Blood and Thunder (28 page)

It was illustrative of problems occurring all over the battlefield. It was a nightmare. Not only was William's battalion exhausted by the halts they were compelled to make every few minutes, but constant shell fire decimated their ranks. By 8.a.m. they still hadn't made it up the communication trench and their commanding officer began to panic that the 12th Royal Scots to their left would have gone out over the top on their own without support. The attack on William's flank had collapsed so that in their way were all of the surviving men who had been part of that failed advance. Their approach was completely disrupted and eventually they were forced to turn off into another trench at about 9.30 where they finally managed to make some headway, but only after a battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders stopped to let them pass.

Already thoroughly spent, as soon as they set foot into no-man's-land William and his company came under a deluge of bullets from the high ground to the left that their compatriots had failed to secure. The Germans on the rise were free to rake the ranks of the Royal Scots with bullets so that ‘every few yards of progress were purchased by a mounting list of dead and wounded'.

At about 11.a.m. the two battalions of Royal Scots formed a single line with what was left of their ranks and finally reached Pekin Trench where they ran into the back of the Highlanders who had made the initial advance. The men had marched for five hours just to begin advancing and now they were faced with lines of Germans who had gathered themselves after the first push and were sending up reserves for a counter-attack. William's battalion tried to creep forward in small groups, each of them providing covering fire for the other. With no artillery support; for they had no information as to what was occurring in front of them, the superior German numbers held them at bay as the rain began cascading down. The slightest movement brought on more enemy fire and in the end, cold, wet and famished, realising that no support was forthcoming, they withdrew to Pekin Trench with their rifles so clogged with mud that they would no longer fire.

The 11th Royal Scots were in such disarray that they could not even fathom what had become of their commanding officer. William Winterton was amongst those that simply vanished into the mud. A major evacuated to a London hospital confirmed that he was wounded, but that was as much as was known. It was not until 1916 that two men who had ended up injured in the Boulogne area were able to shed just a little light on what had happened to the teenager. One recalled that he had been one of those who picked up an early wound when they first attempted to go over the top and that William had turned to the corporal next to him and said, ‘Am I not going to have a shot at these beggars?' The corporal said that he had been the first officer to fall when they went charging towards the German lines, which suggested that William had been able to get on his feet and at least attempt to advance. The two could not agree though, on whether he had been struck down by machine-gun fire or a shell.

William had penned a letter home in August as soon as he found out that he was leaving for the front. ‘Dear People,' he began, ‘I am not going to make a will as I am not of age.' If he was to ‘kick the bucket' then he left them to ensure that anyone who wanted one should have a little memento of him. At 19 he had little to give save for all of the photographs of his ‘chums', which he wanted his sister to have. His younger brother Frank was to have the rest. His body lost, all that remained of William Winterton were his sports' trophies, his school photographs and his watch chain.

As darkness fell on 25 September the British were exhausted, freezing and soaking wet. The night brought counter-attacks from the no-longer ruffled Germans, who had brought up their reserves and trained their machine guns on the British troops before they could take advantage of any advance. The initial bombardment had failed, leaving strong defences unscathed. Men were ill informed and unaware as to what they were supposed to be doing and how they should do it and things were not about to get any better.

Problems with communications, the impotence of the artillery and the shocking planning of the day before all repeated themselves at horrific cost. At nightfall on 26 September it had become clear that Haig's ambitious plans were in ruins. They had not even taken the German second-line positions and in certain areas the hold that they had achieved was getting weaker by the second. All the Germans had to do was remain organised and sit and watch the farcical tragedy being played out in front of them.

The Guards contingent, including Yvo Charteris and Robin Blacker, had been marching towards the battlefield for days. On 23 September they marched off through a moonlit night, tired-looking locals lining the road outside their cottages, silently watching them pass.The following day Robin was summoned, as his battalion's bombing officer to a conference where they were given an outline of the offensive that was to come. In the background the preliminary bombardment, ‘a continuous roar', rumbled on.

