THIRD OBJECTIVE – Village of Haisnes – Conspicuous by high-spired church. Our eventual line will be taken up on the railway behind this village, where we will dig in and await reinforcements.
When Thomas had reached this point, The Actor’s shoulders were shaking with laughter.
‘What’s up?’ asked Thomas irritably.
The Actor giggled: ‘Who in God’s name is responsible for this little effort?’
‘Don’t know,’ Thomas said. ‘Probably Paul the Pimp, or someone like that.’ (Paul the Pimp was a captain on the divisional staff, young, inexperienced, and much disliked. He ‘wore red tabs upon his chest And even on his undervest.’) ‘Between the six of us, but you youngsters must be careful not to let the men know, this is what they call a “subsidiary attack”. There will be no troops in support. We’ve just got to go over and keep the enemy busy while the folk on our right do the real work. You notice that the bombardment is much heavier over there. They’ve knocked the Hohenzollern Redoubt to bits. Personally, I don’t give a damn either way. We’ll get killed whatever happens.’
We all laughed.
‘All right, laugh now, but by God, on Saturday we’ve got to carry out this funny scheme.’ I had never heard Thomas so talkative before.
‘Sorry,’ The Actor apologized, ‘carry on with the dictation.’
Thomas went on:
The attack will be preceded by forty minutes’ discharge of the accessory,* which will clear the path for a thousand yards, so that the two railway lines will be occupied without difficulty. Our advance will follow closely behind the accessory. Behind us are three fresh divisions and the Cavalry Corps. It is expected we shall have no difficulty in breaking through. All men will parade with their platoons; pioneers, servants, etc., to be warned. All platoons to be properly told off under N.C.O.S. Every N.C.O. is to know exactly what is expected of him, and when to take over command in case of casualties. Men who lose touch must join up with the nearest company or regiment and push on. Owing to the strength of the accessory, men should be warned against remaining too long in captured trenches where the accessory is likely to collect, but to keep to the open and above all to push on. It is important that if smoke-helmets have to be pulled down they must be tucked in under the shirt.
The Actor interrupted again. ‘Tell me, Thomas, do you believe in this funny accessory?’
Thomas said: ‘It’s damnable. It’s not soldiering to use stuff like that, even though the Germans did start it. It’s dirty, and it’ll bring us bad luck. We’re sure to bungle it. Take those new gas-companies – sorry, excuse me this once, I mean accessory-companies – their very look makes me tremble. Chemistry-dons from London University, a few lads straight from school, one or two N.C.O.S of the old-soldier type, trained together for three weeks, then given a job as responsible as this. Of course they’ll bungle it. How could they do anything else? But let’s be merry. I’m going on again:
Men of company: what they are to carry:
Two hundred rounds of ammunition (bomb-throwers fifty, and signallers one hundred and fifty rounds).
Heavy tools carried in sling by the strongest men.
Waterproof sheet in belt.
Sandbag in right tunic-pocket.
Field dressing and iodine.
Emergency ration, including biscuit.
One tube-helmet, to be worn when we advance, rolled up on the head. It must be quite secure and the top part turned down. If possible each man will be provided with an elastic band.
One smoke helmet, old pattern, to be carried for preference behind the back where it is least likely to be damaged by stray bullets, etc.
Wire-cutters, as many as possible, by wiring party and others; hedging gloves by wire party.
Platoon screens, for artillery observation, to be carried by a man in each platoon who is not carrying a tool.
Packs, capes, greatcoats, blankets will be dumped, not carried.
No one is to carry sketches of our position or anything to be likely of service to the enemy.
That’s all. I believe we’re going over first with the Middlesex in support. If we get through the German wire I’ll be satisfied. Our guns don’t seem to be cutting it. Perhaps they’re putting that off until the intense bombardment. Any questions?’
That afternoon I repeated the whole rigmarole to the platoon, and told them of the inevitable success attending our assault. They seemed to believe it. All except Sergeant Townsend. ‘Do you say, sir, that we have three divisions and the Cavalry Corps behind us?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I answered.
