Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1194 page)

Twenty-four hours later, it was alive and roaring with our tanks rooting through the massed wire of the Hindenburg Line, the clamour of half-a-dozen divisions launched at their heels and the smashing fire of our guns in advance of them and their covering smoke-screens; while far to the north and south dummy attacks, gas and artillery demonstrations veiled and confused either flank. The opening day was, beyond doubt, a success. The German line went out under the tanks, as breakwaters go out under the race of a tide; and from Gonnelieu to north of Hermies three systems of their defence were overrun to a depth of four or five miles. By the 21st November our attack had punched out a square-headed salient, ten miles across the base, the southerly side of which ran along the high ground of the Bonavis Ridge, more or less parallel to the St. Quentin–Escaut Canal from Gonnelieu to Masnières, which latter place we held. The easterly side lay from Masnières through Noyelles-sur-l’Escaut and Cantaing to Fontaine-Notre-Dame and Bourlon Wood. This latter, as the highest point of command, was the key of the position on our north flank. Thence, the northerly flank of the salient ran roughly westward from the wood, south of Mœuvres till it joined our original front north of Boursies. About one half of the salient was commanded by German guns from the north of Bourlon Wood, and the other half from the south in the direction of the Bonavis Ridge.

Besides these natural disadvantages there were large numbers of our cavalry hopefully disposed on the main routes in readiness for the traditional “breakthrough,” the harrying of enemy communications, etc. November on the Somme is not, however, quite the best season for exploits of horse, sabre and lance.

Meantime, the Battalion spent the 20th November, and till the evening of the 21st, at two hours’ notice in camp near Barastre, and on the 23rd November moved to bivouac just west of the village of Doignies behind Demicourt on the edge of the “habitually very quiet sector” before mentioned. The 1st and 3rd Brigades Guards Division had been detailed to relieve two brigades of the Fifty-first Division in the line attacking Fontaine-Notre-Dame village at the extreme north tip of the salient a dozen miles away; and on the evening of the 23rd November they received verbal orders to get away from Doignies. At the moment the Battalion was moving off, came written orders that the whole of its first-line transport should accompany it; so a verbal order was sent to the transport officer to bring it on in rear of the Brigade column. That was the beginning of some not too successful Staff work and some unnecessary wanderings in the dark, complicated by the congestion of the roads and the presence of the ever-hopeful cavalry. The Battalion, its transport all abroad, crossed the Canal du Nord from Doignies and waited by the roadside till Lieut.-Colonel Follett, commanding the Brigade, rode into Graincourt, picked up guides from the 152nd Brigade, brought on the Battalion another couple of thousand yards to the crossroads at La Justice, found fresh guides from the Gordons and Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and moved downhill straight into line at Cantaing mill after “a good and quiet relief,” at 3.20 A.M. on the morning of the 24th. Fighting had been going on day and night since the 20th for the possession of Bourlon Wood and village, where the Fortieth Division had been worn to a skeleton in alternate attack and counter-attack, but there was no trouble that dawn or day on the Cantaing sector where the Battalion lay and listened to the roar of the battle a mile and a half to the north. Their concern was to improve their line and find out where on earth the Staff had lost their first-line transport. It appeared that varying orders had been given to the transport for the different battalions, complicated by general instructions to follow their own units by the light of nature; and there the orders stopped. Naturally, as the roads boiled with traffic, all transport was promptly stood aside to let troops get ahead, with the result that after many adventures in the dark, including the collapse of a bridge over the Canal du Nord when half the loads had crossed, the Battalion’s transport got into Ribecourt at five in the morning, still without any orders, found that no one knew where Brigade Headquarters might be, billeted themselves in a wrecked farm and managed to get into touch with their Battalion in the afternoon of the 24th. About this time, the Fortieth Division with the tanks attacked Bourlon village, captured the whole of it, only to be fought out by the enemy on the following day. The Wood had not at that time gained its dark name in history. All that the waiting Battalion at Cantaing reports on the 25th November, while wood and village fumed like the infernos that they were, is “no fighting on the battalion front, although there was heavy fighting on the left.”

It broke out again on the 26th towards evening (the fifth day of continuous battle), when the 4th Grenadiers of the 3rd Guards Brigade were sent up to support the Fortieth Division and, on the way thither, went through a heavy German barrage as though they were on parade.

