Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1184 page)

On the 12th September No. 1 Company, stationed in a small copse near Trônes Wood, which was choked with wreckage and dead, had three of their Lewis-gunners killed and five wounded by a single shell.

On the 13th September the Battalion spent a quiet day (with only one killed and seven wounded), except for a deadly tiring fatigue of carrying bombs to Guillemont under shell-fire. Our artillery began on the 12th, and continued day and night without much break till the hour of advance on the 15th, when it changed to the duly ordered stationary and creeping barrages of the field-guns.

THE 15TH SEPTEMBER

On the evening of the 14th, the 1st Brigade of Guards moved out to the shell-holes and fragments of trench that formed their assembly-positions, on a front of five hundred yards between Delville Wood and the northern flank of Ginchy. There it lay in the cold with the others till “Zero,” 6.20 A.M. Of the 15th. The 2nd and 3rd Coldstream had the front line, for they were to lead the attack; the 2nd Grenadiers lay behind to support them and consolidate the first objective — a line of trench about twelve hundred yards north-east — and to hold it till the 1st Irish Guards came up and had passed through them. Then, if the flanks were secure, the 2nd Grenadiers were to come on and support in turn. The 1st Irish Guards were to pass through the 2nd and 3rd Coldstream after the latter battalions had reached the third objective, another line of trench twenty-five hundred yards off, and were thence to go and take the final objective — the northern outskirts of Lesbœufs, thirty-five hundred yards from their jumping-off place. There was a limited objective, three hundred yards beyond the first, which worked in with the advance towards Flers of the divisions on the left of the Guards from Delville Wood to Martinpuich. It was supposed to concern only the Battalion (2nd Coldstream) on the left flank of the 1st Brigade.

Incidentally, it was announced that as soon as all the objectives had been seized, “Cavalry would advance and seize the heights ahead.”

The Battalion formed up north-west of Ginchy in two lines, facing north-east. Nos. 3 and 4 Companies in the first line; 1 and 2 in the second on the right, commanded as follows:

Captain L. R. Hargreaves, Lieutenants the Hon. P. J. Ogilvy, and R. Rodakowski, 2nd Lieutenant T. C. Gibson, and C.S.M. Voyles and Farrell were left in reserve. Lieutenant L. C. Whitefoord and his section of the Brigade Machine-gun Company was attached to the Battalion.

They waited the hour and occupied themselves, many times over, with trivial details, repetitions of orders and comparisons of watches and compasses. (Their compass-bearing, by the way, was N. 37, or within a shade of North North-east.) Every one noticed that every one else fussed a little, and rather resented it. The doctor and the priest seemed to loom unnaturally large, and the sergeants were busier than was necessary over shortcomings, till ten minutes or so before Zero, Father Browne, who had given Absolution, spoke to the companies one by one as they knelt before him, their bayonets fixed and the searching dawn-light on their faces. He reminded them that that day was one set apart to Our Lady, and, ere many minutes, not few of them would be presenting their homage to Her in person. They realised that he told no more than truth.

Through some accident, Zero had been a little mistimed, and the troops left their lairs, not under the roar and swish of their own barrage, but in a silence which lasted perhaps less than a minute, but which seemed endless. They felt, one man averred, like amateur actors upon whom the curtain unexpectedly rises. The enemy, not looking for the attack, were only expending occasional shots, which emphasised the awful loneliness and exposure of it all, till, with a wrench that jerked the ground, our barrage opened, the enemy’s counter-barrage, replied, and through a haze of flying dirt No. 1 Company of the Irish saw a platoon of Coldstream in front of them crumped out of existence in one flash and roar. After that, the lines moved into a blizzard of shell and machine-gun fire where all landmarks were undistinguishable in the upheaval of explosives. (“We might as well have tried to guide ourselves by the waves of the sea-the way they spouted up.”)

