They went up on the 2nd May, relieving the Coldstream in the same evil sector, and the enemy machine-guns filling the dark with bullets as effectively as and more cheaply than artillery, killed one of our corporals and wounded a couple of the Coldstream. A hint of the various companies’ works shows what they had to contend with nightly. No. 2, which held the right front line “where enough of the trench had been already reclaimed to accommodate the whole company” (it was not superior accommodation), borrowed two platoons from No. 1 and worked till dawn at finishing a traffic-trench behind the blown-in front and at making parapets till “by morning it was possible to get all along this trench, even with a good deal of crawling.” No. 4 were out wiring a post against flank and rear attack. It stood out in a wilderness of utterly smashed trenches, which fatigue-parties from the reserve battalions dealt with, by the help and advice of the Sappers, and constructed a new trench (Wieltje Trench) running out on the left flank of the weak and unsupported Wieltje salient. Here was another desert of broken trenches, linked by shallow or wet sketches of new ones. No. 3 Company worked at its own trench, and at the repair of Cardoen Street which “had recently been blown in in several places.” An improved trench could be walked along, without too much stooping. Unimproved dittoes demanded that men should get out and run in the open, steeple-chasing across wreckage of tinware and timber, the bramble-like embraces of stray wire-ends, and that brittle and insecure foothold afforded by a stale corpse, while low flights of machine-gun bullets hastened their progress, or shrapnel overhead hunted the party as hawks hunt small birds in and out of hedges. The labour was as monotonous and barren to perform as it seems to record; but it made the background of their lives and experiences. Some say that, whatever future war may bring forth, never again can men be brought to endure what armed mankind faced in the trenches in those years. Certain it is that men, nowadays, thinking upon that past, marvel to themselves that they could by any means have overcome it at the time, or, later, have put it behind them. But the wonder above all wonders is that, while they lived that life, it seemed to them sane and normal, and they met it with even temper and cool heads.
On the 3rd May, Major Chichester, who had been suffering for some time from the effects of a wound by a H.E. that burst within a few feet of him, had to go sick, and Captain E. B. Greer was left temporarily in command. Their own Commanding Officer, the Hon. L. J. P. Butler, who had come out with them at the first and taken all that the Gods had sent since, was on the 5th May translated to the command of a Kitchener Brigade. Here is a tribute of that time, from within the Battalion, where they were not at all pleased by the calls of the New Army for seasoned brigadiers. “Butler, more than any other man, has made this Battalion what it is. Also we all love him. However, I am glad he has got a less dangerous job. He is too brave a man ever to be safe.”
On that same day they were relieved and went into one of the scattered wooden camps near Brandhoek for a whole week, which was spoiled by cold weather and classes in wiring under an R.E. corporal attached to them for that purpose. (“We were not clever with our hands at first go-off, but when it came to back-chat and remarks on things, and no officers near, begad there was times when I could have pitied a Sapper!”)
By the 12th May the Battalion was in reserve, their Brigade in the line, Major P. L. Reid had assumed command and Lieutenant F. Pym and 2nd Lieutenants A. Pym and Close had joined. Then they began again to consider raids of a new pattern under much more difficult conditions than their Laventie affairs. The 2nd Grenadiers and the 1st Coldstream were to do the reconnoitring for them, and “live Germans were badly needed for purposes of intelligence.” The authorities recommended, once more, two simultaneous raids symmetrically one from each flank. Their C.O. replied, as at Laventie, that live Germans meant stalking, and wished to know how it was possible to stalk to a time-table, even had the ground been well reconnoitred, and if several nights instead of one, and that a relief-night, had been allowed for preparations. Neither of the raids actually came off, but the projected one on the left flank ended in a most typical and instructive game of blind-man’s buff. The idea was to rush a German listening-post known to be held just north of the railway line on the left of Railway Wood, and the point of departure for the Coldstream reconnoitring patrol had been from a listening-post of our own, also on the railway. The patrol’s report was perfectly coherent. They had left our listening-post, gone up the railway line, turned half right, crawled fifty yards, found German wire, worked along it, discovered a listening-post “empty but obviously in recent use,” had hurried back, recrossed the railway about a hundred yards above our own listening-post, and fifty yards to the north of their crossing had noted the outline of another German listening-post where men were talking. (It is interesting to remember that the entire stage of these tense dramas could almost be reconstructed in a fair-sized garden.) This latter, then, was the post which the Battalion was to attack. Accordingly, they rehearsed the play very carefully with ten men under Lieutenant F. Pym, who had strict orders when they should rush the post, to club the Germans, “trying not to kill them (or one another).” They were to “collar a prisoner and hurry him back if well enough to walk,” and, incidentally, as illustrating the fashion of the moment, they were all to wear “brown veils.”
With these stage-directions clear in their mind, they went into the line on the 16th May, after a quiet relief, and took over from the Coldstream the sector from Railway Wood, the barricades across the railway, the big dug-out which had been an old mine, under Railway Wood, and disposed their reserves near Hell Fire Corner and the Menin road. It was ground they knew and hated, but since they had last eaten dirt there, our own listening-post, which had been the point of departure for the Coldstream patrol, on whose reports the raid would be based, had been withdrawn one hundred and fifty yards down the railway line. Apparently no one had realised this, and the captain (Platt) of the Coldstream Company, who had this sector when the 2nd Irish Guards relieved, had been killed while out wiring a couple of nights before. Consequently, that patrol had reconnoitred inside our own front; had mistaken our own wire for the German, had followed it to one of our own disused posts, and had seen and heard a listening-post of the 2nd Grenadiers which they, quite logically, assumed to be German and reported as such. Everything fitted in like a jigsaw puzzle, but all was based on a line which had been shifted—as the Battalion perceived the moment they took over the sector. So there was no attack with clubs and brown veils by the 2nd Irish Guards on the 2nd Grenadiers’ listening-post then, or afterwards, and the moral of the story was “verify your data.” (“No living man could tell from one day to the next—let alone nights—which was our line and which was Jerry’s. ’Twas broke an’ gapped and turned round every way, and each battalion had its own fancy-trenches dug for to make it worse for the next that took over. The miracle was—an’ how often have I seen it!—the miracle was that we did not club each other in the dark every night instead of—instead of when we did.”)
