On the evening of the 21st October they were relieved by the 1st Coldstream, and were grateful to go into Brigade Reserve in the trenches beside the Vermelles railway line, where they were out of direct contact with the enemy and the nerve-stretching racket of their own artillery shelling a short hundred yards ahead of them. (“The heavies are like having a good friend in a fight behind your back, but there’s times when he’ll punch ye in the kidneys trying to reach the other fella.”) They were put to cleaning up old communication-trenches, and general scavenging, which, though often in the highest degree disgusting, has a soothing effect on the mind, precisely as tidying out a room soothes a tired woman. For the first time in a month the strain on the young Battalion had relaxed, and since it was their first month at the front, they had felt the strain more than their elders. They had a general impression that the German line had been very nearly broken at Loos; that our pressure upon the enemy was increasingly severe; that their own artillery were much better and stronger than his, and that, taking one thing with another, the end might come at any moment. Since there were but a limited number of Huns in the world, it was demonstrable that by continually killing them the enemy would presently cease to exist. This, be it remembered, was the note in the Press and the public mind towards the close of 1915—the War then redly blossoming into its second year.
As to their personal future, it seemed to be a toss-up whether they would be kept to worry and tease Huns in trenches, or moved off somewhere else to “do something” on a large scale; for at the back of the general optimism there lurked a feeling that, somehow or other, nothing very great had been actually effected. (Years later the veterans of twenty-five, six, and seven admitted: “We were a bit young in those days, and, besides, one had to buck up one’s people at home. But we weren’t quite such fools as we made ourselves out to be.”)
They were taken away from that sector altogether on the 23rd October, marched to Noyelles, thence to Béthune on the 25th, where they entrained for Lillers and billeted at Bourecq. This showed that they had done with the chalk that does not hide corpses, and that the amazing mud round Armentières and Laventie would be their portion. At that date the Battalion stood as follows, and the list is instructive as showing how very little the army of that epoch had begun to specialise. It was commanded by Lieut.-Colonel Hon. L. Butler; Adjutant Captain (temporary) J. S. N. FitzGerald; Transport Officer Lieutenant C. Moore; Bomb Officer 2nd Lieutenant R. E. Coxon; Quartermaster 2nd Lieutenant J. Brennan. Companies: No. 1, Captain Witts, Lieutenant Nugent, 2nd Lieutenant Pym; No. 2, Captain (temporary) Parsons, 2nd Lieutenants Hannay and James; No. 3, Captain (temporary) R. Rankin, Lieutenant Montgomery, 2nd Lieutenant Watson; No. 4, Captain (temporary) Hubbard, Lieutenant Kinahan, 2nd Lieutenant Brew.
Drafts of eighty-five men in all had come in since they went into Brigade Reserve, and Captain Alexander, who had been sick with influenza and fever for the past fortnight, during which time the 1st Battalion had demanded him urgently, went over to it as Temporary C.O. and Temporary Major.
So they settled down at Bourecq, which in peace time has few merits, and devoted themselves to eating and to talking about food between meals. In the trenches they had not eaten with discrimination. Out of them, they all demanded variety and abundance, sweets, solids, and savouries devoured at any hour, and sleep unlimited to settle it all.
Lord Cavan came on the last day of the month and addressed them as their Divisional Commander; which meant a parade in wet weather. He congratulated them on their fine work of the preceding fortnight (the trench-affairs round Hohenzollern) and on “the fine fighting spirit which had enabled them to persevere and accomplish their task in spite of an initial rebuff.” (“He knew as well as we did that if we hadn’t hoofed the Hun out of the trench the Hun would have hoofed us,” was one comment.) He assured the Battalion that the lives unfortunately lost in the undertaking had not been lost in vain, and that it was only by continually harassing him that we would eventually defeat the German. He said that the Battalion had begun well, and he only wished for it that it might do as well as the 1st, “than which no finer example of a Guards Battalion existed.” “And that,” said one of those who were young when the speech was made, and lived to be very old and wise, “was at a time when we had literally no troop railways, and relatively no artillery. And they told us we were going to break through every time we had cleared fifty Jerries out of a front-line trench!”
Two Lewis-guns, which were then new things, had been supplied to the Battalion, and teams were made up and instructed in the working by 2nd Lieutenant Hannay, while the Bomb Officer, 2nd Lieutenant Coxon, had his bombing-teams out daily, and it is recorded that on one afternoon the bombers of Nos. 1 and 2 Companies, thirty-two in all, threw fifty live bombs at practice. Then it rained drearily and incessantly for days and nights on end, and there was nothing to do but to eat and attend lectures. A fresh draft of fifty men turned up. Second Lieutenant Keenan, who had been sick, and 2nd Lieutenant Synge, who had been wounded in the bombing attack, rejoined a few days before they marched with the 2nd Guards Brigade to new billets at La Gorgue in mud. Here they had huge choice of mixed discomforts, for the whole sad landscape was sodden with autumn rain. They were to take over from the 60th Brigade at Laventie a peaceful semi-flooded sector, with every promise, for which they were not in the least grateful, of staying in that part of the world the winter long.
The seasonal pause had begun when men merely died without achieving visible result, even in the Press. The C.O.’s and Adjutants of the Brigade, accompanied by the Brigadier-General, made wet and melancholy reconnaissances to their destined stamping ground—an occasion when every one is forgiven for being in the worst of tempers. The one unpardonable offence was false and bustling optimism. The Battalion’s line ran from Winchester road on the left to South Moated Grange on the right, all “in very bad order owing to the recent rain.”
Next day, the 12th November, the medical officer and the four company commanders were added to the reconnaissance parties. (“It was like going into a cold bath, one toe at a time. And I don’t see how looking at it for a week in advance could have made it any better.”) Wet days followed the wet nights with Hunnish precision. A wretched Lieutenant (Montgomery) was sent out like Noah’s dove to “arrange the route for leading his company in,” the communication-trenches being flooded; and on the 14th November, after Divine Service, the men were paraded in billets and “rubbed their feet with anti-frostbite grease preparatory to going into the trenches.” It seems a small matter, but the Battalion had been in the way of hearing a good deal about the horrors of the previous winter in the Ypres Salient, when men were forbidden to stand for more than twelve hours at a time belly-deep in water without relief—“if possible.” (“That foot-greasing fatigue, with what the old hands told us was in store, put the wind up us worse than Loos. We was persuaded we would be drowned and frost-bit by whole platoons.”)
They paraded that afternoon and marched down to their dreary baptism. Boots—“gum, thigh, long”—had been supplied limitedly to the companies, and they changed into them in a ruined cottage behind the lines, leaving their marching boots to be picked up on return. “Thus some men were able to wade without getting wet,” says the Diary. It was not so with others. For example, the whole of No. 3 Company was taken along one thoroughly flooded communication-trench half-way up their thighs. A platoon of No. 2 was similarly treated, only their guide lost his way, and as all the support-trenches were flooded, 2 and 3 had to be packed in the fire-trenches. Nos. 4 and 1 got off without a complete soaking, and it is pathetic to see how the Battalion, to whom immoderate and omnipresent dampness was still a new thing, record their adventures in detail. But it was not so much water as the immensely sticky mud that oppressed them, with the consequent impossibility of being able to lie down even for a moment. Then it froze of nights. All which are miseries real as wounds or sickness.