Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1208 page)

The orders for the Battalion, after the conference and the short view of the ground, were that No. 3 Company (Captain Wynter) was to advance from their trenches when the bombardment stopped, to the southern end of Chalk-Pit Wood, get through and dig itself in in the tough chalk on the farther side. No. 2 Company (Captain Bird), on the left of No. 3, would make for the centre of the wood, dig in too, on the far side, and thus prolong No. 3’s line up to and including the Chalk-Pit — that is to say, that the two companies would hold the whole face of the Wood.

Nos. 1 and 4 Companies were to follow and back up Nos. 3 and 2 respectively. At four o’clock the two leading companies deployed and advanced, “keeping their direction and formation perfectly.” That much could be seen from what remained of Vermelles watertower, where some of the officers of the 1st Battalion were watching, regardless of occasional enemy shell. They advanced quickly, and pushed through to the far edge of the Wood with very few casualties, and those, as far as could be made out, from rifle or machine-gun fire. (Shell-fire had caught them while getting out of their trenches, but, notwithstanding, their losses had not been heavy till then.) The rear companies pushed up to thicken the line, as the fire increased from the front, and while digging in beyond the Wood, 2nd Lieutenant Pakenham-Law was fatally wounded in the head. Digging was not easy work, and seeing that the left of the two first companies did not seem to have extended as far as the Chalk-Pit, at the north of the Wood, the C.O. ordered the last two platoons of No. 4 Company which were just coming up, to bear off to the left and get hold of the place. In the meantime, the 1st Scots Guards, following orders, had come partly round and partly through the right flank of the Irish, and attacked Puits 14 bis, which was reasonably stocked with machine-guns, but which they captured for the moment. Their rush took with them “some few Irish Guardsmen,” with 2nd Lieutenants W. F. J. Clifford and J. Kipling of No. 2 Company who went forward not less willingly because Captain Cuthbert commanding the Scots Guards party had been adjutant to the Reserve Battalion at Warley ere the 2nd Battalion was formed, and they all knew him. Together, this rush reached a line beyond the Puits, well under machinegun fire (out of the Bois Hugo across the Lens–La Bassee road). Here 2nd Lieutenant Clifford was shot and wounded or killed — the body was found later — and 2nd Lieutenant Kipling was wounded and missing. The Scots Guards also lost Captain Cuthbert, wounded or killed, and the combined Irish and Scots Guards party fell back from the Puits and retired “into and through Chalk-Pit Wood in some confusion.” The C.O. and Adjutant, Colonel Butler and Captain Vesey went forward through the Wood to clear up matters, but, soon after they had entered it the Adjutant was badly wounded and had to be carried off. Almost at the same moment, “the men from the Puits came streaming back through the Wood, followed by a great part of the line which had been digging in on the farther side of it.”