The Battalion went on, sadly, with its lawful enterprises of running wire and trench from the high ground under Railway Wood toward the shifted barricade on the railway itself; and digging saps to unstable mine-craters that had, some way or other, to be worked into their ever-shifting schemes of defence. All this under machine-gun fire on bright nights, when, as the cruel moon worked behind them, each head showing above ground-level was etched in black for the snipers’ benefit. On their right flank, between their own division and the Canadians, lay a gap of a quarter of a mile or so, which up till then had been imperfectly looked after by alternate hourly patrols. (“And in the intervals, any Germans who knew the way might have walked into Ypres in quest of souvenirs.”) It had to be wired and posted, and, at the same time, a huge, but for the moment dry, mine-crater directly in front of the right company’s shattered trench, needed linking up and connecting with another crater on the left. Many dead men lay in the line of that sap, where, at intervals, enemy rifle-grenades would lob in among the sickened workers. The moonlight made the Germans active as rats every night, and, since it was impossible to wire the far sides of the craters in peace, our people hit upon the idea of pushing “knife-rests”—ready wired trestles—out in the desired direction with poles, after dark. Be it noted, “This is a way, too much neglected, of wiring dangerous places. Every description of ‘puzzy-wuzzy’ can be made by day by the eight company wirers, and pushed out. Then on the first dark night, a few metal pegs and a strand or two of wire passed through the whole thing, makes an entanglement that would entangle a train.” (The language and emotions of the fatigue-parties who sweated up the unhandy “knife-rests” are not told.) Half the Battalion were used to supply the wants of the other half; for rations and water could only creep to within a couple of hundred yards of Hell Fire Corner, where the parties had to meet them and pack them the rest of the way by hand. The work of staggering and crawling, loaded with sharp-angled petrol-tins of water along imperfect duck-boards, is perhaps a memory which will outlast all others for the present generation. “The fatigues kill—the fatigues kill us”—as the living and the dead knew well.
On the 18th May they were drenched with a five hours’ bombardment of 4.2’s and “woolly bears.” It blew in one of their trenches (West Lane) and killed two men and wounded an officer of the Trench Mortar Battery there. But the height of the storm fell, as usual, round Hell Fire Corner, never a frequented thoroughfare by daylight, and into an abandoned trench. “They could hardly have put down so much shell anywhere else in our line and have got so small a bag. Only one man in the company was wounded.” The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but a battalion that works strenuously on its parapets and traffic-trenches gets its reward, even in the Salient in ’16. Battalion Headquarters, always fair target for a jest, is derided as taking “a severe fright from a shell that pitched twenty yards away, but it was an obvious error in bowling, and was not repeated.” Our guns fired throughout the next day, presumably in retaliation, but, like all troops in trenches, the Battalion had no interest in demonstrations that did not directly affect their food and precious water-tins. They were relieved on the 21st of May by the 6th Oxford and Bucks of the Twentieth Division, and went off to camp near Proven for ten days’ Corps Reserve, when “almost the entire Battalion was on fatigue, either building military railways or cleaning up reserve-lines of trenches.”
After Hooge
On the 1st June they moved out of that front altogether, to billets at the back of Wormhoudt fourteen miles away, and thence on the next day, June 2, to Bollezeele westward, while the enemy were making their successful attack on the Canadians at Hooge. (“Have ye noticed there is always trouble as soon as you come out of the line; or, maybe, being idle you pay the more attention to it. Annyway, the minute we was out of it, of course Jerry begins to play up and so Hooge happened, and that meant more fatigue for the Micks.”) Meantime, they were in “G.H.Q. Reserve” for a fortnight, busy on a rehearsal-line of English and German trenches which the R.E. had laid down for them to develop. Our G.H.Q. were thinking of the approaching campaign on the Somme. The enemy were intent on disarranging our plans just as our guns were moving southward. Hooge was their spoke in our wheel. It came not far short of success; for it pinned a quantity of shellable troops to weak ground, directly cost the lives of several thousands of them and added a fresh sore to the Salient’s many weaknesses in that it opened a fortnight’s fierce fighting, with consequent waste, as well as diversion, of supplies. While that battle, barren as the ground it won and lost, surged back and forth, the Battalion at Bollezeele gained a glory it really appreciated by beating the 3rd Grenadiers in the ring, six fights out of nine, at all weights. Specially they defeated Ian Hague (late heavy-weight champion of England) whom Corporal Smith of the Battalion settled “on points.” There would be time and, perhaps, warning to attend to Death when He called. Till then, young and active life was uppermost, and had to be catered for. Indeed, their brigadier remarked of the social side of that boxing entertainment that “it reminded him of Ascot.”
But at the back of everything, and pouring in hourly by official or unofficial word, was the news of the changing fortunes of Hooge. Would that postpone or advance the date of the “spring meeting,” not in the least like Ascot, that they had discussed so long? Whichever way war might go, the Guards would not be left idle.