Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1188 page)

The Somme was one overwhelming fatigue.

The Somme To Gouzeaucourt

THE BEGINNING
of the year saw the British armies, now more than fifty divisions strong, holding a front of a hundred and ten miles from Ypres to within a short distance of Roye. Thus, allowing for changes imposed by the fluctuations of war and attack, they lay:

The Second Army had the Salient: the First centred on Armentierès; the Third (Gough’s) carried on to the south of Arras, where the Fifth held all along the valley of the Ancre and a portion of the old British line on the Somme. The Fourth joined the French left wing near Roye, and the French pressure worked in with ours.

From the Salient to the Somme battle-front, our line’s business was to draw as much as possible of the enemy’s strength. Therefore, our raids on that part of the line, during the latter half of 1916, were counted by the hundred; and in all that time, at no point on any given day there, could the Germans feel secure against our irruptions.

On the Somme our pressure was direct and, except for the weather, worked as continuously as a forest fire in fallen pine-needles. A fold of the hills might check it there; a bare ridge or a sodden valley hold it elsewhere for the while; but always it ate north and east across the stricken country, as division after division gathered, fought, won foothold, held it, dug in, and gave place to their unspent fellows beneath the cover of the advancing guns. Here is a mere outline of the work of a few weeks:

The affairs of the 15th and 25th of September (1916), when the Fourth Army pushed the line past Lesbœufs and Flers and beyond Gueudecourt on the right, knocked out, as we know, both battalions of the Irish Guards for the time being.

On the 27th and 28th of September the Second and First Canadian Divisions, with the Eleventh and Eighteenth of the Second Army Corps, captured Thiepval, the Stuff and Schwaben redoubts on the left of the line; while the Fifty-fifth and New Zealand Divisions made possible an advance on Le Sars and Eaucourt l’Abbaye villages in the centre, which, after four days’ continuous fighting by the Forty-seventh, Fiftieth, and Twenty-third Divisions, ended in the taking of Eaucourt l’Abbaye and Le Sars.

On the 7th of October the French Army attacked in the direction of Sailly-Saillisel, the Fourth Army chiming in along its whole front from Lesbœufs to Destremont farm, which had been taken by the Twenty-third Division on the 29th September. In this affair the Twenty-third Division captured Le Sars, and the Twentieth Division over a mile of trenches east of Gueudecourt.

Then the treacherous weather broke once more, and the battered and crumbled ground held their feet till a few days of dry cold were snatched for an attack in the direction of Courcelette by four Divisions (Fourth Canadian, Eighteenth, Fifteenth, and Thirty-ninth), where a fresh line was needed.

On the 23rd October, and on the 5th November again, as side-issues while waiting on the weather for a serious attack on Beaumont-Hamel, a couple of divisions (Fourth and Eighth) went in with a French attack against Pierre St. Vaast Wood, where a tangle of enemy trenches at the junction of the two armies was slowly smoked and burned out.

The 10th of November (after one day’s fine weather) gave the Fourth Canadian Division a full day’s fighting and, once more, a thousand yards of trench in the Courcelette sector.

On the 13th of November the battle of the Ancre opened from Serre to east of the Schwaben redoubt (Thirty-first, Third, Second, Fifty-first, Thirty-ninth and Nineteenth Divisions), with the intention of gaining command of both banks of the river, where it entered the enemy lines six or seven miles north of Albert. This was a sector of the old German front to the west, which had thrown back our opening attack of July 1, and had grown no more inviting since. Serre itself, helped by the state of the ground before it, was impossible, but Beaucourt, Beaumont-Hamel, and a portion of the high ground above it, with the village of St. Pierre-Divion in the valley, were, in the course of the next few days, captured and held.

All the above takes no count of incessant minor operations, losses and recaptures of trenches, days and nights of bombing that were necessary to silence nests of subterranean works, marked on the maps of peace as “villages”; nor of the almost monotonous counter-attacks that followed on the heels of every gain. So long as movement was possible the Somme front was alive from end to end, according as one hard-gained position gave the key to the next, or unscreened some hitherto blinded works. Against every disadvantage of weather and over ground no troops in history had before dared to use at that season, the system and design of the advance revealed itself to the enemy. Their counter-attacks withered under our guns or died out in the fuming, raw-dug trenches; the slopes that had been their screens were crowned and turned against them; their infantry began to have no love for the blunt-nosed tanks, which, though not yet come to the war in battalions, were dragging their smeared trails along the ridges; the fighting aeroplanes worried them, too, with machine-gun fire from overhead; photographers marked their covered ways by day and our heavy bombers searched them by night, as owls search stubble for mice. It all cost men and stuff, and the German Army Command had little good news to send back to the German tribes.