Evidently, one and a half hour’s bombardment, against a country-side packed with machine-guns, was not enough to placate it. The Battalion had been swept from all quarters, and shelled at the same time, at the end of two hard days and sleepless nights, as a first experience of war, and had lost seven of their officers in forty minutes. They were reformed somewhat to the rear along the Loos–Hulluch road. (“Jerry did himself well at Loos upon us innocents. We went into it, knowing no more than our own dead what was coming, and Jerry fair lifted us out of it with machine-guns. That was all there was to it
that
day.”) The watchers on the Vermelles water-tower saw no more than a slow forward wave obscured by Chalk-Pit Wood; the spreading of a few scattered figures, always, it seemed, moving leisurely; and then a return, with no apparent haste in it, behind the wood once more. They had a fair idea, though, of what had happened, and guessed what was to follow. The re-formed line would go up again exactly to where it had come from. While this was being arranged, and when a couple of companies of the 1st Coldstream had turned up in a hollow on the edge of the Loos–Hulluch road, to support the Battalion, a runner came back with a message from Captain Alexander saying that he and some men were still in their scratch-trenches on the far side of Chalk-Pit Wood, and he would be greatly obliged if they would kindly send some more men up, and with speed. The actual language was somewhat crisper, and was supplemented, so the tale runs, by remarks from the runner addressed to the community at large. The demand was met at once, and the rest of the line was despatched to the near side of the Wood in support. The two companies of the Coldstream came up on the left of the Irish Guards, and seized and settled down in the Chalk-Pit itself. They all had a night’s energetic digging ahead of them, with but their own entrenching tools to help, and support-trenches had to be made behind the Wood in case the enemy should be moved to counter-attack. To meet that chance, as there was a gap between the supporting Coldstream Companies and the First Guards Brigade on the left, the C.O. of the 2nd Battalion collected some hundred and fifty men of various regiments, during the dusk, and stuffed them into an old German communication-trench as a defence. No counter-attack developed, but it was a joyless night that they spent among the uptorn trees and lumps of unworkable chalk. Their show had failed with all the others along the line, and “the greatest battle in the history of the world” was frankly stuck. The most they could do was to hang on and wait developments. They were shelled throughout the next day, heavily but inaccurately, when 2nd Lieutenant Sassoon was wounded by a rifle bullet. In the evening they watched the 1st Coldstream make an unsuccessful attack on Puits 14 bis, for the place was a well-planned machine-gun nest — the first of many that they were fated to lose their strength against through the years to come. That night closed in rain, and they were left to the mercy of Providence. No one could get to them, and they could get at nobody; but they could and did dig deeper into the chalk, to keep warm, and to ensure against the morrow (September 29) when the enemy guns found their range and pitched the stuff fairly into the trenches “burying many men and blowing a few to pieces.” Yet, according to the count, which surely seems inaccurate, they only lost twenty dead in the course of the long day. The 3rd Guards Brigade on their right, sent in word that the Germans were massing for attack in the Bois Hugo in front of their line. “All ranks were warned,” which, in such a situation, meant no more than that the experienced, among them, of whom there were a few, waited for the cessation of shell-fire, and the inexperienced, of whom there were many, waited for what would come next. (“And the first time that he is under
that
sort of fire, a man stops his thinking. He’s all full of wonder, sweat, and great curses.”) No attack, however, came, and the Gunners claimed that their fire on Bois Hugo had broken it up. Then the Brigade on their left cheered them with instructions that Chalk-Pit Wood must be “held at all costs,” and that they would not be relieved for another two days; also, that “certain modifications of the Brigade line would take place.” It turned out later that these arrangements did not affect the battalions. They were taken out of the line “wet, dirty, and exhausted” on the night of the 30th September when, after a heavy day’s shelling, the Norfolks relieved them, and they got into billets behind Sailly-Lebourse. They had been under continuous strain since the 25th of the month, and from the 27th to the 30th in a punishing action which had cost them, as far as could be made out, 324 casualties, including 101 missing. Of these last, the Diary records that “the majority of them were found to have been admitted to some field ambulance, wounded. The number of known dead is set down officially as not more than 25, which must be below the mark. Of their officers, 2nd Lieutenant Pakenham-Law had died of wounds; 2nd Lieutenants Clifford and Kipling were missing, Captain and Adjutant the Hon. T. E. Vesey, Captain Wynter, Lieutenant Stevens, and 2nd Lieutenants Sassoon and Grayson were wounded, the last being blown up by a shell. It was a fair average for the day of a debut, and taught them somewhat for their future guidance. Their commanding officer told them so at Adjutant’s Parade, after they had been rested and cleaned on the 2nd October at Verquigneul; but it does not seem to have occurred to any one to suggest that direct infantry attacks, after ninety-minute bombardments, on works begotten out of a generation of thought and prevision, scientifically built up by immense labour and applied science, and developed against all contingencies through nine months, are not likely to find a fortunate issue. So, while the Press was explaining to a puzzled public what a far-reaching success had been achieved, the “greatest battle in the history of the world” simmered down to picking up the pieces on both sides of the line, and a return to autumnal trench-work, until more and heavier guns could be designed and manufactured in England. Meantime, men died.

THE HOHENZOLLERN AND TRENCH WORK

The Battalion, a little rested, and strengthened by four officers from the 1st Irish Guards (Lieutenant and temporary Captain FitzGerald, Lieutenants Rankin and Montgomery, and 2nd Lieutenant Langrishe) as well as a draft of a hundred men under Lieutenant Hamilton, was introduced to the trenches on the 3rd October, when they moved to Vermelles and hid themselves in the ruins and cellars of as much as the enemy had allowed to remain of it. It was an unpleasant experience. The following comment covers it, and the many others of the same sort that followed: “We was big men for the most part, and this creeping and crawling in and out of what’s left of houses, was not our ways of living. Maybe some of the little fellows in the Line would have found it easier. And there’s a smell to that kind o’ billet worse than graves — a smell off the house-plaster where it lies, and the wall-paper peelin’ off the walls, and what’s in the sand-bags that we build acrost the passages an’ the sculleries, ye’ll understand, and the water on the floors stinkin’ and rottin’. Ye hear it drip like dhrums through ceilings in the night. And ye go in an’ out of them dark, stinkin’ places always stoopin’ an’ steppin’ on bits o’ things. Dead houses put the wind up a man worse than trenches.”