‘Well, excuse me, sir, I’m thinking it’s only those chaps on the right that’ll get reinforcements. If we get half a platoon of Mons Angels,* that’s about all we will get.’
‘Sergeant Townsend,’ I said, ‘you’re a well-known pessimist. This is going to be a really good show.’
We spent the night repairing damaged trenches.
When morning came we were relieved by the Middlesex, and marched back to Béthune, where we dumped our spare kit at the Montmorency Barracks. The battalion officers messed together in a château near by. This billet was claimed at the same time by the staff of a New Army division, due to take part in the fighting next day. The argument ended amicably with the division and battalion messing together. It was, someone pointed out, like a brutal caricature of The Last Supper in duplicate. In the middle of the long table sat the two pseudo-Christs, our colonel and the divisional general. Everybody was drinking a lot; the subalterns, allowed whisky for a treat, grew rowdy. They raised their glasses with: ‘Cheerio, we will be messing together tomorrow night in La Bassée!’ Only the company commanders were looking worried. I remember ‘C’ Company commander especially, Captain A. L. Samson, biting his thumb and refusing to join in the excitement. I think it was Childe-Freeman of ‘B’ Company who said that night: ‘The last time the regiment visited these parts we were under decent leadership. Old Marlborough had more sense than to attack the La Bassée lines; he masked them and went around.’
The G.S.O.I of the New Army division, a staff-colonel, knew the adjutant well. They had played polo together in India. I happened to be sitting opposite them. The G.S.O.I said, rather drunkenly: ‘Charley, see that silly old woman over there? Calls himself General Commanding! Doesn’t know where he is; doesn’t know where his division is; can’t even read a map properly. He’s marched the poor sods off their feet and left his supplies behind, God knows how far back. They’ve had to use their iron rations and what they could pick up in the villages. And tomorrow he’s going to fight a battle. Doesn’t know anything about battles; the men have never been in trenches before, and tomorrow’s going to be a glorious balls-up, and the day after tomorrow he’ll be sent home.’ Then he ended, quite seriously: ‘Really, Charley, it’s just like that, no exaggeration. You mark my words!’
That night we marched back again to Cambrin. The men were singing. Being mostly from the Midlands, they sang comic songs rather than Welsh hymns: Slippery Sam, When we’ve Wound up the Watch on the Rhine, and I do like a S’nice S’mince Pie, to concertina accompaniment. The tune of S’nice & mince Pie ran in my head all next day, and for the week following I could not get rid of it. The Second Welsh would never have sung a song like When we’ve Wound up the Watch on the Rhine. Their only songs about the war were defeatist:
I want to go home,
I want to go home.
The coal-box and shrapnel they whistle and roar,
I don’t want to go to the trenches no more,
I want to go over the sea
Where the Kayser can’t shoot bombs at me.
Oh, I
Don’t want to die,
I want to go home.
There were several more verses in the same strain. Hewitt, the Welsh machine-gun officer, had written one in a more offensive spirit:
I want to go home,
I want to go home.
One day at Givenchy the week before last
Th
e Allmands attacked and they nearly got past.
They pushed their way up to the Keep,
Through our maxim-gun sights we did peep,
Oh, my!
They let out a cry,
They never got home.
But the men would not sing it, though they all admired Hewitt.
The Béthune-La Bassée road was choked with troops, guns, and transport, and we had to march miles north out of our way to circle round to Cambrin. Even so, we were held up two or three times by massed cavalry. Everything radiated confusion. A casualty clearing-station had been planted astride one of the principal cross-roads, and was already being shelled. By the time we reached Cambrin, the battalion had marched about twenty miles that day. Then we heard that the Middlesex would go over first, with us in support; and to their left the Second Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, with the Cameronians in support. The young Royal Welch officers complained loudly at our not being given the honour of leading the attack. As the senior regiment, they protested, we were entitled to the ‘Right of the Line’. An hour or so past midnight we moved into trench sidings just in front of the village. Half a mile of communication trench, known as ‘Maison Rouge Alley’, separated us from the firing line. At half-past five the gas would be discharged. We were cold, tired, sick, and not at all in the mood for a battle, but tried to snatch an hour or two of sleep squatting in the trench It had been raining for some time.
