Brigade, passing through the 1st, would carry on and take the high ground round Premy Chapel.