There naturally cannot be any definite or accurate record of the day’s work. Even had maps been issued to the officers a week, instead of a day or so, before the attack; even had those maps marked all known dangerpoints — such as the Ginchy–Flers sunk road; even had the kaleidoscopic instructions about the brown and yellow lines been more intelligible, or had the village of Ginchy been distinguishable from a map of the pitted moon — once the affair was launched, there was little chance of seeing far or living long. The two leading platoons of No. 3 Company following the Coldstream, charged, through the ripping fire that came out of Ginchy orchard, to the German first-line trench which ran from the sunken road at that point. The others came behind them, cheering their way into the sleet of machine-gun fire. The true line of advance was north-easterly, but the 2nd Guards Brigade on the right of the 1st, caught very heavily by the German barrage on their right flank, closed in towards the 1st Brigade and edged it more northward; so that, about an hour and a half after the advance began, what the countless machine-guns had left of the Irish found itself with three out of its four company commanders already casualties, all officers of No. 2 Company out of action, and the second in command, Major T. M. D. Bailie, killed. They were held up under heavy shelling, either in front of German wire, or, approximately, on the firstline objective — a battered German trench, which our artillery had done its best to obliterate, but fortunately had failed in parts. With the Irish were representatives of every unit of the 1st and 2nd Brigades, mostly lacking officers, and some fresh troops of the Fourteenth Division from the left of the line. Outside their area, the Sixth Division’s attacks between Ginchy Telegraph and Leuze Wood had failed, thanks to a driving fire from the Quadrilateral, the great fortified work that controlled the landscape for a mile and a half; so the right flank of the Guards Division was left in the air, the enemy zealously trying to turn it — bomb
versus
bayonet.

Judgment of time and distance had gone with the stress and roar around. The two attacking battalions (2nd and 3rd Coldstream) of the 1st Brigade had more or less gone too — were either dead or dispersed into small parties, dodging among smoking shell-holes. The others were under the impression that they had won at least two of the three objectives — an error due to the fact that they had found and fought over a trench full of enemy where no such obstacle had been indicated.

Suddenly a party of snipers and machine-guns appeared behind the Irish in a communication-trench, fired at large, as much out of bewilderment as design, wounded the sole surviving company officer of the four companies (Lieutenant J. K. Greer), and owing to the jamming of our Lewis-guns got away to be killed elsewhere. A mass of surrendering Germans, disturbed by the advance of a division on the left, drifted across them and further blinded the situation. Nobody knew within hundreds of yards where they were, but since it was obvious that the whole attack of the Division, pressed, after the failure of the Sixth Division, by the fire from the Quadrilateral, had sheered too far towards the left or north, the need of the moment was to shift the men of the 2nd Guards Brigade back along the trench towards their own area; to sort out the mixed mass of officerless men on the left; and to make them dig in before the vicious, spasmodic shelling of the congested line turned into the full roll of the German barrage.