But the high ground above Bourlon Wood and Fontaine-Notre-Dame gave the enemy an artillery and observation command which enabled them to sweep our front and back areas in the northern half of the salient almost as they chose. Pressure, too, was beginning to develop on the flanks. The forty-eight hours in which the enemy could bring up fresh troops had grown to nearly a week, and they had used every hour of it. In no way could the situation be called healthy, but were the Bourlon Ridges won, at least our gain of ground might be held. So it was decided that the 2nd Guards Brigade, 3rd Grenadiers, 1st Coldstream, 2nd Irish Guards and 1st Scots Guards, together with the 4th Grenadiers and the Welsh Guards borrowed, should on the 27th attack Fontaine village and Bourlon Wood. They did so attack; they were cut to pieces with machine-gunfire in the advance; they were shelled out of Bourlon Wood; they were counter-attacked by heavy reinforcements of the enemy; they had no reinforcements; they fell back on Fontaine village in the evening; they withdrew from it in the darkness and fell back on La Justice. It was a full failure with heavy casualties and the news went back, with the speed of all bad news, to the 1st Brigade, which had been relieved on the 26th, the 1st Irish Guards lying at Ribecourt in the ruined farm where their transport had taken refuge. They should have been in a trench outside the village, but a battalion of another division was found in possession of it, and so was not disturbed.

GOUZEAUCOURT

There was no shelter against the driving snowy rain, and the men, without great-coats or blankets, were “very cold, wet and miserable.” The next day was no better, and on the 29th the Fifty-ninth Division took over their area from them while the Guards Division was rearranged thus: the 3rd Brigade at Trescault, the 2nd at Ribecourt, and the 1st at Metz-en-Couture, a wrecked, red-brick village, once engaged in the sugarbeet industry, lying on and under a swell of the downs some four thousand yards west of Gouzeaucourt. The Divisional Artillery was at Flesquières, more than four miles away. The Battalion’s march to Metz was badly delayed by blocks on the road and a general impression spread that trouble was not far off. Individually, the soldier is easy to deceive: collectively, a battalion has the sure instinct of an animal for changes in the wind. There were catacombs in Metz village where one company was billeted whereby it was nearly choked to death by foul gases.
¹
This seemed all of a piece with the bad luck of the tour, and the dawn of the 30th November was ushered in by single shells from a long-range gun which found them during the night. Half an hour after they had the order to move to Heudicourt and had digested a persistent rumour that the enemy were through at Gonnelieu, telegrams and orders began to pour in. The gist of them was that the line had undoubtedly cracked, and that the Brigade would move to Gouzeaucourt at once. But what the Brigade was to do, and under whose command it was to operate, were matters on which telegrams and orders most livelily conflicted. Eventually, the Division as a whole was assigned to the Third Corps, the 3rd Brigade was ordered to come up from Trescault and help the 1st, and the various C.O.’s of the battalions of the 1st Brigade rode forward to see for themselves what was happening. They had not far to go. Over the ridge between Gouzeaucourt and Metz poured gunners, carrying their sights with them, engineers, horses and infantry, all apparently bent on getting into the village where they would be a better target for artillery. The village choked; the Battalion fell in, clear of the confusion, where it best could, and set off at once in artillery formation, regardless of the stragglers, into the high and bare lands round Gouzeaucourt. There were no guns to back them, for their own were at Flesquières.

As was pointed out by an observer of that curious day — ”‘Tis little ye can do with gunsights, an’ them in the arrums av men in a great haste. There was men with blankets round ‘em, an’ men with loose putties wavin’ in the wind, and they told us ‘twas a general retirement. We could see that. We wanted to know for why they was returnin’. We went through ‘em all, fairly breastin’ our way and — we found Jerry on the next slope makin’ prisoners of a Labour Corps with picks an’ shovels. But some of that same Labour Corps they took their picks an’ shovels and came on with us.”

