Enough rain fell the day before to grease the ground uncomfortably, and when at 3.30 A. M. the Irish Guards moved off from their reserve trenches west of Lagnicourt to their assembly positions along the Demicourt-Graincourt road to Bullen Trench, the jumping-off place, it was pouring wet. They were not shelled on the way up, but the usual night-work was afoot in the back-areas, and though our guns, as often the case on the eve of an outbreak, held their breath, the enemy’s artillery threatened in the distance, and the lights and “flaming onions” marked their expectant front. Just before the Battalion reached the ruins of Demicourt, there was an explosion behind them, and they saw, outlined against the flare of a blazing dump, Lagnicourt way, a fat and foolish observation-balloon rocking and ducking at the end of its tether, with the air of a naughty baby caught in the act of doing something it shouldn’t. Since the thing was visible over half a Department, they called it names, but it made excuse for a little talk that broke the tension. Tea and rum were served out at the first halt—a ritual with its usual grim jests—and when they reached the road in front of Demicourt, they perceived the balloon had done its dirty work too well. The enemy, like ourselves, changes his field-lights on occasion, but, on all occasions, two red lights above and one below mean trouble. “Up go the bloody pawnbrokers!” said a man who knew what to expect, and, as soon as the ominous glares rose, the German trench-mortars opened on the Battalion entering the communication-way that led to Bullen Trench. Our barrage came down at Zero (5.20) more terrifically, men said, than ever they had experienced, and was answered by redoubled defensive barrages. After that, speech was cut off. Some fifty yards ahead of Bullen Trench—which, by the way, was only three feet deep—lay the 1st Scots Guards, the first wave of the attack. On, in front of, and in the space between them and the Irish, fell the rain of the trench-mortars; from the rear, the Guards Machine-Guns tortured all there was of unoccupied air with their infernal clamours. The Scots Guards went over among the shell-spouts and jerking wires at the first glimmer of dawn, the Irish following in a rush. The leading companies were No. 3 (Lieutenant H. A. A. Collett) on the left, and No. 4 (2nd Lieutenant C. S. O’Brien) on the right. The 1st Guards Trench Mortar Battery (2nd Lieutenant O. R. Baldwin, Irish Guards) was attached experimentally to No. 3 Company in the first wave instead of, as usual, in support. No. 2 Company (Captain C. W. W. Bence-Jones) supported No. 3, and No. 1 (Lieutenant the Hon. B. A. A. Ogilvy) No. 4. They stayed for a moment in the trench, a deep, wide one of the Hindenburg pattern, which the Scots Guards had left. It was no healthy spot, for the shells were localised here and the dirt flung up all along it in waves. Men scrambled out over the sliding, flying edges of it, saw a bank heave up in the half-light, and knew that, somewhere behind that, was the Canal. By this time one of the two Stokes guns of the Mortar Battery and half the gunners had been wiped out, and the casualties in the line were heavy; but they had no time to count. Then earth opened beneath their feet, and showed a wide, deep, dry, newly made canal with a smashed iron bridge lying across the bed of it, and an unfinished lock to the right looking like some immense engine of war ready to do hurt in inconceivable fashions. Directly below them, on the pale, horribly hard, concrete trough, was a collection of agitated pin-heads, the steel hats of the Scots Guards rearing ladders against the far side of the gulf. Mixed with them were the dead, insolently uninterested, while the wounded, breaking aside, bound themselves up with the tense, silent preoccupation which unhurt men, going forward, find so hard to bear. Mobs of bewildered Germans had crawled out of their shelters in the Canal flanks and were trying to surrender to any one who looked likely to attend to them. They saluted British officers as they raced past, and, between salutes, returned their arms stiffly to the safe “Kamerad” position. This added the last touch of insanity to the picture. (“We’d ha’ laughed if we had had the time, ye’ll understand.”)
None recall precisely how they reached the bottom of the Canal, but there were a few moments of blessed shelter ere they scrambled out and reformed on the far side. The shelling here was bad enough, but nothing to what they had survived. A veil of greasy smoke, patched with flame that did not glare, stood up behind them, and through the pall of it, in little knots, stumbled their supports, blinded, choking, gasping. In the direction of the attack, across a long stretch of broken rising ground, were more shells, but less thickly spaced, and craters of stinking earth and coloured chalks where our barrage had ripped out nests of machine-guns. Far off, to the left, creaming with yellow smoke in the morning light, rose the sullen head of Bourlon Wood to which the Canadians were faithfully paying the debt contracted by the 2nd Battalion of the Irish Guards in the old days after Cambrai.
