Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1219 page)

GINCHY

But the idea of the battle of the 15th September was, as usual, immensely definite. Rawlinson’s Fourth Army was to attack between Combles and Martinpuich and seize Morval, Lesbœufs, Gueudecourt, and Flers; the French attacking at the same time on the right, and the Reserve Army on the left. Immediately after our objective had been won the cavalry would advance and, apparently, seize the high ground all round the Department, culminating at Bapaume. The work of the Guards Division, whose views of cavalry at that particular moment are not worth reproducing, was to support the cavalry “on the above lines.” The 2nd Guards Brigade would take the right of the attack on Lesbœufs; the 1st the left, with the 3rd Brigade in Reserve, and the 71st Infantry Brigade on the right of the 2nd Guards Brigade. The 3rd Grenadiers and 1st Coldstream were respectively right and left leading battalions, with the 1st Scots Guards and the 2nd Irish Guards as right and left supporting battalions; each advancing in four waves of single rank; two machine-guns accompanying each leading battalion and four each the supporting ones. Three other machine-guns were to bring up the rear flanked, on either side, by two Stokes mortar-guns. The Brigade’s allotted front was five hundred yards to the north-east of Ginchy, and since the normal enemy barrage between Guillemont and Ginchy was a thing to be avoided if possible, they were assembled east of the latter village and not behind it. Their objectives were duly laid down for them in green, brown, blue, and red lines on the maps, or as one young gentleman observed, “just like a game of snooker except that every one played with the nearest ball as soon as the game began.” But every one understood perfectly the outlines of the game. Their predecessors had been playing it by hundreds of thousands since the 1st of July. They knew they would all go on till they were dropped, or blown off the face of the earth.

They dug themselves in on the night of the 14th in shallow trenches about ten paces apart, a trench to each wave which was made up of two half companies. The 2nd Irish Guards having expended one (No. 2 ) company on the 13th September, their No. 3 Company was distributed between Nos. 1 and 4 who accordingly went over in two enlarged waves.

The Brigade lost hardly a man from enemy bombardment during the long hours that passed while waiting for the dawn. At six o’clock on the 15th our heavies opened; and, as far as the 2nd Brigade was concerned, brought down the German barrage exactly where it was expected, between Guillemont and Ginchy, which, by German logic, should have been crowded with our waiting troops. Thanks, however, to the advice of Major Rocke and Captain Alexander as to the massing-point, that blast fell behind our men, who thus lived to progress into the well-laid and unbroken machine-gun fire that met them the instant they advanced. Their first objective (green line) was six hundred yards away through the mists of the morning and the dust and flying clods of the shells. A couple of hundred yards out, the 3rd Grenadiers and 1st Coldstream came upon a string of shell-holes which might or might not have started life as a trench, filled with fighting Germans, insufficiently dealt with by our guns. This checked the waves for a little and brought the Irish storming into the heels of the leading line, and as the trench lay obliquely across the advance, swung the whole of the 2nd Brigade towards the left, and into the 1st Brigade, who had already met a reasonable share of trouble of their own. Indeed, during this first advance, one party of the 2nd Irish Guards, under Major Rocke and Lieutenant G. Bambridge and 2nd Lieutenant Mylne found themselves mixed up among the men of the 1st Battalion. Moreover, the attack of the Sixth Division which was taking place on the right of the 2nd Guards Brigade had been held up, and it seemed as though the whole of the machine-gun fire from the low fortified quadrilateral dominating that end of the line was sweeping like hail into the right of the 2nd Guards Brigade. This still further, though they were not aware of it at the time, turned them towards the left.