On Friday 25 September, as the first assault began, the Guards wound up a rain-soaked march and collapsed to try to rest. By lunchtime though, they had been given an hour's notice and warned that there might be no food for thirty-six hours. If the attack was successful, and there was every indication that so far it was, then they would be going through the gap punched in the German lines. At 2 p.m. they moved off again and marched for seven and a half hours in the pouring rain. On their way they passed wounded men being ferried back from the front in motor-ambulances. Their spirits were buoyed though as they stopped to let several cavalry contingents overtake them; surely that pointed to a real advance?

There were continual checks on the road, and Yvo was exhausted by the time that they reached a village named Houchain. It was ‘seething' with troops, and after much bad language and hollering he managed to find some sheds full of straw for his men to use as shelter from the downpour. Someone had procured a cottage for the officers and Yvo went to sleep on the brick floor on an air cushion, with his wet overcoat as a blanket, to the tune of a terrific bombardment going on up at the front.

There was little hope of any significant rest. At 6 a.m. on 26 September they began marching again. That morning the entire Guards Division was put under Haig's control when his secondary attacks failed. Orders were issued for them to march to Vermelles. Then they were halted and told to sit in a swampy field in the rain, not knowing if they should just seize the initiative and press on owing to the great congestion of troops ahead. Yvo and Robin were issued with circulars to read to their men: ‘On the eve of the biggest battle in the world's history the General officer commanding the Guards Division wishes his troops God speed'.

By now the severity of the situation had become apparent and the plan was changed. At 2.30 p.m. they were shifted on again. Robin was bound for the old German trench lines whilst Yvo and his battalion would be part of the brigade left in support. Yvo was beside himself. ‘Oh! What a march!' They walked for nine more hours, or rather walked then stopped, walked then stopped in the rain, held up by long lines of cavalry. On they went, on and on all the time thinking that there couldn't be much further to go. Then it became apparent that nobody knew where they were going. ‘It was terrible to see a gaunt railway bridge looming in the distance that we had left hours ago,' Yvo complained. ‘Altogether a brilliant piece of Staff work.'

His battalion was winding ever closer to the lines. The roads grew more and more congested as they moved towards Vermelles and great lorries lumbered continuously by. All the ‘sweat of war', the wounded men, the prisoners, the supplies, greeted them on their way. As darkness fell the guns grew louder and louder and the flashes brighter. Yvo grew more and more excited. Every building that they passed seemed to be ‘battered to bits'. Streets were laid out with the wounded. They sat with their bayonets fixed; exchanging battle stories and always there was ‘the jolting of limbers on the road as the transport lorries bumped by'.

Robin and his men quit marching, exhausted, at 9.p.m. and he shed his pack, wrapped himself up in his trench coat, drank some tepid tea then sprawled out on his waterproof sheet and tried to sleep. At last, Yvo and his battalion turned into Vermelles, a ‘wreck of a town'. Yvo promptly got separated from the rest of his brigade. He had been heading the rear party, walking at the back and trying to rally stragglers who had fallen out, ‘an awful task'. He ended up wandering about the town with a different Guards brigade until he found his fellow officers and spent the night lying in the bottom of a soaking wet ditch drinking a mixture of rum and brandy to keep warm. All night long, the artillery hidden in amongst the ruins pounded away. Robin was despondent. ‘All this served to prove that there had been no very great advance, and things were more or less as they had been.'

His enthusiasm to get to war no longer came hand in hand with the ‘smash the Kaiser' philosophy. ‘On the contrary, he talked of it as if it would be never-ending.' He had assumed a fatalistic attitude towards the war before he had even left England. In mid July the Blacker brothers were at the RAC Club when Pip picked up a newspaper and saw that his best friend from Eton had been killed three days before. He took the paper over to Robin and silently put it in front of him. His younger brother just handed it back. ‘Don't worry about this. We are
all
going to get killed. You and I and everybody else.'

By the time he had arrived in France, Robin's nonchalance had devolved into all out bitterness; ostensibly since the decimation of his brother officers in the 8th Rifle Brigade at Hooge. He was in France, so he declared, ‘to partake in that universal lapse into barbarism and inhumanity (not to say imbecility and madness)' that was the Great War.

