On the 18th November they were shifted from their chill tents at “Mansell Camp” to Camp A, only four miles off, at Trônes Wood. The roads which were not roads and the traffic that was trying to treat them as such, made this a matter of three and a half hours’ continuous marching, mainly in single file. They found themselves at last in dark and pouring rain, hunting across a morass for holes in the ground inadequately covered with pieces of tarpaulin and five hundred yards away from any firm foothold. This was the “camp.” The cookers frankly dared not leave the road and the men had to flounder across the bog to get their teas. For that reason, the next day being fine and all hands, “thoroughly wet and uncomfortable,” they “sang loudly as they slopped about in the mud.”
Their wholly unspeakable front line was five miles distant from this local paradise. You followed a duck-board track of sorts through Trônes Wood, between ghastly Delville and the black ruins of Ginchy, and across the Ginchy ridge where the chances of trouble thickened, through a communication-trench, and thereafter into a duck-boarded landscape where, if you were not very careful, the engulfing mud would add you to its increasing and matured collection of “officers and other ranks.” These accidents overcome, you would discover that the front line was mud with holes in it. If the holes were roundish they were called posts; if oblong they were trenches with names, such as Gusty Trench and Spectrum Trench. They connected with nothing except more mud. Wiring peered up in places, but whether it was your own or the enemy’s was a matter of chance and luck. The only certainty was that, beyond a point which no one could locate, because all points were wiped out by a carpet-like pattern of closely set holes, you would be shelled continuously from over the bleak horizon. Nor could you escape, because you could never move faster than a man in a nightmare. Nor dared you take cover, because the mud-holes that offered it swallowed you up.
Here, for instance, is what befell when No. 1 Company went up to relieve a grenadier company on the night of the 19th November. They started at 3 P. M. in continuous mud under steady shelling. Only three out of their four platoon guides turned up. The other had collapsed. Ten men were hit on the way up; a number of others fell out from sheer exhaustion or got stuck in the mud. The first man who set foot in the front-line trench blocked the rest for a quarter of an hour, while four of his comrades were hauling him out. This was five hours after they had begun. The two Lewis-guns and some stragglers, if men hip-deep in mud and water can straggle, were still unaccounted for. Lance-Sergeant Nolan brought them all in by hand at three in the morning under shell-fire. Then they were heavily shelled (there was hardly any rifle-fire), and three men were wounded. Luckily shells do not burst well in soft dirt. It was Private Curran’s business to shift two of them who were stretcher-cases to Battalion Headquarters one mile and a half distant. This took two relays of eight men each, always under shell-fire, and Curran’s round trip was completed in nine hours. When they were relieved by the soft-spoken Australians, on the evening of the 21st, they spent the whole of the night, from 8 P. M. to 6 A. M., getting back to camp, where it is not surprising that they arrived “utterly exhausted.” Owing to an orderly losing his way, one isolated trench or hole held by Sergeant Murphy, Lance-Sergeant Nolan and seven men, was not relieved, and they stayed on for another twenty-four hours. No. 2 Company, a few hundred yards away, were fairly dead to the world by the time they had worked their way to their line, which possessed, nominally, a trench and some posts. The trench was a gutter; their posts had no protection at all from shells, and when they arrived they found that no sand-bags had been sent up, so they had nothing to work with. They also spent their time pulling men out of the mire. Supervision of any sort was impossible. It took the officer three hours to get from the left to the right of his short line. The posts could not be reached by daylight at all, and during bombardments of the trench “it often seemed as though what little there was must disappear, and (the Battalion, as we know, was mostly new hands) the coolness of the young N.C.O.’s was invaluable in keeping up the spirits of the men.” There was one time when a sergeant (Lucas) was buried by a shell, and a brother sergeant (Glennon) “though he knew that it meant almost certain death” went to his aid, and was instantly killed, for the enemy, naturally, had the range of their own old trenches to the inch. To be heroic at a walk is trying enough, as they know who have plowtered behind the Dead March of a dragging barrage, but to struggle, clogged from the waist down, into the white-hot circle of accurately placed destruction, sure that if you are even knocked over by a blast you will be slowly choked by mud, is something more than heroism. Equally, to lie out disabled on an horror of shifting mud is beyond the sting of Death. One of our corporals on patrol heard groaning somewhere outside the line. It proved to be a grenadier, who had lain there twenty-four hours “suffering from frost-bite and unable to move.” They saved him. Their stretcher-bearers were worn out, and what sand-bags at last arrived were inadequate for any serious defence. “We were fighting purely against mud and shells, as the German infantry gave us no trouble.” When No. 2 was relieved at the same time as No. 1 Company, they dribbled into camp by small parties from two till ten in the morning, and three of the men never turned up at all. The Somme mud told no tales till years later when the exhumation parties worked over it. The Australians, of whom it is reported that the mud dragged every national expletive out of them by the boots, relieved the Division as a whole on the 22nd November, and, pending the new arrangements for taking over more of the French line, the Guards were transferred first to a camp between Carnoy and Montauban, which for those parts was fairly comfortable. At all events, the huts though stoveless were water-tight, and could be “frowsted up” to something like warmth. For ten days they worked, two days out of three, on the Carnoy-Montauban road in company with a labour battalion surnamed “The Broody Hens,” owing to their habit of scuttling at the very last moment from under the wheels of the multitudinous lorries. “On off days we made paths through the mud for ourselves.” But these were dry, and by comparison clean.