Yet the last six months of 1916 had advanced our front no more than some eight miles-along the Albert–Bapaume road. At no point were we more than ten miles from our beginnings. All that showed on the map was that the enemy’s line to the north had been pinched into a salient which, starting from just east of Arras, followed the line of the old German front built up two years before, through Monchy-au-Bois, Gomiecourt and Serre to the high white grounds above Beaumont-Hamel. Thence it turned east across the Ancre, seven or eight kilometres north of Arras, skirted Grandcourt, crossed the arrow-straight Albert–Bapaume road by the dreary Butte de Warlencourt, ran north-east of Gueudecourt, and on the rim of the rise above Le Transloy, till it crossed the Péronne–Bapaume road just north of Sailly-Saillisel. Here it swung south-east from Rancourt and Bouchavesnes down the long slopes to the Valley of the Somme, and its marshes west of Péronne. Thence, south-westerly by Berny-en-Santerre, Ablaincourt to the outskirts of Chaulnes, ending at Le Quesnoy-en-Santerre, where the French took on. The twenty-five mile stretch from Le Transloy to Le Quesnoy was the new section that had been handed over to the British care, piece by piece, at the end of the year.

To meet this pinch and all that they could see that it meant, the Germans had constructed, while they and the weather held us, elaborate second and third lines of defence behind their heavily fortified front. The first barrier — a double line of trenches, heavily wired, ran behind Sailly-Saillisel, past Le Transloy to the Albert–Bapaume road, Grévillers and Loupart woods, and
via
Achiet-le-Petit to Bucquoy.

Parallel to this, at a distance ranging from one to two miles, was a new line through Rocquigny, Bapaume, and Ablainzevelle, almost equally strong and elaborate. Behind it, as every one understood, was a thing called the Hindenburg Line, known to the Germans as “Siegfried” — a forty-mile marvel of considered defences with branches and spurs and switches, one end of which lay on St. Quentin and the other outside Arras. This could be dealt with later, but, meantime, the enemy in the Arras–Le Transloy salient were uneasy. The attacks delivered on selected positions; the little inter-related operations that stole a few hundred yards of trench or half a village at a leap, or carried a gun-group to a position whence our batteries could peer out and punish; above all, the cold knowledge that sooner or later our unimaginative, unmilitary infantry would shamble after the guns, made them think well of lines in their rear to which they could retire at leisure. Verdun had not fallen; very many of their men lay dead outside its obliterated forts, and so very many living were needed to make good the daily drain of the Somme that they had none too many to spare for Austrian or Turkish needs. Their one energetic ally was the weather, which, with almost comic regularity, gave them time after each reverse to draw breath, position more guns, reorganise reliefs, and explain to their doubting public in Germany the excellence and the method of their army’s plans for the future. The battle of the Ancre, for instance, was followed by an absolute deadlock of six weeks, when our armies — one cannot assault and dig out battalions at the same time — dropped everything to fight the mud, while our front-line wallowed in bottomless trenches where subalterns took from three to six hours to visit their posts on a front of one quarter of a mile.

Bitter frosts set in with the first weeks of the New Year and the “small operations” began at once, on our side, round such portions of the Beaumont-Hamel heights as the enemy still clung to. Here the Third, Seventh, and Eleventh Divisions fought, shift by shift, for the rest of January and won the high ground needed for our guns to uncover against Serre and Grandcourt, which were the keys of the positions at the corner of the Arras–Le Transloy salient. Thanks to our air-work, and the almost daily improvement in the power and precision of our barrages, that little army came through its campaign without too heavy losses, and still further cramped the enemy’s foothold along the Ancre, while the rest of the line enjoyed as much peace as the Somme allowed them when “there was nothing doing.”