Next day they were turned down into the multitude of trenches, established or in the making, which lay between Vermelles and the great Hohenzollern redoubt that swept every line of approach with its sudden fires. They were led out (October 5) at dusk across a muddy field beside a dead town, and entered that endless communication-trench called Central Boyau, whose length was reckoned by hours. It led them to the line held by the East Yorks Regiment and two companies of the K.O.Y.L.I. they were relieving. Men forget much, but no man of any battalion ever forgets his first introduction to the stable, deadly fire-line, as distinguished from the casual field-trench. An hour or so before they moved off, a 5.9 burst in a ruined cottage where all the Battalion Staff was sitting, and might well have destroyed the sergeant-major, drill-sergeants and signallers, etc. The only casualty, however, was one pioneer killed, while the officers of the Battalion Staff in the next mound of ruins escaped unhurt.

Then began the slow and repeatedly checked sidle in the dusk, of single men up Central Boyau, which was also a thoroughfare for other units falling, tripping, and cursing among festoons of stray telephone wires. From Vermelles to their trenches was a mile and a quarter. They began at seven at night and completed the relief at six in the morning. Not much shelling greeted them, but the darkness was “tickled up,” as one man put it, with bullets from all angles, and while No. 3 Company was settling in to reserve trenches just at the point of grey dawn, 2nd Lieutenant Hine showed himself by getting up on to the parapet, and was shot through the head at once, probably by a sniper. Over and above the boy’s natural fearlessness, by which he had already distinguished himself at Loos (for he had helped Captain Alexander to hold the men in Chalk-Pit Wood after the failure of Coldstream attack on Puits 14 bis), he was utterly convinced he would not be killed in the war. Others of his companions had presentiments of their own death more than once, and yet survived to the end with nothing worse than a wound or gassing. It may be worth noting, as far as this sort of information goes, that a man who felt that he was “for it” on the eve of an engagement was seldom found to be wrong. Occasionally, too, it would come over a man in the trenches that that day or night would be his last. Indeed the very hour would sometimes forespeak itself as with an audible voice, and he, chosen, would go forward to the destined spot — so men have said who saw it — already divorced from this world.

But at the beginning, before nerves wore down, there was hope and interest for every one. The enemy had probably learned of the fresh material before them, for they filled the day of the 6th October with alternate whizz-bangs and large-size H.E. howitzers; the crack and gravel-like smash of the small stuff alternating with the grunt, vomit, and stamp of the Jack Johnsons. Every one was hit by the flying dirt, and well-nigh choked by the stench, and some officers visiting the front line had their first experience of crawling in cold blood across bits of broken trench, where the debris of corpses was so mingled with the untidy dirt that one could not be sure till later what hand or foot had met. It struck some of the young officers as curious that they were not more impressed. Others were frankly sick; while others found that the sights lifted from them the dread fear of being afraid which waits at every generous man’s shoulder. But they all owned, according to their separate temperaments, that they were quite sufficiently frightened for working purposes, and so — went on with their work.

Between the 5th and the 7th October the Battalion lost one officer (2nd Lieutenant Hine) and six other ranks killed and twenty-one wounded. Their trenches were moderately good, and had been regularly used, and they discovered dug-outs here and there, which enabled some of them to doze lying down instead of propped against the side of a trench full of moving men. This was great luxury to them, though their revolvers punched holes in their hips and their boots drew like blisters. The more imaginative wrote home that the life was something like camping out. The truthful merely said that they were having an interesting time, and gave their families peace. There was no need to explain how their servants brought them up their meals, dodging, balancing, and ducking along a trench as the fire caught it, or how, even while the hungry youngsters waited and watched, both food and servant would be wiped out together, with a stretch of the parapet under which they had decided to eat.