The trench-line taken over by the Guards Division ran, roughly, from Morval to Sailly-Saillisel (locally “Silly-Sally”) when their groups were split into two (right and left) sections. The right, to which the Battalion was attached, was made up of themselves, their sister battalion, and the 2nd Grenadiers. A spell of hard winter weather had frozen the actual trenches into fairly good condition for the minute, but there were no communications, nor, as they observed, much attempt at fire-steps. The French trusted more to automatic rifles—the battalions the Irish relieved had thirty-two each—and machine-guns than to infantry, and used their linesmen mainly as bombers or bayoneteers. Accommodation was bad. When not on tour, two companies were billeted in old dug-outs that contained the usual proportion of stale offences, on the west side of Combles; one in cellars and dug-outs in the town itself; and one in dug-outs in Haie Wood three thousand yards behind the front. Their front line ran along the east edge of the obliterated village, their support a hundred yards or so behind it through the mounds of brick and earth of the place itself, while the reserve company lay up in mildewy dug-outs in a chalk quarry three quarters of a mile back. (One peculiarity of the Somme was its most modestly inconspicuous cave-dwellings.) For the rest, “The whole area was utterly desolate. West of the village, rolling ground, the valleys running east and west a waste of mud with shell-holes touching one another. Here and there the charred stumps of trees. Equipment, French and German, dotted the ground, and rifles, their muzzles planted in the mud, showed where, in some attack, wounded men had lain. The village was just mounds of earth or mud and mere shell-holes.” Later on even the mounds were not suffered to remain, and the bricks were converted into dull red dust that in summer blew across the dead land.
The Battalion was not in position till the 11th December, when it relieved the 2nd Grenadiers after three or four days’ rain which wiped out what communication-trenches had been attempted, and pulped the front line. As to the back-breaking nature of the work—“Though the first company (on relief) passed Haie Wood about 4 P. M. it was 11.30 before they had floundered the intervening 3000 yards.” One of the grenadiers whom they relieved had been stuck in the mud for forty-three hours. Unless the men in the trenches, already worn out with mud-wrestling to get there, kept moving like hens on hot plates, they sank and stuck. (“It is funny, maybe, to talk about now, that mud-larking of ours; but to sink, sink, sink in the dark and you not sure whether they saw ye or could hear you, puts the wind up a man worse than anything under Heaven. Fear? Fear is not the word. ’Twas the Somme that broke our hearts. Back, knees, loins, acrost your chest—you was dragged to pieces dragging your own carcase out of the mud. ’Twas like red-hot wires afterwards—and all to begin it again.”)
A mystery turned up on the night of the 12th December in the shape of a wild-looking, apparently dumb, Hun prisoner, brought before Captain Young of the Support Company, who could make naught of him, till at last “noticing the likeness between his cap and that affected by Captain Alexander”[1] he hazarded “Russky.” The prisoner at once awoke, and by sign and word revealed himself as from Petrograd. Also he bolted one loaf of bread in two counted minutes. He had been captured at Kovel by the Huns, and brought over to be used by them to dig behind their front line. But how he had escaped across that wilderness that wild-eyed man never told.
They got back on the 13th December to a hideous tent-camp near Trônes Wood. Thence, thoroughly wet, they were next day solemnly entrained at Trônes Wood, carted three miles by train to Plateau and thence, again, marched two more to Bronfay. There, done to the last turn, chilled to the marrow, and caked with mud, they found the huttage allotted them already bursting with a brigade of artillery. Short of turning out themselves, the gunners did their kindest to help the men dry and get their food, while the various authorities concerned fought over their weary heads; some brilliant members of the Staff vowing that the camp intended for them had not even been built; which must have been vast consolation to the heavy-eyed, incurious sick, of whom there were not a few after the last tour, as well as to the wrathful and impeded cooks and sergeants. They got their sick away (the Adjutant, Captain, J. S. N. FitzGerald and Lieutenant D. Gunston among them), and somehow squashed in all together through another day of mere hanging about and crowded, cold discomfort, which does men more harm and develops more microbes than a week’s blood and misery.
On the 16th December they returned afoot through eight miles of snow-storm to “some of the most depressing scenery in Europe.” The “men had had but little rest and few of them had got any of their clothes in the least dry.” But they were left alone for one blessed night at Combles and Haie Wood in their cellars and their dug-outs, and they slept where they lay, the stark, corpse-like sleep of men too worn out even to mutter or turn.
Except that shelling was continuous over all back-areas and approaches, the enemy as a fighting force did not enter into their calculations. Or it might be more accurate to say, both sides were fighting ground and distance. The sole problem of the lines was communication; for every stick, wire, and water-tin had to be backed up by brute bodily labour across the mud. All hands were set to laying trench-boards from the support and reserve-lines and Haie Wood. Without these, it had taken two and a half hours to carry a load eight hundred yards. With them, the same party covered the same distance under an equal burden in twenty minutes. The enemy used their prisoners and captives for these ends. Ours were well tended, out of harm’s range, while His Majesty’s Foot Guards took their places. The front line—they relieved the 2nd Grenadiers there on the 17th—was “mere canals of mud and water with here and there a habitable island.” The defences had been literally watered down to a string of isolated posts reached over the top across stinking swamp, and the mounds and middens called parapets spread out dismally and collapsed as they tinkered at them.
All dirt is demoralising. The enemy’s parapets had melted like ours and left their working-parties exposed to the waist. Since the lines were too close to be shelled by either artillery, the opposing infantry on both sides held their hands till there grew up gradually a certain amount of “live and let live,” out of which, but farther down the line, developed attempts at fraternisation, and, in front of the Guards, much too much repair work and “taking notice” on the part of the enemy. The Hun never comprehends unwritten codes. Instead of thanking Heaven and the weather for a few days’ respite, he began to walk out on the top of his mounds and field-glass our wire. Therefore, on the 19th December, the dawn of a still freezing day, two obviously curious Germans were “selected and shot” by a sniper who had been detailed for that job. “The movement then ceased,” and doubtless our action went to swell the wireless accounts of “unparalleled British brutalities.”