At the crest of the ascent lay Saunders Keep, which marked the point where the Scots Guards would lie up and the Irish come through. Already the casualties had been severe. Captain Bence-Jones and 2nd Lieutenant Mathieson of No. 2 Company were wounded at the Keep itself, and 2nd Lieutenant A. R. Boyle of No. 1 earlier in the rush. The companies panted up, gapped and strung out. From the Keep the land sloped down to Stafford Alley, the Battalion’s first objective just before which Lieutenant Barry Close was killed. That day marked his coming of age. Beyond the Alley the ground rose again, and here the Irish were first checked by some machine-gun fire that had escaped our barrages. Second Lieutenant O’Brien, No. 3 Company, was hit at this point while getting his men forward. He had earned his Military Cross in May, and he died well. The next senior officer, 2nd Lieutenant E. H. R. Burke, was away to the left in the thick of the smoke with a platoon that, like the rest, was fighting for its life; so 2nd Lieutenant O’Farrell led on. He was hit not far from Stafford Alley, and while his wound was being bandaged by Sergeant Regan, hit again by a bullet that, passing through the Sergeant’s cap and a finger, entered O’Farrell’s heart. The officer commanding the remnants of the Mortar Battery took on the company and his one gun. Meantime, Collett and a few of No. 3 Company had reached Silver Street, a trench running forward from Stafford Alley, and he and Lieutenant Brady were bombing down it under heavy small-arm fire from the enemy’s left flank which had not been driven in and was giving untold trouble. No. 2 Company, with two out of three of its officers down, was working towards the same line as the fragment of No. 3; though opinion was divided on that confused field whether it would not be better for them to lie down and form a defensive flank against that pestilent left fire. Eventually, but events succeeded each other like the bullets, Collett and his men reached their last objective—a trench running out of Silver Street towards Flesquières. Here he, Brady, and Baldwin drew breath and tried to get at the situation. No. 4 Company lay to the right of No. 3, and when 2nd Lieutenant E. H. R. Burke, with what was left of his platoon before mentioned, came up, he resumed charge of it without a word and went on. No. 1 Company (Lieutenant the Hon. B. A. A. Ogilvy) had, like the rest, been compelled to lead its own life. Its objective was the beet-sugar factory in front of Flesquières ahead of and a little to the right of the Battalion’s final objective, and it was met throughout with rifle, bomb, and flanking fire. Lieutenant Ogilvy was wounded at a critical point in the game with the enemy well into the trench, or trenches. (The whole ground seemed to the men who were clearing it one inexhaustible Hun-warren.) As he dropped, Lieutenant R. L. Dagger and Sergeant Conaboy, picking up what men they could, bombed the enemy out, back, and away, and settled down to dig in and wait; always under flank-fire. The Sergeant was killed “in his zeal to finish the job completely”—no mean epitaph for a thorough man. By eleven o’clock that morning all the companies had reached their objectives, and, though sorely harassed, began to feel that the worst for them might be over. There were, however, two German “whizz-bangs” that lived in Orival Wood still untaken on the Battalion’s left, and these, served with disgusting speed and accuracy, swept Silver Street mercilessly. The situation was not improved when one of the sergeants quoted the ever-famous saying of Sergeant-Major Toher with reference to one of our own barrages: “And even the wurrums themselves are getting up and crying for mercy.” The guns were near enough to watch quite comfortably, and while the men watched and winced, they saw the “success” signal of the Canadians—three whites—rise high in air in front of Bourlon Wood. Then No. 1 Company reported they were getting more than their share of machine-gun fire, and the 1st Guards Brigade Trench Mortar Battery, reduced to one mortar, one officer, one sergeant, four men, and ten shells, bestowed the whole of its ammunition in the direction indicated, abandoned its mortar, and merged itself into the ranks of No. 3 Company. It had been amply proved that where trench-mortars accompany a first wave of attack, if men are hit while carrying two Stokes shells apiece (forty pounds of explosives), they become dangerous mobile mines.
Enemy aeroplanes now swooped down with machine-gun fire; there seemed no way of getting our artillery to attend to them and they pecked like vultures undisturbed. Then Battalion Headquarters came up in the midst of the firing from the left, established themselves in a dug-out and were at once vigorously shelled, together with the neighbouring aid-post and some German prisoners there, waiting to carry down wounded. The aid-post was in charge of a young American doctor, Rhys Davis by name, who had been attached to the Battalion for some time. This was his first day of war and he was mortally wounded before the noon of it.
