The Welsh Guards relieved in the late evening, and by eleven o’clock the whole Battalion was safe in Dulwich Camp with an amazingly small casualty list. The only officer killed had been Captain Hanbury. Lieutenants Close and Bagot were wounded and also Alexander and Father Browne, these last two so slightly that they still remained on duty. Of other ranks they had but twenty dead, eighty-nine wounded, and two missing. The Wurtembergers’ raid had cost them more. And that, too, was the luck of war.
None of them knew particularly how the fight outside their limited vision had gone. The Scots Guards were comfortably on their right, keeping step for step; and the French on the left, barring their incontinent gun, had moved equally level. But they were all abominably stiff from negotiating the slippery-sided shell-holes and the mud, and it took them two days’ hard work to clean up.
On the 13th October they relieved the 1st Scots Guards for fatigue-parties to the front, and lay in a camp of sand-bag and corrugated iron hovels where the men had to manufacture shelter for themselves, while a long-range German gun prevented that work from being too dull. But again there was no damage. They were relieved on the 16th October from these duties by a battalion of the Cheshires and marched to Elverdinghe, leaving the Pioneers behind for a little to put up crosses over the graves of the newly dead. That closed the chapter and they lapsed back to “the usual routine,” of drill, inspections, and sports. They were at Houlle Camp near Watten on the 21st when the 2nd Guards Brigade was inspected by H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught, and the Battalion, in walking-out order, lined the roads and cheered. Sir Douglas Haig, too, inspected them on the 25th October with the whole of their Division, dealt them all those compliments on past work which were their undeniable right, and congratulated them on their turn-out. The Battalion then was specially well set up and hard-bitten, running to largish men even in No. 2 Company. Their new drafts had all been worked up and worked down; the new C.O.’s hand and systems were firmly established; company cooks and their satellites had been re-formed, and—which puts a bloom on men as quickly as food—they were “happy” under a justice which allowed an immense amount of honest, intimate, domestic fun.
Of the tales which ran about at that period there is one perhaps worth recording. During the fatigues on the Boesinghe front it fell to them to relieve some battalion or other which, after much manœuvring in the mud, at last drew clear of its trenches to let in the wet and impatient Irish. The latter’s C.O., wearied to the bone, was sitting in the drizzling dark beside the communication-trench, his head on his hand and on his wrist his campaign watch with its luminous dial. Suddenly, as the relieved shadows dragged themselves by, he felt his wrist gently taken, slightly turned, and after an instant’s inspection, loosed again. Naturally, he demanded by all the Gods of the Army what the unseen caitiff meant by his outrageous deed. To him, from the dark, in irresistible Cockney, “Beg pardon, Sir, but I thought it was a glow-worm,” and the poor devil who had been cut off from all knowledge of earthly time for the past three days shuffled on, leaving behind him a lieut.-colonel of the Brigade of Guards defeated and shaken with mirth.
Their rest lasted till the 9th November, during which time 2nd Lieutenants Cary-Elwes and A. F. Synge joined, and Captain Sassoon came up from the base and took over No. 3 Company. Lieut.-Colonel Pawlett of the Canadian Army was attached to the Battalion from the 6th of the month, and Captain the Hon. H. A. V. Harmsworth rejoined from the staff where, like a brother-officer in the entrenching battalion, his heart was not. On the 9th, too, Lieutenant Lysaght and Sergeant R. Macfarlane were decorated with the Croix de Guerre by General Antoine commanding the First French Army.
On the 10th of November they were ordered out into the St. Pol area which, as a jumping-off place, offered as many possibilities as Charing Cross station on a Bank holiday. One knows from the record of the 1st Battalion that the whole Division now on the move were prepared for and given to believe anything—even that they might be despatched to Italy, to retrieve October’s disaster of Caporetto. But it is known now that the long series of operations round the Salient—Messines, the two months’ agony of the Third Battle of Ypres, and the rest—had drawn the enemy forces and held them more and more to the northward of our front; and that Sir Julian Byng had been entrusted to drive at the Hindenburg Line on the Somme with the Sixth, Fourth, Third, and Seventh Army Corps, from Bullecourt southward to a little south of Gonnelieu.
It was to be a surprise without artillery preparation, but very many tanks were to do the guns’ work in rooting out trenches, barbed wire, and machine-gun nests.
The main attack was on a front of six miles, and, as has been noted elsewhere, the official idea was not to make the capture of Cambrai, behind the Hindenburg Line, a main feature of the affair, but to get as far into the enemy’s ground as could be, and above all, to secure a clean flank for ourselves to the north-east of Bourlon Wood near Cambrai where the lie of the Somme Downs gave vital observation and command. The Guards Division, as usual, would wait upon the results. If the thing was a success they would advance on Cambrai. If not, they would assist as requisite.
It was late in the year, and the weather was no treat as the 2nd Battalion Irish Guards marched out in the wet from Houlle on the 10th November to Ecques, and, in billets there, made its first acquaintance with a battalion of Portuguese troops. Two days more brought them to Ostreville’s bad billets and a draft of a hundred new hands with Lieutenant M. R. Hely-Hutchinson and 2nd Lieutenant F. C. Lynch-Blosse. Not a man had fallen out on the road, but they were glad of a four days’ halt and clean-up, though that included instruction in outpost companies and positions.
On the 17th they continued their march south to Ambrines over the large, untouched lands of the high water-shed between the Scarpe and the little streams that feed the Authies River. The next day carried them no longer south, but east towards the noise of the unquiet Somme guns, and had they any doubts as to their future, it was settled by one significant gas-helmet drill. (“But we knew, or at least, I did, having done my trick here before, that we were for it. Ye could begin to smell the dam’ Somme as soon as ye was across that Arras railway.”)