A grey, watery dawn broke at last behind the German lines; the bombardment, surprisingly slack all night, brisked up a little. ‘Why the devil don’t they send them over quicker?’ The Actor complained. ‘This isn’t my idea of a bombardment. We’re getting nothing opposite us. What little there seems to be, is going into the Hohenzollern.’
‘Shell shortage. Expected it,’ was Thomas’s laconic reply.
We were told afterwards that on the 23rd a German aeroplane had bombed the Army Reserve shell-dump and sent it up. The bombardment on the 24th, and on the day of the battle itself, compared very poorly with that of the previous days. Thomas looked strained and ill. ‘It’s time they were sending that damned accessory off. I wonder what’s doing.’
The events of the next few minutes are difficult for me now to sort out. I found it more difficult still at the time. All we heard back there in the sidings was a distant cheer, confused crackle of rifle fire, yells, heavy shelling on our front line, more shouts and yells, and a continuous rattle of machine-guns. After a few minutes, lightly wounded men of the Middlesex came stumbling down Maison Rouge Alley to the dressing-station. I stood at the junction of the siding and the Alley.
‘What’s happened? What’s happened?’ I asked.
‘Bloody balls-up,’ was the most detailed answer I could get.
Among the wounded were a number of men yellow-faced and choking, their buttons tarnished green – gas cases. Then came the badly wounded. Maison Rouge Alley being narrow, the stretchers had difficulty in getting down. The Germans started shelling it with five-point-nines.
Thomas went back to battalion headquarters through the shelling to ask for orders. It was the same place that I had visited on my first night in the trenches. This cluster of dug-outs in the reserve line showed very plainly from the air as battalion headquarters, and should never have been occupied during a battle. Just before Thomas arrived, the Germans put five shells into it. The adjutant jumped one way, the colonel another, the R.S.M. a third. One shell went into the signals dug-out, killed some signallers, and destroyed the telephone. The colonel, slightly cut on the hand, joined the stream of wounded and was carried back as far as the Base with it. The adjutant took command.
Meanwhile ‘A’ Company had been waiting in the siding for the rum to arrive; the tradition of every attack being a double tot of rum beforehand. All the other companies got theirs. The Actor began cursing: ‘Where the bloody hell’s that storeman gone?’ We fixed bayonets in readiness to go up and attack as soon as Captain Thomas returned with orders. Hundreds of wounded streamed by. At last Thomas’s orderly appeared. ‘Captain’s orders, sir: “A” Company to move up to the front line.’ At that moment the storeman arrived, without rifle or equipment, hugging the rum-bottle, red-faced and retching. He staggered up to The Actor and said: ‘There you are, sir!’, then fell on his face in the thick mud of a sump-pit at the junction of the trench and the siding. The stopper of the bottle flew out and what remained of the three gallons bubbled on the ground. The Actor made no reply. This was a crime that deserved the death penalty. He put one foot on the storeman’s neck, the other in the small of his back, and trod him into the mud. Then he gave the order ‘Company forward!’ The company advanced with a clatter of steel, and that was the last I ever heard of the storeman.
It seems that at half past four an R.E. captain commanding the gas-company in the front line phoned through to divisional headquarters: ‘Dead calm. Impossible discharge accessory.’ The answer he got was: ‘Accessory to be discharged at all costs.’ Thomas had not overestimated the gas-company’s efficiency. The spanners for unscrewing the cocks of the cylinders proved, with two or three exceptions, to be misfits. The gas-men rushed about shouting for the loan of an adjustable spanner. They managed to discharge one or two cylinders; the gas went whistling out, formed a thick cloud a few yards off in No Man’s Land, and then gradually spread back into our trenches. The Germans, who had been expecting gas, immediately put on their gas-helmets: semi-rigid ones, better than ours. Bundles of oily cotton-waste were strewn along the German parapet and set alight as a barrier to the gas. Then their batteries opened on our lines. The confusion in the front trench must have been horrible; direct hits broke several of the gas-cylinders, the trench filled with gas, the gas-company stampeded.