The Battalion, without landmarks to guide, did what they could. Under Captain Alexander and 2nd Lieutenant Greer, the Germans in the first unexpected trench were all accounted for. Greer also shot down and put out of action an enemy machine-gun, and the thinned line went on. There had been instructions, in Brigade Orders, as to the co-operation of nine tanks that were to assist the Guards Division that day and would, probably, “start from each successive line well in advance of the attacking troops.” Infantry were warned, however, that their work “would be carried out whether the tanks are held up or not.” It was. The tanks were not much more in evidence on that sector than the cavalry which, cantering gaily across the shell-holes, should have captured Bapaume; and long before the Brigade were anywhere near their first objective, companies and battalions were mixed up, in what with other troops, would have been hopeless confusion; but the Guards are accustomed to carry on without worrying whether with their own units or not. In due time, and no man can say what actually happened outside his own range of action, for no man saw anything coherently, their general advance reached the German trench which was their first objective. Its wire had not been cut properly by our guns, and little gasping, sweating parties dodged in and out and round the wings of it, bombing enemies where they sighted them. There were many Germans, too, in the shellholes that they overpassed who fired into their backs, and all the while from their right flank, now wholly in the air, came the lashing machine-gun fire of the quadrilateral which was so effectively holding the Sixth Division. So the wrecked trench of the first objective was, as one man said, “none too bad a refuge even if we had to bomb ourselves into it.”

They tumbled in, as they arrived, about a hundred and twenty of all units of the Brigade with Captain Alexander of the Battalion, Captain F. J. Hopley, 3rd Grenadiers, Lieutenant Boyd-Rochfort, Scots Guards, Lieutenant M. Tennant, Scots Guards, attached to the machine-guns, and 2nd Lieutenants Greer and Lysaght, of the Battalion. A few minutes later Colonel Claude de Crespigny of the 2nd Grenadiers of the 1st Brigade arrived with about fifty men. They had fairly lost the rest of their Brigade in the dust and smoke, and had fetched up, fragmentarily, among the 2nd Brigade, at what was fast becoming a general rendezvous. Finding that the first objective still needed a great deal more combing out, the mixed parties of officers and men divided and began to bomb left and right along the trench. Then Colonel Godman of the Scots Guards appeared (it was all one whirling vision of breathless men and quickly passing faces), and took over general command of the Brigade. With him were Lieutenant Mackenzie and Captain the Hon. K. Digby, the adjutants of the 1st Scots Guards and 1st Coldstream; while Captain FitzGerald, Lieutenant Keenan, and 2nd Lieutenant Close of the Battalion were bombing and taking prisoners up an offshoot of the trench in the direction of Lesbœufs. The Germans who had fought so well among the shell-holes did not seem to be represented here for they surrendered with ease. Their own people machine-gunned them so purposefully as they scuttled towards our lines that sometimes they bolted back to the comparative decency of the trench whence they had been digged.

Meantime the situation did not clear itself. The uncut wire of the first objective and the general drift of the whole attack to the left had made a gap between the two front battalions of the 2nd Brigade’s attack, that is to say, the 3rd Grenadiers and the 1st Coldstream. A party of a hundred of the former battalion were pushed up into it, and seem to have disappeared into the general maelstrom. At the same time, the 3rd Grenadiers were trying to get touch with the Sixth Division, on their sorely hammered right. Major Rocke, Lieutenant Bambridge, and 2nd Lieutenant Mylne and their party of the 2nd Irish Guards, were far out towards the left where the 2nd Brigade’s advance had outrun that of the 1st, so much that the 1st Coldstream’s left flank was in the air and there was a gap between the two brigades. Here Major Rocke’s party found Colonel Guy Baring (he was killed a little later) commanding the 1st Coldstream, and at his suggestion formed a defensive flank on the left of the Coldstream until the 1st Brigade drew level. This precaution was rewarded by a satisfactory bag estimated at over two hundred Huns who, being incommoded by the 2nd Brigade’s action, were trying to slip through the gap between the two brigades and escape round the rear of the 2nd Brigade, and who were mostly killed by small-arm fire.