The trench filled as the day went on, with details dropping in by devious and hurried roads to meet the continual stream of prisoners being handed down to Brigade Headquarters. One youth, who could not have been seventeen, flung himself into the arms of an officer and cried, “Kamerad, Herr Offizier! Ich bin sehr jung! Kamerad!” To whom the embarrassed Islander said brutally: “Get on with you. I wouldn’t touch you for the world!” And they laughed all along the trench-face as they dodged the whizz-bangs out of Orival Wood, and compared themselves to the “wurrums begging for mercy.”
About noon, after many adventures, the 2nd Grenadiers arrived to carry on the advance, and Silver Street became a congested metropolis. The 2nd Grenadiers were hung up there for a while because, though the Third Division on the right had taken Flesquières, the Sixty-third on the left had not got Graincourt village, which was enfilading the landscape damnably. Orival Wood, too, was untaken, and the 1st Grenadiers, under Lord Gort, were out unsupported half a mile ahead on the right front somewhere near Premy Chapel. Meantime, a battalion of the Second Division, which was to come through the Guards Division and continue the advance, flooded up Silver Street, zealously unreeling its telephone wires; Machine-Gun Guards were there, looking for positions; the 2nd Grenadiers were standing ready; the Welsh Guards were also there with intent to support the Grenadiers; walking wounded were coming down, and severe cases were being carried over the top by German prisoners who made no secret of an acute desire to live and jumped in among the rest without leave asked. The men compared the crush to a sugar-queue at home. To cap everything, some wandering tanks which had belonged to the Division on the right had strayed over to the left. No German battery can resist tanks, however disabled; so they drew fire, and when they were knocked out (our people did not know this at first, being unused to working with them), made life insupportable with petrol-fumes for a hundred yards round.
About half-past four in the afternoon a Guards Battalion—they thought it was the 1st Coldstream—came up on their left, and under cover of what looked like a smoke-barrage, cleared Orival Wood and silenced the two guns there. The Irish, from their dress-circle in Silver Street, blessed them long and loud, and while they applauded, Lieut.-Colonel Lord Gort, commanding the 1st Grenadiers, came down the trench wounded on his way to a dressing-station. He had been badly hit once before he thought fit to leave duty, and was suffering from loss of blood. The Irish had always a great regard for him, and that day they owed him more than they knew at the time, for it was the advance of the 1st Grenadiers under his leading, almost up to Premy Chapel, which had unkeyed the German resistance in Graincourt, and led the enemy to believe their line of retreat out of the village was threatened. The Second Division as it came through found the enemy shifting and followed them up towards Noyelles. So the day closed, and, though men did not realize, marked the end of organized trench-warfare for the Guards Division.
The Battalion, with two officers dead and five wounded out of fifteen (killed: Lieutenant B. S. Close, and 2nd Lieutenant A. H. O’Farrell; wounded: Captain the Hon. B. A. A. Ogilvy, Captain C. W. W. Bence-Jones, and 2nd Lieutenants A. R. Boyle, G. F. Mathieson, and C. S. O’Brien, M.C., died of wounds), and one hundred and eighty casualties in the ranks, stayed on the ground for the night. It tried to make itself as comfortable as cold and shallow trenches allowed, but by orders of some “higher authority,” who supposed that it had been relieved, no water or rations were sent up; and, next morning, they had to march six thousand yards on empty stomachs to their trench-shelters and bivouacs in front of Demicourt. As the last company arrived a cold rain fell, but they were all in reasonably high spirits. It had been a winning action, in spite of trench-work, and men really felt that they had the running in their own hands at last.
Back-area rumours and official notifications were good too. The Nineteenth and Second Corps of the Second Army, together with the Belgian Army, had attacked on the 28th September, from Dixmude to far south of the Ypres-Zonnebeke road; had retaken all the heights to the east of Ypres, and were in a fair way to clear out every German gain there of the past four years. A German withdrawal was beginning from Lens to Armentières, and to the south of the Third Army the Fourth came in on the 29th (while the Battalion was “resting and shaving” in its trench-shelters by Demicourt) on a front of twelve miles, and from Gricourt to Vendhuille broke, and poured across the Hindenburg Line, then to the St. Quentin Canal. At the same time, lest there should be one furlong of the uneasy front neglected, the Fifth and Sixth Corps of the Third Army attacked over the old Gouzeaucourt ground between Vendhuille and Marcoing. This, too, without counting the blows that the French and the Americans were dealing in their own spheres on the Meuse and in the Argonne; each stroke coldly preparing the next.
The Germans had, during September, lost a quarter of a million of prisoners, several thousand guns, and immense quantities of irreplaceable stores. Their main line of resistance was broken and over-run throughout; and their troops in the field were feeling the demoralisation of constant withdrawals, as well as shortage from abandoned supplies. Our people had known the same depression in the March Push, when night skies, lit with burning dumps, gave the impression that all the world was going up in universal surrender.