Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1172 page)

An interesting point is the unshaken serenity with which the men took the new developments. They were far too annoyed at being shifted about and losing their rest to consider too curiously the underlying causes of evil. They left the 3rd Coldstream to deal with the situation and went into billets in Le Préol, and the next day (April 26) into Béthune for their hot baths. A draft of 3 officers (Captain T. M. D. Bailie and 2nd Lieutenants A. W. L. Paget and R. S. G. Paget) with 136 N.C.O.’s and men reached them on the 27th, when there was just time to give them a hot meal and send them at once to the trenches in the bright moonlight under “a certain amount of rifle-fire and intermittent shelling from small guns which did not do much damage.” An enemy field-gun, long known as an unlocated pest, spent the morning busily enfilading the trenches, in spite of the assurances of our artillery that they had found and knocked it out several times. Appeal was made to an R.A. Brigadier who, after examining the ground, left the Battalion under the impression that “it was likely a gun would be brought up early tomorrow.” Nothing more is heard of the hope: but guns were scarce at that time.

There were other preoccupations for those in command. The second battle of Ypres, that month’s miracle of naked endurance against the long-planned and coldly thought-out horror of gas, had begun near Langemarck with the choking-out of the French and Canadian troops, and had continued day after day with the sacrifice of battalions and brigades, Regulars and Territorials swallowed up in the low grey-yellow gas banks that threatened Ypres from Langemarck to Hill 60, or beaten to pulp by heavy explosives and the remnant riddled anew by machine-guns. Once again England was making good with her best flesh and blood for the material and the training she had deliberately refused to provide while yet peace held. The men who came out of that furnace alive say that no after experience of all the War approached it for sheer concentrated, as well as prolonged, terror, confusion, and a growing sense of hopelessness among growing agonies. If a world, at that time unbroken to German methods, stood aghast at the limited revelations allowed by the press censorship reports, those who had seen a man, or worse, a child, dying from gas may conceive with what emotions men exposed to the new torment regarded it, what kind of reports leaked out from clearing-stations and hospitals, and what work therefore was laid upon officers to maintain an even and unaffected temper in the battalions in waiting. The records, of course, do not mention these details, nor, indeed, do they record when gas-protectors (for masks, helmets, and boxes were not evolved till much later) were first issued to the troops on the Givenchy sector. But private letters of the 25th April, at the time the German mine in the orchard occupied their attention, remark, “we have all been issued out with an antidote to the latest German villainy . . . i.e. of asphyxiating gases. . . . What they will end by doing one can hardly imagine. The only thing is to be prepared for anything.”

The first “masks” were little more than mufflers or strips of cloth dipped in lime water. A weathercock was rigged up near Headquarters dug-outs, and when the wind blew from the Germans these were got ready. False alarms of gas, due to strange stenches given off by various explosives, or the appearance of a mist over the German line, were not uncommon, and on each occasion, it appeared that the C.O. had to turn out, sniff, and personally pass judgment on the case. The men had their instructions what to do in case of emergency, concluding with the simple order, perhaps the result of experience at Ypres, “in event of the first line being overcome, the second immediately charge through the gas and occupy the front-line trenches.”

But to return to the routine:

The casualties for the month of April were 2 officers and 8 men killed and 1 officer and 42 men wounded. The strength of the Battalion stood at 28 officers and 1133 men, higher than it had ever been before.

The following is the distribution of officers and N.C.O.’s at that time, a little less than three weeks before the battle of Festubert.

The first ten days of May passed quietly. Mines, for the moment, gave no further anxiety, bombing and bombardments were light, reliefs were happily effected, and but 1 man was killed and 1 wounded. Two officers, Lieutenant H. A. Boyse and 2nd Lieutenant R. H. W. Heard, joined on the 2nd.

THE BATTLE OF FESTUBERT

It was judged expedient while the second battle of Ypres was in full heat that the Germans should, if possible, be kept from sending any help to their front near Arras, in Artois, which at the time was under strong pressure from the French thrusting towards Lens. To this end, our First Army was ordered to attack the German Seventh Corps over the flat ground between Laventie and Richebourg on a front of some ten miles. The affair opened very early on the morning of the 9th May with a bombardment, imposing in itself by the standards of the day, but, as before, insufficient to break the wire or crush enough of the machine-gun nests. The Germans seem to have had full information of its coming, and dealt with it severely. The whole attack from north to south — Indian, Scottish, Territorials, and the rest — was caught and broken as it rolled against the well-wired German trenches.

