The 16th September was an almost continuous bombardment of whizz-bangs and 5.9’s on the trench where they still lay; but in the intervals of the shelling men kept turning up and reporting themselves with tales of adventure and extremity among the shell-holes outside. They were relieved a little before midnight and left their battered lair eighty-eight strong, via Ginchy, Guillemont, and Trônes Wood for the Citadel, which, when they reached their total, had been increased by strays to one hundred and six. Lieutenant Bainbridge, eminently capable of looking after himself and his party, turned up later with another sixty. Next day, the weary work of re-making the Battalion began. Lieutenant Dollar had to be sent down to hospital with a return of the dysentery from which he had reported himself recovered. This further reduced the few available officers on their feet. A draft of a hundred and fifty men came in. By absorbing the still effective digging-platoon into the active line, a battalion of four companies of a hundred each was put together and turned out for the next week in the Carnoy mud to drill under new company commanders.
Mud-Fighting on the Somme
The second move of the Guards Division opened on the 25th September, and this time the ball was with the 1st Battalion. The work on the 15th of the month had carried the Fourteenth Division’s front on to the naked ridge towards Morval and Lesbœufs where it had been held, but without advance, for the past ten days. Now brigade orders came “to renew the attacks” over what remained untaken of the ground. “The Guards Division will capture Lesbœufs. The 1st Guards Brigade will attack on the right, the 3rd on the left,” while the Fifth Division was to attack Morval on the right of the Guards Division and the Twenty-First Division (62nd Brigade) would take Gueudecourt on the left. The 2nd Guards Brigade would be in reserve; and the Battalion hoped, as men may who know what war means, that they would not be needed. Nor were they till the evening of the 26th September, when they moved from Trônes Wood and its dead, to relieve the 1st Battalion, used and broken for the second time in ten days, the day before, with the 2nd Grenadiers who “after the attack on Lesbœufs had dug themselves in to the east of that town.” Cæsar himself does not equal the sublime terseness of the Diary. All their world from the King downwards was to crown them with praise later on, but in the meantime reliefs must be orderly conducted and touch must be kept through the shell-tormented darkness with the battalions on either side, while they themselves settled in the reeking front line under certainty of vicious bombardment and the possibility of suddenly launched counter-attack. They were shelled all that night from their relief on and throughout the next day (the 27th) “by every type of shell, but mostly by 5.9’s.” In the afternoon when it became necessary to help an attack on their left by launching a creeping barrage from in front of Lesbœufs towards Le Transloy, the enemy retaliated with a barrage on the Battalion’s front that blew the line in in several places. They received the same attentions on the 28th, and this in an uptorn isolated land where water was scarce; but, on their demand, retaliation arrived in the shape of heavies and some aeroplanes. “This had the effect of stopping the enemy’s fire completely except for a few whizz-bangs.” For the rest of the day they merely took their share of the general necessary shellings on a vast and disputed front. Men grow quick to differentiate between the punishment they should accept without complaint, and the personal direct “hate” which sets the newly strung telephones buzzing to Brigade Headquarters for the guns. But, even so, it is said, a hypnotic sense of helplessness comes over troops which are being shelled continuously, till sometimes they will sit and suffer, the telephone under their hand, while parapets fly up and fall down on them. Yet, one single small casualty may break that spell as suddenly as it was cast, and the whole line, grumbling and uneasy, wants to know whether their artillery are dead too.
The 1st Coldstream relieved them late at night and without one single casualty on the 28th September, and they lay up in bivouac in Trônes Wood on the 30th, their old C.O., Colonel, now General, Butler lunched with them in the Headquarters dug-out, where they compared experiences. The 3rd Londons relieved them, and an enemy aeroplane bombed them, but without effect, on their way back to camp in Carnoy Valley; and four officers, Lieutenant Gunstone and 2nd Lieutenants Heard, Crawford, and Black, arrived on that uneventful day. Naturally, in a district alive with troops, German aeroplanes did all the harm they could in our back-areas, and nothing will persuade harried infantry on the ground that our aircraft are properly protecting them. A draft of fifty men came in on the 1st October, a Sunday, and on the 2nd they withdrew altogether with the Division out of the battle for intensive training. Their own camp was Méricourt-en-Vimeux west of Amiens, but—more important than all else—the leave-season opened.
It was an ordinary month of the ordinary work demanded by the war conditions of the age. Steady drill was the background of it, and specialist classes for Lewis-gunners, bombers, intelligence, and gas filled the hours, varied by night and day outpost and wire work as well as map-reading for officers. Company commanders, whose men were taken from lawfully ordained parade, swore and complained, and not without justification; for the suave, un-get-at-able shirker has a much better chance of evading the burdens of mere battalion routine when every one is a “specialist,” than when, as a marching unit, he is under the direct eye of his own unimaginative N.C.O.’s. (“There was times, if you will believe me, when we was sorry for platoon sergeants. What with this and that and the other special trick, every mother’s son of us Micks had the excuses of his life to his hands all the time.”) Hence the disgraceful story of the sergeant who demanded whether “those somethinged spe-shy-lists” could “lend him as much as three wet-nurses, just to make a show with the platoon.”