They cleared out, as best they could, the mixed English and German bodies that paved the bottom of the trench, and toiled desperately at the wreckage — splinters and concrete from blown-in dug-outs, earth-slides and collapses of head-cover by yards at a time, all mingled or besmeared with horrors and filth that a shell would suddenly increase under their hands. Men could give hideous isolated experiences of their own — it seemed to each survivor that he had worked for a lifetime in a world apart — but no man could recall any connected order of events, and the exact hour and surroundings wherein such and such a man — private, N.C.O., or officer — met his death are still in dispute. It was a still day, and the reeking, chemical-tainted fog of the high explosives would not clear. Orders would be given and taken by men suddenly appearing and as suddenly vanishing through smoke or across fallen earth, till both would be cut off in the middle by a rifle bullet, or beaten down by the stamp and vomit of a shell, There was, too, always a crowd of men seated or in fantastic attitudes, silent, with set absorbed faces, busily engaged in trying to tie up, staunch, or plug their own wounds — to save their own single lives with their own hands. When orders came to these they would shake their heads impatiently and go on with their urgent, horrible business. Others, beyond hope, but not consciousness, lamented themselves into death. The Diary covers these experiences of the three hours between 8 A.M. and 11 A.M. with the words: “In the meantime, despite rather heavy shelling, a certain amount of consolidation was done on the trench while the work of reorganization was continued.” In the meantime, also, some of the Coldstream battalions, mixed with a few men of the Irish Guards, the latter commanded by Lieutenant W. Mumford, had rushed on into the wilderness beyond the trench towards the brown line, or what was supposed to be the brown line, three hundred yards or so ahead, and for the moment had been lost. About half-past eleven the Commanding Officer, the Adjutant, and 2nd Lieutenant G. V. Williams and Lieutenant L. C. Whitefoord of the 1st Guards Brigade Machine-gun Company, who represented all that was left of the officers, went forward with all that was left of the Irish Guards and all available, not too badly wounded Coldstreamers, towards the next objective. Every one was glad to step out from the sickening trench into the wire-trapped, shell-ploughed open whence the worst of the German barrage had lifted, though enemy machine-guns were cropping it irregularly. Their road lay uphill through a field of rank, unweeded stuff, and, when they had topped a little rise, they saw what seemed, by comparison, untouched country where houses had some roofs on them and trees some branches, all laid out ahead, in the hot sunshine between Flers and Lesbœufs. There were figures in the landscape too — Germans on the move with batteries and transport — an enemy in sight at last and, by the look of them, moving away. Then a German field-battery, also in the open, pulled up and methodically shelled them. They came upon a shallow trench littered with wreckage, scraped themselves in, and there found some more of the Division, while the German battery continued to find them. In the long run, that trench, which had been a German covered-way for guns, came to hold about sixty of the 1st Irish Guards, thirty of the 2nd Grenadiers under Captain A. F. S. Cunningham, and a hundred or so of both Battalions Coldstream under Colonel J. V. Campbell, the senior officer present. Somewhere on the left front of it, fifteen of the Irish were found lying out in shell-holes under C. S. M. Carton and Sergeant Riordan. They were in touch, so far as touch existed then, with the 9th Rifle Brigade on their left, but it was not advisable to show one’s head above a shell-hole on account of enemy machine-guns which were vividly in touch with everything that moved. Their right was all in the air, and for the second time no one knew — no one could know — where the trench in which they lay was situated in the existing chaos. They fixed its position at last by compass-bearings. It was more or less on the line of the second objective, and had therefore to be held in spite of casualties. The men could do no more than fire when possible at anything that showed itself (which was seldom) and, in the rare intervals when shelling slackened, work themselves a little further into the ground. At this juncture, Captain L. R. Hargreaves, left behind with the Reserve of Officers in Trônes Wood, was ordered up, and reached the line with nothing worse than one wound. He led out a mixed party of Coldstream and Irish to a chain of disconnected shell-holes a few hundred yards in advance of the trench. Here they suffered for the rest of the afternoon under the field-battery shelling them at less than half a mile, and the regular scything of the machine-guns from the Quadrilateral on their right. A machine-gun detachment, under Lieutenant L. C. Whitefoord, went with them, and Lieutenant W. C. Mumford and 2nd Lieutenant F. S. L. Smith with their little detachments of Irish and Coldstream came up later as reinforcements. That scattered forward fringe among the shell-holes gave what help it could to the trench behind it, which filled up, as the day wore on, with more Irish and Coldstream working their way forward. Formation was gone — blown to bits long ago. Nearly every officer was down, and sergeant after sergeant succeeding to the command, had dropped too; but the discipline held, and with it the instinct that made them crawl, dodge, run and stumble as chance offered and their corporals ordered, towards the enemy and not away from him. They had done so, at first, shouting aloud in the massed rush of the full charge that now seemed centuries away in time, and worlds in space. Later, as they were scattered and broken by fire, knowing that their battalion was cut to pieces, they worked with a certain automatic forlorn earnestness, which, had any one had time to think, was extremely comic. For instance, when a sergeant came across a stray private meditating longer than seemed necessary at the bottom of a too-tempting shell-hole, he asked him gravely what he thought he was doing. The man, dazed and shaken, replied with an equal gravity that he did not know. “Then,” said the sergeant, “get on forward out o’ this an’ maybe ye’ll find out,” and smote him dispassionately with the flat of a spade. The man, without a word, rose up, lifted his head once more into the bullet-torn air, and pitched forward, dead, a few paces farther on. And, at one time, in a terrible waiting pause, when it was death to show a finger, they saw one man out on the flank suddenly taken by madness. He lifted himself up slowly, and as slowly marched across the open towards the enemy, firing his rifle in the air meantime. The bullets seemed to avoid him for a long while till he was visibly jerked off his feet by several that struck him altogether. The stiff, blind death-march ended, and the watching Irish clicked their tongues for wonder and pity.