MARKING TIME

The Guards Division, after their ten days’ rest and clean-up at Sandpits Camp, Méaulte, supplied one brigade to take over a new sector of trench opposite St. Pierre Vaast Wood on the extreme east of things and left their 1st Brigade in reserve at Méaulte, Villesous-Corbie, and Méricourt l’Abbé. The latter camp was allotted to the Irish Guards who had to send one company for permanent fatigues to the railway-station — all the valley here was one long siding for men and supplies — and another to the back of Bernafay Wood for Decauville construction, while the remainder were drilled and instructed in their specialties. This was the time in our armies’ development when nearly every third man was a “specialist” in some branch or another except, as company officers remarked under their breaths, the rifle and its bayonet. The men’s deferred Christmas dinners (it will be remembered they had been in the line on the day itself) were duly issued by half a battalion at a time in the big cinema-hall in camp, and, lest the transport officer should by any chance enjoy himself, their transport chose this time of rest to develop “contagious stomatitis,” a form of thrush in the mouth, and had to be isolated. Still, setting aside the cold, which does not much trouble well-fed men, the Battalion had some pleasant memories of its rest by the river. Leave was possible; smoking-parties made themselves in the big huts; the sergeants gave a dinner, which is a sure sign of wellbeing; there were cinemas for the men, and no one troubled himself too much for the noise of the guns ten miles up stream.

It is difficult to rediscover a battalion’s psychology at any given time, but so far as evidence goes they had not too black doubts as to the upshot of the campaign, though every platoon kept its loud-voiced pessimists who foretold that they would take root in the trenches for evermore and christened the R.O.D. locomotives “Roll on Duration!”

On the 1st February (1917) in “cold bright weather with snow on the ground,” the 1st Brigade were once again in Divisonal Reserve near Carnoy, ready to relieve the 3rd Coldstream near Rancourt on the recently taken-over French sector, in trenches a little westerly of St. Pierre Vaast Wood which is under Sailly-Saillisel. In the wood itself lay a dreadful mine-crater of the old days, filled, as it seemed, with dead French Colonial troops — browned and blackened bodies, their white skulls still carrying jaunty red caps. Our wondering patrols used to look down into it sometimes of moonlight nights.

They moved out on the 2nd of February
via
Maricourt and Maurepas, left No. 2 Company under canvas in Maurepas Ravine, distributed the rest in shelters and dug-outs and resumed their watch. The frozen ground stopped much digging or “improvements,” and the enemy’s front line gave no trouble, but a few small shells were sent over, one of which hit 2nd Lieutenant J. Orr temporarily in command of No. 1 Company and wounded a couple of men. The rest of their turn — February 2 to 6 — was quiet, for the new-fallen snow gave away the least movement on either side. While they crouched over their braziers and watched each other, the operations round Serre and at the nose of the Arras–Le Transloy salient, began again as the earth’s crust hardened. The Sixty-third Division hammered its way for a day and a night up the southern slopes of Serre, and our guns were threatening the line of enemy’s trenches from Grandcourt westward. This move unkeyed the arch of his local defences at this point, and next day he evacuated Grandcourt and such of his front as lay between Grandcourt and the Stuff redoubt.

By the 7th February our troops had carried forward to midway between Beaucourt and Miraumont, and on the 10th February the Thirty-second Division took in hand the business of shifting the enemy out of what remained to him in the Beaumont Valley. Their advance brought Serre village into direct danger from our artillery, and any further move on our part up the valley of the Ancre would make Serre untenable.

On the 17th February that move was made by three Divisions (Second, Eighteenth, and Sixty-third) before dawn, through heavy mist on the edge of a thaw, and in the face of a well-contrived barrage that caught the battalions forming up. But the positions and observation-points, already gained, helped our guns to help the infantry, broke up the enemy’s counter-attacks with satisfactory losses, and, in the next few days, gave us good command over the enemy’s artillery dispositions in the valley of the Upper Ancre and a fair look into his defences at Pys and Miraumont. Then the game stood thus: If Miraumont, which lay at our mercy, were taken, Serre would go; if Serre went, Puisieux-au-Mont and Gomiecourt, the pillar of the old German western defences, would be opened too; and it was no part of the German idea to cling to untenable positions, whose loss would have to be explained at home where people were asking why victory delayed so long. Not only was the whole of Arras–Le Transloy salient shaking by now; there was the prospect of indefinite wastage to no good end all along the rest of the Somme front, and though the weather, till then, had blunted the following weight of each following blow, many considerations pointed to a temporary withdrawal of a few miles in order to advance the more irresistibly at a more fitting time. Slowly, methodically then, with careful screens of veiled machine-guns behind them, and a series of scientifically chosen artillery positions, equally capable of supporting a counter-attack, or checking and destroying any too inconvenient body of pursuers, the enemy moved back into ground not yet churned and channelled by shell or traffic, over untouched roads which he had kept in perfect order, to this very end; and left us to follow through bottomless valleys of desolation.