Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1232 page)

On their relief (the night of the 14th-15th April) they moved away in the direction of Hazebrouck to embus for their billets. There was a certain amount of shelling from which the Coldstream suffered, but the Battalion escaped with no further damage than losing a few of the buses. Consequently, one wretched party, sleeping as it walked, had to trail on afoot in the direction of Borré, and those who were of it say that the trip exceeded anything that had gone before. “We were all dead to the world — officers and men. I don’t know who kicked us along. Some one did — and I don’t know who
I
kicked, but it kept me awake. And when we thought we’d got to our billets we were sent on another three miles. That was the final agony!”

What was left of the Brigade was next sorted out and reorganised. The 12th (Pioneer) Battalion of the K.O.Y.L.I., who had borne a good share of the burden that fell upon our right, including being blown out of their trenches at least once, were taken into it; the 4th Grenadiers and 3rd Coldstream, of two weak companies apiece, were, for a few days, made into one attenuated battalion. The 2nd Irish Guards, whose companies were almost forty strong, preserved its identity; and the enemy generously shelled the whole of them and the back-areas behind the Forest on the 16th April till they were forced to move out into the fields and dig in where they could in little bunches. Captain C. Moore, while riding round the companies with Colonel Alexander, was the only casualty here. He was wounded by shrapnel while he was getting off his horse.

On the 17th and 18th April they took the place, in reserve, of the 3rd Australian Brigade and worked at improving a reserve line close up to Hazebrouck. The enemy pressure was still severe, no one knew at what point our line might go next, while at the bases, where there was no digging to soothe and distract, the gloom had not lightened. The Australians preserved a cheerful irreverence and disregard for sorrow that was worth much. The Battalion relieved two companies of them on the 19th in support-line on the east edge of the Forest of Nieppe (Bois d’Aval) which was thick enough to require guides through its woodland rides. Here they lay very quiet, looking out on the old ground of the Vieux-Berquin fight, and lighting no fires for fear of betraying their position. The enemy at Ferme Beaulieu, a collection of buildings at the west end of the Verte Rue–La Couronne road and on the way to Caudescure, did precisely the same. But, on the 21st April, they gassed them most of the night and made the wood nearly uninhabitable. Nothing, be it noted once more, will make men put on their masks without direct pressure, and new hands cannot see that the innocent projectile that lands like a “dud” and lies softly hissing to itself, carries death or slow disablement. Gassing was repeated on the 22nd when they were trying to build up a post in the swampy woodlands where the water lay a foot or two from the surface. They sent out Sergeant Bellew and two men to see if samples could be gathered from Ferme Beaulieu. He returned with one deaf man who, by reason of his deafness, had been sent to the Ersatz. The Sergeant had caught him in a listening-post!

Next night they raided Ferme Beaulieu with the full strength of Nos. 2 and 4 Companies (eighty men) under 2nd Lieutenants Mathew and Close. It seems to have been an impromptu affair, and their sole rehearsal was in the afternoon over a course laid down in the wood. But it was an unqualified success. Barrages, big and machine-gun, timings and precautions all worked without a hitch and the men were keen as terriers. They came, they saw, and they got away with twenty-five unspoiled and identifiable captives, one of whom had been a North-German Lloyd steward and spoke good English. He told them tales of masses of reserves in training and of the determination of the enemy to finish the War that very summer. The other captives were profoundly tired of battle, but extremely polite and well disciplined. Among our own raiders (this came out at the distribution of honours later) was a young private, Neall, of the D.C.L.I. who had happened to lose his Battalion during the Vieux-Berquin fighting and had “attached himself” to the Battalion — an irregular method of transfer which won him no small good-will and, incidentally, the Military Medal for his share in the game.