More men kept dribbling in to the first objective trench from time to time (“Like lost hounds, only they’d been fighting every yard of their way home”), and the remnants of the battalions of the Brigade were sorted out and apportioned lengths of trench to hold. Thus: “Grenadier Guards, 60 on the right; Scots Guards, 60 next; Irish Guards, 40 next; Coldstream Guards, 10, on the left in touch with the 1st Brigade,” or, at least, as far as any touch could be made. The fighting, of course, continued all round them, and various parties devoted themselves to this as need arose. Everything was in the air now, left and right flanks together, but the Guards Division, as an extremely mixed whole, had pushed forward and taken the ground it had been ordered to take, while the enemy, attacking here, bombing there, and bolting across the shell-holes elsewhere, seemed to be desirous to pull out of action and break away towards Bapaume. Our guns, of which the fighting infantry were unconscious at the tine, had helped them towards this decision. There was some question and discussion in the trench as to whether they should now push on to their second objective or whether our artillery would, as originally laid down, bombard that before a fresh move. But signs of German withdrawal across the bare down and the sight of some of their field-guns trotting back suggested a sporting chance of pushing on towards Lesbœufs, which Captain Ian Colquhoun of the Scots Guards and Captain Lyttelton of the 3rd Grenadiers thought worth taking. Their view was shared by Major Rocke, Captain Alexander, and Lieutenant Mylne of the Battalion, so between them they amassed some hundred men and went out nearly half a mile into an unoccupied trench in a hollow, with standing crops in front. Here they halted and sent back demands for reinforcements. As they were utterly detached from an already detached force, they might as well have indented for elephants. The day went on, and the enemy, realising that our push had come to an end, began to steal forward in small bodies which first out flanked and then practically surrounded the detachment. At last a whole company, hidden in the tall crops, made a rush which should have killed or captured every one in the position. Somehow or other — and again no coherent account was ever rendered, but it was probjably due to our controlled rapid fire — they failed. Our men fought their way out and back to the main body with surprisingly few casualties; and the enemy excitedly following them, came under a limited but well directed machine-gun fire from the main trench. The Diary enters it as “a weak attack from Lesbœufs easily driven off, Lieutenant M. Tennant doing good work with his machine-gun which was well placed on the right.” But nothing is more difficult than to dissect and sift out the times and the values of linked or overlapping episodes throughout one desperate day, where half a dozen separated detachments are each profoundly certain that they, and they alone, bear the weight or turn the tide of the local war. The minuteness of the field of action adds to the confusion, when one remembers that the distance from Ginchy to Lesbœufs was about the extreme range of a service rifle and that the whole of that day’s work had won them about eight hundred yards. For that advance they had paid three hundred casualties among the men, and the following officers: Captain Parsons, Lieutenants Purcell and Walters, both the latter attached to the machine-gun company, killed; Major Rocke, Lieutenant Brew (seriously), and 2nd Lieutenants M. R. FitzGerald, Mylne, and Cutcliffe Hyne wounded. In addition 2nd Lieutenants Vaughan and Tomkins, and Lieutenant Montgomery had been killed in the preliminary work on the 13th September. A total of six officers dead and five wounded.

A partially successful attempt on a German trench ahead of them by a battalion of the Durham Light Infantry a little after dark brought the very long day to an end. The night was quiet, while some units of the Twentieth Division came up and dug themselves in outside their parapet in readiness for the fresh attack which was to begin the next morning. Men could not help admiring, even at the time, the immense and ordered inhumanity of the system that, taking no count of aught except the end, pushed forward through the dead and the debris of war the fresh organisations which were to be spent next day as their predecessors had been. (“Atop of it all, when a man was done with he felt that he was in the road of the others. The same with the battalions. When they was used they was heaved out of the road like a broke lorry, and only too glad of it. But, as I was saying, when we was expended, we all felt ashamed of blocking the traffic with our wounds and our carcases. The only fun for us afterwards was telling them that came up what was awaiting them. But they knew — they knew it already!”)

The 16th September was an almost continuous bombardment of whizz-bangs and 5.9’s on the trench where they still lay; but in the intervals of the shelling men kept turning up and reporting themselves with tales of adventure and extremity among the shell-holes outside. They were relieved a little before midnight and left their battered lair eighty-eight strong,
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Ginchy, Guillemont, and Trônes Wood for the Citadel, which, when they reached their total, had been increased by strays to one hundred and six. Lieutenant Bambridge, eminently capable of looking after himself and his party, turned up later with another sixty. Next day, the weary work of re-making the Battalion began. Lieutenant Dollar had to be sent down to hospital with a return of the dysentery from which he had reported himself recovered. This further reduced the few available officers on their feet. A draft of a hundred and fifty men came in. By absorbing the still effective digging-platoon into the active line, a battalion of four companies of a hundred each was put together and turned out for the next week in the Carnoy mud to drill under new company commanders.