WARFARE
A theme across both volumes is the lack of readiness on the part of Britain for a European war. There are numerous examples of the ways in which the British army began to adapt.
TANKS
A story that a wonderful new weapon would soon appear was very general. Some one had half-seen or been told about the tanks in their well-screened shelters; one or two over-zealous English journals had been industriously hinting at the developments of science; the enemy was uneasy, and, German-fashion, had issued portentous instruction to his men to be on their guard against something. But, however short his training, the British infantryman is a born scoffer. “We had heard about moving forts that weighed thirty ton,” said one of them. “Whatever it might be, we knew we’d have to take the thick o’ the coffee.”
Vol 1. August 1916.
On the 9th September (1916), at Happy Valley, they had their first sight of the tanks, some thirty of which were parked, trumpeting and clanking, near their camp. At that date the creatures were known as “creepy-crawlies” or “hush-hush birds” and were not as useful as they learned to become later.
(15th September 1916) 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.
(17th February 1917). The frost broke on the third week of February, and the last state of the ground was worse even than it had been throughout the rainy autumn. Trenches caved in bodily; dumps sank where they were being piled; the dirt and the buttresses of overhead shelters flaked and fell away in lumps; duckboards went under by furlongs at a time; tanks were immobilised five feet deep and the very bellies of the field-guns gouged into the mud. Only our airmen could see anything beyond or outside the present extreme discomfort, but the mists that came punctually with the thaws helped to baffle even ,their eyes.
(20th November 1917). Twenty-four hours later, it was alive and roaring with our tanks rooting through the massed wire of the Hindenburg Line, the clamour of half-a-dozen divisions launched at their heels and the smashing fire of our guns in advance of them and their covering smoke-screens; while far to the north and south dummy attacks, gas and artillery demonstrations veiled and confused either flank. The opening day was, beyond doubt, a success.
Vol 2. September 1916.
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TACTICS
While in Brigade Reserve for a couple of days No. 1 Company amused itself preparing a grim bait to entice German patrols into No Man’s Land. Two dummies were fabricated to represent dead English soldiers. “One, designed to lie on its back, had a face modelled by Captain Alexander from putty and paint which for ghastliness rivalled anything in Madame Tussaud’s. The frame-work of the bodies was wire, so they could be twisted into positions entirely natural.” While they were being made, on the road outside Brigade Headquarters at Pont du Hem, a French girl came by and believing them to be genuine, fled shrieking down the street. They were taken up to the front line on stretchers, and it chanced that in one trench they had to give place to let a third stretcher pass. On it was a dead man, whom no art could touch.
Next night, February 15, between moonset and dawn, the grisliest hour of the twenty-four, Lieutenant Pym took the twins out into No Man’s Land, arranging them one on its face and the other on its back in such attitudes as are naturally assumed by the old warped dead. “Strapped between the shoulders of the former, for the greater production of German curiosity, was a cylinder sprouting india-rubber tubes. This was intended to resemble a flammenwerfer.” Hand- and rifle-grenades were then hurled near the spot to encourage the theory (the Hun works best on a theory) that two British patrols had fought one another in error, and left the two corpses. At evening, the Lewis-gun party and a brace of bombers lay out beside the kill, but it was so wet and cold that they had to be called in, and no one was caught. And all this fancy-work, be it remembered, was carried out joyously and interestedly, as one might arrange for the conduct of private theatricals or the clearance of rat-infested barns.
Vol 2. February 1916.
GAS
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.”
Vol 1. April 1915.
BOMBS
A party from the Brigade was sent to Headquarters of the 11th Engineering Company “to be taught how to throw bombs made out of jam-pots, which apparently are used against the enemy at close quarters in the present trench-warfare.” There were at least half-adozen more or less dangerous varieties of these handmade bombs in use, before standard patterns were evolved and bombing took its place as a regular aid to warfare. The “jam-pot” bomb died early but not before it had caused a sufficiency of trouble to its users. The others will be mentioned in due course.
Vol 1, 1914
CREEPING BARRAGE
The use of an effective barrage developed as the war progressed.
Early in the morning of the 1st February a post held by the Coldstream in a hollow near the embankment, just west of the Railway Triangle—a spot unholy beyond most, even in this sector—was bombed and rushed by the enemy through an old communication-trench. No. 4 Company Irish Guards was ordered to help the Coldstream’s attack. The men were led by Lieutenant Blacker-Douglass who had but rejoined on the 25th January. He was knocked over by a bomb within a few yards of the German barricade to the trench, picked himself up and went on, only to be shot through the head a moment later. Lieutenant Lee of the same Company was shot through the heart; the Company Commander, Captain Long-Innes, and 2nd Lieutenant Blom were wounded, and the command devolved on C.Q.M.S. Carton, who, in spite of a verbal order to retire “which he did not believe,” held on till the morning in the trench under such cover of shell-holes and hasty barricades as could be found or put up. The Germans were too well posted to be moved by bomb or rifle, so, when daylight showed the situation, our big guns were called upon to shell for ten minutes, with shrapnel, the hollow where they lay. The spectacle was sickening, but the results were satisfactory. Then a second attack of some fifty Coldstream and thirty Irish Guards of No. 1 Company under Lieutenants Graham and Innes went forward, hung for a moment on the fringe of their own shrapnel—for barrages were new things—and swept up the trench. It was here that Lance-Corporal O’Leary, Lieutenant Innes’s orderly, won his V.C. He rushed up along the railway embankment above the trenches, shot down 5 Germans behind their first barricade in the trench, then 3 more trying to work a machine-gun at the next barricade fifty yards farther along the trench, and took a couple of prisoners. Eye-witnesses report that he did his work quite leisurely and wandered out into the open, visible for any distance around, intent upon killing another German to whom he had taken a dislike. Meantime, Graham, badly wounded in the head, and Innes, together with some Coldstream, had worked their way into the post and found it deserted. Our guns and our attack had accounted for about 30 dead, but had left 32 wounded and unwounded prisoners, all of whom, with one exception, wept aloud. The hollow was full of mixed dead—Coldstream, Irish, and German.
Vol 1. January 1915.
PERMISSIONS
WW1 Tank
Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=139499
Mills Bomb
By I, Jean-Louis Dubois, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2438919
Irish Guards Gas Warfare
Lieutenant John Wawrick Brooke, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Irish_Guards_Gas_Warfare_Battle_of_the_Somme.jpg