Life began to return to the normal. The C.O. left, for a day or two, to command the Brigade, as the Brigadier was down with gas-poisoning, and on April the 25th a draft of fifty-nine men came in from home. Captain A. F. L. Gordon arrived as Second in Command, and Captain Law with him, from England on the 28th. On the 27th they were all taken out of D’Aval Wood and billeted in farms round Hondeghem, north of Hazebrouck on the Cassel road, to strengthen that side of the Hazebrouck defence systems. Continuous lines of parapet had to be raised across country, for all the soil here was water-logged. Of evenings, they would return to Hondeghem and amuse the inhabitants with their pipers and the massed bands of the Brigade. Except for the last few days of their stay, they were under an hour’s notice in Corps Reserve, while the final tremendous adjustments of masses and boundaries, losses and recoveries, ere our last surge forward began, troubled and kept awake all the fronts. They were inspected by General Plumer on the 15th for a distribution of medal-ribbons, and, having put in a thoroughly bad rehearsal the day before, achieved on parade a faultless full-dress ceremonial-drill, turn-out and appearance all excellent. (“The truth is, the way we were put through it at Warley, we knew
that
business blind, drunk, or asleep when it come to the day. But them dam’ rehearsals, with the whole world an’ all the young officers panickin’, they’re no refreshment to drilled men.”)

On the 20th May, when the line of the Lys battle had come to a stand-still, and the enemy troops in the salient that they had won and crowded into were enjoying the full effect of our long-range artillery, there was a possibility that their restored armies in the south might put further pressure on the Arras–Amiens front, and a certain shifting of troops was undertaken on our side which brought the 4th Guards Brigade down from Hondeghem by train to Mondicourt on the Doullens–Arras line, where the drums of the 1st Grenadiers played them out of the station, and, after a long, hot march, to Barly between Bavincourt and Avesnes. Their orders were, if the enemy broke through along that front, they would man the G.H.Q. line of defence which ran to the east of Barly Wood, and, for a wonder, was already dug. There is an impenetrability about the Island temperament in the face of the worst which defies criticism. Whether the enemy broke through or not was in the hands of Providence and the valour of their brethren; but the Battalion’s duty was plain. On the 22nd, therefore, they were lectured “on the various forms of salutes” and that afternoon selected, and ere evening had improved, “a suitable site in the camp for a cricket-pitch.” Cricket, be it noted, is not a national game of the Irish; but the Battalion was now largely English. Next day company officers “reconnoitred” the G.H.Q. line. After which they opened a new school of instruction, on the most solid lines, for N.C.O.’s and men. Their numbers being so small, none could later boast that he had escaped attention. At the end of the month their 1st Battalion borrowed four lieutenants (Close, Kent, Burke, and Dagger) for duty, which showed them, if they had not guessed it before, that they were to be used as a feeding battalion, and that the 4th Guards Brigade was, for further active use, extinct.

On the 9th June, after a week’s work on the G.H.Q. line and their camp, Captain Nugent was transferred as Second in Command to the 1st Battalion, and 2nd Lieutenant W. D. Faulkner took over the duties of Acting Adjutant.

On the 11th they transferred to camp in the grounds of Bavincourt Château, a known and well-bombed area, where they hid their tents among the trees, and made little dug-outs and shelters inside them, when they were not working on the back defences. But for the spread of the “Spanish influenza” June was a delightful month, pleasantly balanced between digging and divisional and brigade sports, for they were all among their own people again, played cricket matches in combination with their sister battalion, and wrote their names high on the list of prize-winners. Their serious business was the manufacture of new young N.C.O.’s for export to the 1st Battalion, and even to Caterham, “where they tame lions.” Batches of these were made and drilled under the cold eye of the Sergeant-Major, and were, perhaps, the only men who did not thoroughly appreciate life on the edge of the Somme in that inconceivable early summer of ‘18.

The men, as men must be if they hope to live, were utterly unconcerned with events beyond their view. They comprehended generally that the German advance was stayed for the while, and that it was a race between the enemy and ourselves to prepare fresh armies and supplies; but they themselves had done what they were required to do. If asked, they would do it again, but not being afflicted with false heroisms, they were perfectly content that other battalions should now pass through the fire. (“We knew there was fighting all about an’ about. We knew the French had borrowed four or five of our divisions and they was being hammered on the Aisne all through May — that time we was learning to play cricket at Barly, an’
that
’ll show you how many of us was English in those days! We heard about the old Fifth and Thirty-first Divisions retaking all our Vieux-Berquin ground at the end o’ June (when we was having those sports at Bavincourt) an’ we was dam’ glad of it — those of us who had come through that fight. But no man can hold more than one thing at a time, an’ a battalion’s own affairs are enough for one doings. . . . Now there was a man in those days, called Timoney — a runner — an’ begad, at the one mile and the half mile there was no one could see him when he ran, etc. etc.”)