Rewards began to come in. Captain Harvey, their M.O., was awarded the Military Cross for a little more than the usual bravery that a doctor has to exhibit in the ordinary course of his duty, and 2nd Lieutenant Greer received the same honour for, incidentally, dealing with enemy machine-guns in the advance of the 15th. General Feilding, on the 6th, also distributed ribbons of medals won, and said what he thought of the work of the Guards Division during the previous month. The formal acknowledgment of the commander of the Fourth Army (General Rawlinson) arrived on October 17. He said that the “gallantry and perseverance of the Guards Division in the battles of the 15th and 25th were paramount factors in the success of the operations of the Fourth Army on those days.” Of the 15th September, specially, he observed, “The vigorous attacks of the Guards in circumstances of great difficulty, with both flanks exposed to the enfilade fire of the enemy, reflect the highest credit on all concerned, and I desire to tender to every officer, N.C.O., and man, my congratulations and best thanks for their exemplary valour on that occasion.” They knew that they had not done so badly, though every one above the rank of drummer could say now how it could have been done much better; but the official word was grateful to those who had lived, and cheering for those about to die.
On the 23rd October they route-marched to a fair field south of Aumont with their cookers and their water-carts (all the Division more or less was being trained in that neighbourhood), met their 1st Battalion, dined well together, and embarked on a football match which the 1st won by two goals to nothing. “The men thoroughly enjoyed meeting each other, and spent a very happy day.” It might be a Sunday-school that the Diary describes, instead of two war-used battalions drawing breath between engagements.
H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught was to inspect the Division on the 1st of November, which meant rehearsals for the ceremonial—a ritual of value for retaining a hold on “specialists,” and taken advantage of by company officers and N.C.O.’s who held that it did men no harm to disport themselves occasionally in slow time with a properly pointed foot. The rain and break-up of autumn made training very difficult, but, the Diary notes, though many denied it at the time, “We endeavoured to make every man a bomber rather than to concentrate on the production of a number of specialists.” The inspection rewarded the trouble taken—there was nothing their sternest critics could lay a finger on—and at the end of it, those officers and men who had won decorations in the war lined up before the Duke who addressed them. Méricourt days ended with a Battalion dinner in the 1st Battalion billets at Hornoy to General Butler, their old commandant whose brigade was in rest near by. Somehow the memory of such dinners remains with the survivors long after more serious affairs, as it seemed then, have faded. (“It’s a curious thing that, on those occasions, one was drunk before one sat down—out of sheer good-fellowship, I suppose, and the knowledge that we were all for it, and had all come through it so far. The amount of liquor actually consumed has nothing to do with the results. I’ve put away four times as much since Armistice and only got the deuce of a head.”)
On the 10th and 11th of November the Division returned to school. They were to take over a stretch of the Fourteenth Corps’ front near Gueudecourt and Lesbœufs. For tactical purposes the Division was now divided into two “groups” of six battalions each. The right group was made up of the 1st Guards Brigade as a whole, with the 1st Coldstream and the 2nd Irish Guards additional. The left was the 3rd Guards Brigade plus the 3rd Grenadiers and the 1st Scots Guards, so that the 2nd Brigade was absorbed for the while. The Battalion left Méricourt-en-Vimeux “with considerable regret” for it was good billets and was packed into a large fleet of French motor-buses, many of which were driven by Senegalese—“an example of the Frenchman’s ability in saving up their men. A particularly engaging ape was the conductor of the officers’ bus. He was fed by the adjutant on chicken legs which he greatly appreciated and entirely devoured. He appeared to speak no word of any human language.” Medals should have been awarded for this affair; to be driven forty miles by Senegalese chauffeurs is an experience deadly almost as warfare. Méaulte, their destination, was then an “entirely unattractive town.” Gangs of Hun prisoners shovelled mud from roads a foot deep in grey reeking slime. Every road was blocked with limbers and lorries that offered no way to the disgusted infantry wedged up impatiently behind them. Their billets were crowded and bad, and they regretted the flesh-pots of Méricourt while they cleaned them or froze in tents beside the Carnoy-Fricourt road where they kept warm by trying to make roads out of frosty mud.
Mud, filth, cold, exposure, and the murderous hard work necessary to mere existence, were their daily and nightly fare from now on. It must be duly set down for that reason, and that the generations to come may judge for themselves what the war of a people unprepared, against a race that had made provision for war, cost in the mere stage-setting and scene-shifting of actual warfare.