They halted and fixed bayonets just outside Gouzeaucourt Wood, the Irish on the left of the line, their right on the Metz–Gouzeaucourt road, the 3rd Coldstream in the centre, the 2nd Coldstream on the right, the 2nd Grenadiers in reserve in Gouzeaucourt Wood itself. What seems to have impressed men most was the extreme nakedness of the landscape, and, at first, the absence of casualties. They were shelled as they marched to the Wood but not heavily; but when they had passed beyond it they came under machine-gun fire from the village. They topped the rise beyond the Wood near Queen’s Cross and were shelled from St. Quentin Ridge to the east. They overran the remnant of one of our trenches in which some sappers and infantry were still holding on. Dismounted cavalry appeared out of nowhere in particular, as troops will in a mixed fray, and attached themselves to the right of the thin line. As they swept down the last slope to Gouzeaucourt the machine-gun fire from the village grew hotter on their right, and the leading company, characteristically enough, made in towards it. This pulled the Battalion a little to the right, and off the road which was supposed to be their left boundary, but it indubitably helped to clear the place. The enemy were seen to be leaving in some haste, and only a few of them were shot or bayoneted in and out among the houses. The Battalion pushed in through the village to the slope east of it under Quentin Mill, where they dug in for the night. Their left flank was all in the air for a while, but the 3rd Brigade, which had been originally ordered to come up on the right of the 1st, was diverted to the left on the Gouzeaucourt–Villers–Plouich line, and they got into touch with the 4th Grenadiers. There was no attempt to counter-attack. Tanks were used on the right during the action, but they do not seem to have played any material part in the Battalion’s area, and, as the light of the short and freezing November day closed, a cavalry regiment or “some cavalry” came up on the left flank.

The actual stroke that recovered Gouzeaucourt had not taken more than an hour, but the day had cost them a hundred and thirty men killed, wounded, and missing; Lieutenant N. F. Durant killed, Lieutenant (Acting Captain) Joyce, Lieutenant G. E. F. Van der Noot, Lieutenant G. K. Thompson, M.C., and 2nd Lieutenant P.M. Riley wounded. All the casualties were from machine-gun fire; men dropping at the corners of streets, across thresholds in cellars and in the angles of wrecked walls that, falling on them, hid them for ever.

A profane legend sprang up almost at once that the zeal shown by the Guards in the attack was because they knew Gouzeaucourt held the supplies of the division which had evacuated it. The enemy had been turned out before he could take advantage of his occupation. Indeed, a couple of our supply-trains were found untouched on rail at the station, and a number of our guns were recaptured in and around the place. Also, the divisional rum-supply was largely intact. When this fact came to light, as it did — so to say — rum-jar by rum-jar, borne joyously through the dark streets that bitter night, the Brigade was refreshed and warmed, and, men assert, felt almost grateful to the division which had laid this extra “fatigue” on them. One grim incident stays in the minds of those who survived — the sight of an enormous Irishman urging two captives, whom he had himself unearthed from a cellar, to dance before him. He demanded the jigs of his native land, and seemed to think that by giving them drink his pupils would become proficient. Men stood about and laughed till they could hardly stand; and when the fun was at its height a chance shell out of the darkness to the eastward wiped out all that tango-class before their eyes. (“‘Twas like a dhream, ye’ll understand. One minute both Jerries was dancin’ hard to oblige him, an’ then — nothin’, nothin’ — nothin’ — of the three of them!”)

The next day, orders came for the Guards Division to continue their work and attack on a front of two miles along the line of the ridge a thousand yards east of Gouzeaucourt, which ran south through Gonnelieu village and Gauche Wood to Villers Hill. Tanks, they were told, would help and the Divisional Artillery would put down barrages. The Fifty-ninth Division would be on their left and the Cavalry Division on their right. The 1st Guards Brigade were assigned Gauche Wood; the 3rd Brigade had the much more difficult problem of rushing Gonnelieu village in the event of another Division who were attacking it that morning (1st December) failing to make headway. The 1st Brigade’s attack on Gauche Wood was undertaken by the 2nd Grenadiers on the right, the 3rd Coldstream, in reserve, in their trenches. They assembled before dawn on the 1st December, waited a while for a promised detachment of tanks and finally started off without them. Their artillery support was meagre, and the troops had to cover three-quarters of a mile over grassy land to the fringe of the wood. The enemy’s first barrage fell behind them; the wood itself was crammed with much more effective machine-guns, but, once it had been entered, the issue became a man-to-man affair. Then some tanks turned up and some cavalry, the latter an hour late. The tanks were eventually withdrawn, as they found no trenches to crush in the wood and drew much shell-fire in the open; but the cavalry, which included Bengal Lancers, were of good use on the right flank of the attack. The two Guards Brigades, one attacking Gonnelieu to the north, the other Gauche Wood to the south, drew a little apart from each other as the men closed in where the machine-gun fire was hottest, and about nine o’clock the 1st Irish Guards sent up a company (No. 1) to fill the gap which developed on both sides of the Gouzeaucourt–Gonnelieu road, the boundary between the Brigades.