No orders could come through because the shell in the signals dugout at battalion headquarters had cut communication not only between companies and battalion, but between battalion and division. The officers in the front trench had to decide on immediate action; so two companies of the Middlesex, instead of waiting for the intense bombardment which would follow the advertised forty minutes of gas, charged at once and got as far as the German wire – which our artillery had not yet cut. So far it had been treated only with shrapnel, which had no effect on it; the barbed-wire needed high-explosive, and plenty of it. The Germans shot the Middlesex men down. One platoon is said to have found a gap and got into the German trench. But there were no survivors of the platoon to confirm this. The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders went over, also, on the Middlesex left; but two companies, instead of charging at once, rushed back out of the gas-filled assault trench to the support line, and attacked from there. It will be recalled that the trench system had been pushed forward nearer the enemy in preparation for the battle. These companies were therefore attacking from the old front line, but the barbed-wire entanglements protecting it had not been removed, so that the Highlanders got caught and machine-gunned between their own assault and support lines. The other two companies were equally unsuccessful. When the attack started, the German N.C.O.s had jumped up on the parapet to encourage their men. These were Jäger, famous for their musketry.
The survivors of the two leading Middlesex companies now lay in shell-craters close to the German wire, sniping and making the Germans keep their heads down. They had bombs to throw, but these were nearly all of a new type issued for the battle. The fuses were lighted on the match-box principle, and the rain had made them useless. The other two companies of the Middlesex soon followed in support. Machine-gun fire stopped them half-way. Only one German machine-gun remained in action, the others having been knocked out by rifle or trench-mortar fire. Why the single gun survived is a story in itself.
It starts with the privilege granted British colonial governors and high-commissioners of nominating one or two officers from their countries for attachment in wartime to the regular Army. Under this scheme, the officers began as full lieutenants. The Captain-General of Jamaica (if that is his correct style) nominated the eighteen-year-
old son of a rich planter, who went straight from Kingston to the First Middlesex. He was good-hearted enough, but of little use as an officer, having never been out of the island in his life or, except for a short service with the West India militia, seen any soldiering. His company commander took a fatherly interest in ‘Young Jamaica’, and tried to teach him his duties. This company commander was known as ‘The Boy’. He had twenty years’ service with the Middlesex, and the unusual boast of having held every rank from ‘boy’ to captain in the same company. His father, I believe, had been the regimental sergeant-major. But ‘Jamaica’, as a full lieutenant, ranked senior to the other experienced subalterns in the company, who were only second-lieutenants.
The Middlesex colonel decided to shift Jamaica off on some course of extra-regimental appointment at the earliest opportunity. Somewhere about May or June, when instructed to supply an officer for the brigade trench-mortar company, he had sent Jamaica. Trench-mortars being then both dangerous and ineffective, the appointment seemed suitable. At the same time, the Royal Welch had also been asked to detail an officer, and the colonel selected Tiley, an ex-planter from Malaya, and what is called a ‘fine natural soldier’. Tiley had been chosen because, when attached to us from a Lancashire regiment, he showed his resentment at the manner of his welcome somewhat too plainly. But, by September, mortars had improved in design and become an important infantry arm; so Jamaica, being senior to Tiley, held the responsible position of brigade mortar officer.
When the Middlesex charged, The Boy fell mortally wounded as he climbed over the parapet. He tumbled back and began crawling down the trench to the stretcher-bearers’ dug-out, past Jamaica’s trench-mortar emplacement. Jamaica had lost his gun-team, and was boldly serving the trench-mortars himself. On seeing The Boy, however, he deserted his post and ran off to fetch a stretcher-party. Tiley, meanwhile, on the other flank opposite Mine Point, had knocked out all the machine-guns within range. He went on until his mortar burst. Only one machine-gun in the Pope’s Nose, a small salient facing Jamaica, remained active.