The first little ripples of our own returning tide began to be felt along the Arras–Amiens line when on the 4th of July the Australians, under Lieutenant-General Monash, with four companies of the Thirty-third American Division and many tanks, retook our lost positions round Hamel and by Villers-Bretonneux. The Battalion celebrated that same day by assisting the American troops with them (and the Guards Division) at their national game. Here the Second in Command narrowly escaped serious injury in the cause of international good will, for a baseball, says the Diary most ungallantly, “luckily just missed him and struck a V.A.D. in the face.” The views of the V.A.D. are not given.

The 14th July, the French celebration at Paris, fell just on the eve of Marshal Foch’s historical first counter-attacks which, after the Second Battle of the Marne, staggered the German front, when the same trees that had hidden the 1st Battalion’s dead at Villers-Cotterêts, close on four years ago, covered and launched one of the armies that exacted repayment. And the 2nd Irish Guards, entirely appreciating the comfort of their situation, despatched to Paris every member of their bureaucracy who could by any means hatch up passable excuses for helping to form the composite battalion which should grace the festivities there. The C.O. (the Second in Command had gone on already), the Adjutant, the Assistant-Adjutant, the Sergeant-Major, the M.O., the Sick Sergeant, the Orderly-Room Clerk, the Signalling Sergeant, the Mess-Sergeant, and all the drums managed to get away. So Captain Nutting chaperoned the remainder down to the pleasant watering-place of Criel Plage, which is over against Dieppe. This time they were set up in business as a young officers’ seminary for the benefit of newly commissioned officers who were to be taken in hand by the 4th Guards Brigade before passing on. Many of them had had considerable service in the ranks, which again required a special form of official education. They were distributed among the battalions to the number of twenty-five or thirty each, and drilled as companies. Whatever they learned, they were, beyond question, worked up to fit physical trim with the others, and, at the Guards Brigade Sports, the Battalion covered itself with glory. They won every single event that counted for points, and the Brigade championship by an overwhelming aggregate. Next day, being the fourth anniversary of the War, they listened to a serious sermon on the matter — as they had listened to others — not much crediting that peace was in sight. Among the specialists who lectured them on their many businesses was an officer from the G.H.Q. Physical and Bayonet Training School, who spoke of “recreational training” — boxing for choice — and had a pretty taste in irony. For he told them how well some pugilists had done in the War; citing the case of an eminent professional who had been offered large purses to appear in the ring, but, feeling his country needed him, declined them all and, when the War had been going on for rather more than two years, joined a select body of cavalry, which, after another year, he discovered was not going to the front. This so wrought on him that he forthwith gave his services to the G.H.Q. Bayonet School, where he had flourished ever since, heroically battling against stuffed gunnybags. The Battalion held its breath at the record of such bravery; and a few days later professed loud horror at an indent which came in for a hundred and fifty men and four officers — a draft for their 1st Battalion. The Guards Division had been at work again since the 21st August on the thrice fought-over Moyenneville-St. Léger-Mory ground, in our northern attack which had followed Rawlinson’s blow round Amiens. The whole of the 4th Guards Brigade was drawn upon to help make good the wastage, and its draft of six hundred and seven men was one of the finest that had ever been furnished-trained to the last ounce, and taught to the limits of teaching. The young officers attached for instruction left after a joyous dinner that lasted till late in the dawn. And it may be that the draft had dined also; for, on the way to the station, one of our men who had lost his cap and had paraded in steel-helmet order was met by “a lady from out of a house,” who solemnly presented him with the missing article. It was an omen of victory and of the days when steel helmets should become curios.