‘There is one subject on which I try not to let my mind dwell as it irritates and disturbs me,' he fumed. ‘That I, a human being 18 years old, the product of untold ages of evolution in humanity, should be in this place with the sole intent of putting to death other human beings … and with what object?' Clearly, to Robin at least, removing ‘militarism and tyranny' from the face of the earth was never going to be achieved in this manner. ‘Never!' He had decided that the whole sorry mess was ‘pitifully humorous in its imbecility, in its hopelessness'. If he ever lived to see another war, well, he stated his intentions forcefully: ‘I will have sufficient moral courage to proclaim my sentiments and to wash my hands of a pack of idiots of which I regret to say I am at present one – unhappily.'

After the disaster of 26 September plans for a mass push had faded, but the idea of simply abandoning the battlefield and leaving the French to it on the right was not an option and so planning for smaller advances continued. From Hill 70 on the southern end of the battlefield the enemy commanded Loos and in its environs. Opposite them there was a chalk pit and a nearby mineshaft which gave the enemy a superior view of the area. The importance of these positions was apparent and at dawn on 27 September the plan for the Guards, the only reinforcements available to Haig, was that they would take both along with Hill 70 itself. One OE was serving with the 4th Grenadier Guards and remarked that neither he, nor indeed any of the other subalterns, received the slightest bit of detailed information as to what they were supposed to be doing. Their orders were still being amended even after they had set out to attack the Germans.

Robin's battalion was to support an attack being made towards the chalk pit, the narrow strip of woodland next to it that had been thoughtfully dubbed ‘Chalk Pit Wood' and a distinctive chimney by the mineshaft. Robin was ordered out of bed at 2.30 a.m. and pushed on in the dark over barbed wire and empty British trenches on the way to occupy the old German line abandoned in the preceeding days. Before the fighting had begun, there had been a large gap between the trenches. In the initial attack British troops had had to advance across this open stretch of ground under heavy fire and Robin found himself tripping over dead bodies. ‘The scene is not pleasant,' he remarked. ‘The battlefield has not been touched … and there are many, many dead.' He found himself sitting in a scruffy German dugout surrounded by German correspondence and it sent shivers up his spine. He couldn't wait to leave Loos behind. It was ‘a blighted and poisonous land' and it made him sick to look at it.

The 2nd Irish Guards took Chalk Pit Wood as planned with the aid of a smoke screen thrown up by more Guards to the left; but when they emerged out of the other side of this shield they were easy targets for the German machine guns across the road in a little bit of woodland known as Bois Hugo. They were eventually forced back with heavy casualties. Robin's battalion had been sitting in wait and were now sent up to help and together with the Irish Guards they took back the wood
1
. At 6.30 p.m. the Coldstream were ordered to advance on the Chalk Pit itself and so two companies, including Robin's, set forth and did so without too much difficulty. Darkness found them digging in and consolidating their position.

On the evening of 27 September, Lord Cavan did his rounds, assessing the situation and decided against a further move on Hill 70. What he did want, though, was a fierce effort to consolidate their positions. The Guards were ordered by Haig to repeat the attack on the chalk pit, however, and at 3.45 p.m. on 28 September they set off from the southern edge of Chalk Pit Wood to try to take the mineshaft. At the time Brigadier-General John Ponsonby, the Etonian commanding Robin's brigade, was still trying to get the attack postponed, at the very least till it was dark, but zero hour came and he still had no word in reply, so he was forced to commence the advance.

The attack had been entrusted to the 1st Coldstream Guards and again it was Robin's company that was in the thick of it. They were to push south and all available machine guns were to be utilised to cover their advance, concentrating their fire on Bois Hugo across the road which was packed with German firepower. As soon as they set out they were showered with shells and bullets from the machine guns in Bois Hugo. Just ten men, two of them officers, managed to reach the objective. The rest were swept away. A withdrawal was ordered. When a roll call was taken at the end of the day, the Coldstream Battalion found thirteen of its twenty-three officers and over 200 men either dead, wounded or missing on the battlefield. The whole of that night was spent digging in and scouring the nearby ground for wounded men.