The Battalion, whose part, then, was to maintain the right of our Army where it joined the French, heard the French guns open on the night of the 8th May, and by dawn the English gun-fire was in full swing to the north — one continuous roar broken by the deep grunt of our howitzer-shells bursting; for these were so few that we could pick them up by ear. The Guards had no concern with these matters till the trouble should thicken. Their business was to stand ready for any counter-attack and keep up bursts of rapid fire at intervals while they waited for what little news came to hand. It was uniformly bad, except that the French in the south seemed to be making some headway, and so far as aeroplanes and artillery observers could make out, there was no concentration of troops immediately in front of them. The Germans were too busy with the immediate English front to extend their commitments to the southward, and the next two days were, for the Battalion in their trenches, the quietest that they had known for some time. Then came orders to hand over to the 1st Scots Guards and rejoin the Second Division near Le Touret in readiness to carry on the attack which had broken down on the 9th. They bivouacked in the open, and the weather turned cold and wet, but the men, relieved from the trenches and assured of a change of work, sat it out “singing songs and playing games in the wet!” They had been forbidden to light fires, lest they should accidentally use the local farmers’ tobacco-drying poles or hedge-stuff. And while they waited under their mackintosh sheets the armies waited on the weather. A fresh attack was to be launched from Richebourg by the Rue du Bois, and southward as far as Festubert, but, this time, by, night not by day, and after longer artillery preparation. The 5th and 6th Brigades were to open it, with the 4th (Guards) Brigade in support. It began at 11.30 on the 15th, when, at huge cost, something like half a mile in breadth and a quarter of a mile in depth of trenches was screwed out of the Germans by the morning of Sunday the 16th. The Battalion was moved from bivouac in the dawn of that day to support the 5th Brigade which had not gone so far forward as the 6th, and spent the day in trenches at Rue du Bois under incessant mixed artillery fire, which killed 1 man and wounded an officer and 28 men — the whole without being able to inflict any damage on the enemy. Indeed, the survivors of the battle here agreed that they saw no German dead other than some corpses left over from previous attacks. They returned to bivouac in wet and mist, and on the afternoon of the 17th were, with the 2nd Grenadiers, ordered to occupy the line then held by the 21st Brigade, and to push forward and dig in near a farm (Cour l’Avoine) bristling with machine-guns across a stretch of dead flat, muddy ground, pitted with water-logged shell-holes. The left was to keep touch with the 6th Brigade and the right with the Grenadiers, the whole line facing north-east from Quinque Rue.

They extended in the dusk. The left flanking company, No. 4, found no sign of the 6th Brigade, but received a message from the 5th King’s Battalion that their brigade orders were that the right of that battalion should get into touch with the Irish but would not be up till late; so one machine-gun was sent to strengthen that company’s flank. No. 2 Company, on the right flank, had reached its objective and dug itself in under bursts of raking machine-gun and rifle-fire directed against the dykes and bridges, which unfortunately wounded both Captain Mylne and Lieutenant Kemp, and the company command devolved on 2nd Lieutenant S. G. Tallents. The left flank, meantime, was in the air without tools or sandbags, but luckily the night was wet and it was allowed to dig itself in unmolested. The casualties for the day were only 2 officers wounded, 3 men killed, and 5 wounded.

The 18th dawned in wreaths of driving rain and mist that wrapped the flats. The preliminary bombardment of farm Cour l’Avoine was postponed for lack of good light, and in that lull a Brigadier whose men had already attacked the farm unsuccessfully came across the trenches to the Battalion and gave his experiences and recommendations. The weather made one low cluster of devastated buildings seen across the levels look remarkably like any other; and it seems pure luck that the attack, as originally intended, was not launched against the wrong objective. From noon on, the enemy began to shell the Battalion severely in its shallow trenches, and there were forty casualties while they lay awaiting orders. The attack began at 4.30 P.M. Cour l’Avoine was then so bombarded by heavy shellfire that, as usual, it seemed that nothing in or around it could live. But as soon as the attacking companies rose and showed over the ground-line, the hail of machine-gun fire re-opened, and for the next three hours, the Irish suffered in the open and among the shell holes, beaten down, as the other battalions had been before them, round the piled wreckage of Cour l’Avoine farm. In one trench, abandoned by the enemy, they fell into a neat German trap. Its parapet facing towards the British was bullet-proof enough, but the parados, though proof against the casual splinters of our shrapnel, which had no back-blast, had been pared thin enough to pass all bullets. Consequently, when the trench was occupied, accurately ranged machine-guns opened on the parados, and riddled the men to such an extent that one company had to get out and take refuge behind what had been the parapet. The greatest distance gained in all was about three hundred yards, and this with their left flank still in the air and protected by the one machine-gun which Lieutenant Straker, the unflinching enthusiast of the weapon, had brought into a communication-trench. At last they dug in where they were; the next brigade on the left linked up to the one machine-gun communication-trench, and with their old friends the Herts Battalion and the East Anglian Field Company, with whom they had tested mines together, they began to consolidate. The C.O. writes “I tried to find out what officers I had left. Out of twenty-eight there were twelve, but four of these had been left behind with the transport a day or two before.” Of the eight who had come through the affair on their feet, only two were absolutely untouched. Here is the list: Captain J. N. Guthrie and 2nd Lieutenant V. W. D. Fox, killed by shell-fire, while leading their company — No. 1 — to reinforce the line; 11 officers were wounded, Major the Earl of Rosse very severely in the head by a piece of shell; Major Reid, concussion from the explosion of a shell; Captain G. E. S. Young, hand; Lieutenant H. T. A. H. Boyse, head; 2nd Lieutenant S. G. Tallents, thigh; 2nd Lieutenant J. R. Ralli, stomach; 2nd Lieutenant E. W. Campbell, head; 2nd Lieutenant Hon. W. S. P. Alexander, neck; 2nd Lieutenant R. S. G. Paget, arm; 2nd Lieutenant J. K. Greer, leg and hand; 2nd Lieutenant C. de Persse, head. Twenty-two men were killed, 284 wounded, and 86 missing. The Battalion came through it all, defeated, held down at long range, but equable in temper and morale.