Short leave and a flying visit across the Channel was a pleasant break in winter warfare. December is not quite the best time of the year, though, to get one’s first impressions of England. Surprise at the apparent familiarity of everything in the big city was the first feeling. Trafalgar Square, the Embankment, the Monument, the Abbey, even Whitechapel left one with the feeling that he had come back after many years to something familiar in a former existence. It was rather the sense of renewing old associations than of forming new ones. So other Australian soldiers who saw England in the flowing time of the year found, not only in its City lions, but in its quiet rustic lanes and hedgerows places where neither bird nor flower were strange, and felt that same suggestion of ‘auld lang syne’. One would like to imagine it the Cradle Call of the Race, though poetry, painting and the prose of historian, naturalist and antiquarian, all unconsciously absorbed, are perhaps the real factors of familiarity. That, after all, is only another way of stating the facts, without disturbing the fancy.
Travelling to Scotland on the Great Northern Railway one day I had as companions two aged gentlemen, one of whom, an American master engineer with eight hundred men in his control, remarked that the railway luncheon baskets were not up to the standard.
‘I expect, though,’ he said, ‘they’re a sight better than what you have in the trenches.’
‘Yes, decidedly better,’ I replied. The second traveller seemed to shake off his indifference.
‘You get much better food than that,’ he asserted. I explained that I was not grumbling—rather otherwise—but tried to explain that we were not habitually set up to ham and chicken, asparagus, fresh rolls and butter, with wine to wash it down. He relapsed into indifference again, but a little later casually remarked that he was with Lord Davenport, as a Director of Food Supply to the British Army on the Western Front.
On my return to the Somme front after leave, my company was in reserve for a while before the Butte de Warlencourt, and there the old Gallipoli wounds broke out again and caused some trouble. After a few days in hospital I joined up again just in time for one of those night stunts, the mystery and adventure of which were ever a strong appeal. Personal interest in the undertaking was sharpened by the presentiment that the next fight was to be the end of the passage. So strong was the conviction that I went through my valise, cleared up all my papers, and wrote a card home to be posted in the event of my death.
We had been four days and nights in the trench and were about to be relieved by the 7th Brigade, when instructions came from headquarters to detail a strong reconnoitring party to move out in the darkness, get in touch with the enemy and find out his strength and dispositions. I sent out first a light patrol, which returned in about an hour and reported that all the indications showed that the Huns were holding the line in considerable strength, and that their front was heavily covered with wire. This was reported to Headquarters, who almost immediately ordered that a strong patrol should be sent out with instructions to penetrate the enemy line. No reasons were given for this extraordinary direction, beyond the remark that if only one man got back with the necessary information it was worth the sacrifice. All of them got back with the information that it was quite impossible to get through the barbed wire entanglements. The report was still unsatisfactory, and the next order was to send out three strong patrols, which meant practically the whole available strength of the company, and pierce the wires at three separate points. This time they carried machine guns. With only about eight men remaining in the trench at that point, I asked permission to lead the attack, but was ordered to stay at the telephone and report as soon as any information was received.
It was a long wait and a trying one, more wearing and worrying than action. For two hours I waited without a sound from the front to indicate either success or discovery. No message came; no man returned from out of the blackness, there was no break in the tension but the ever worrying insistence of Headquarters for information. It was a relief when the order finally came to take the whole of my company and attack at one o’clock.
It was then for the first time that I got some idea as to the reason for action. There was a belief that the enemy had retreated right along our sector, that the main German Army was thirty miles back, and that he was merely holding the trenches in front with a skeleton force which would retire on the first demonstration. I asked whether there was any mistake about the order, because no word had come from the front; they seemed to have disappeared utterly. The company with which I was to attack, as they must be aware, reduced to a strength of eight of all ranks, and to advance with such a handful and without artillery preparation, was to invite a fiasco. I was told to send down a runner as a guide, and the second in command would come up and see what could be done. In the black night the runner lost his way. Five men were sent into no man’s land to try and get touch of the lost patrols, but still no word came back. Finally, in sheer desperation, I said: ‘Come on, Sergeant Major. It’s one o’clock and we must attack. Get the bombs.’
Feeling cautiously along the front we came upon our missing patrols, sheltering in an abandoned trench under the German wires.
‘What are you doing there?’ I asked.
‘We can’t get through the German wires, Sir,’ was the reply.
After the worry of the last couple of hours I was not in a particularly amiable mood, and retorted: ‘Do you think that, if you sit there looking at them, the wires will fall down or fly away?’
Scouts were sent out with instructions to try and find a passage, however small, though it permitted but one man to go through at a time. There was no success. A second patrol returned with reports just as discouraging, and finally I went forward with a man to investigate. There was just one point in our favour, the one thing which had saved us from discovery. Usually the German protective wires were not more than fifteen paces in advance of their trench. At Butte de Warlencourt, a little flat topped ridge formed the front German line, and the contour of the ground compelled the enemy, in order to get a better field of fire, to put his entanglements about fifty yards out from his fighting post.
His front line of wire was wholly on the ‘knife rest’ pattern, prepared in sections, so that, instead of boring in with auger pegs and crisscrossing the wires between them, the lengths of defensive wire already prepared may be carried forward separately and placed in position end to end. Beyond this, I found later, was a band of low apron wire about twelve feet in width. By burrowing away at the junction of the knife rest sections I discovered that it was possible to force them just far enough apart to make room for one man to crawl through. The patrols nearly a hundred strong were mustered at that point. Whispered instructions were passed along to plaster the bayonets with mud, so that in the event of flares going up the light gleaming upon the steel should not betray our position.
The plan was that I should crawl through the wires and, immediately on getting inside them, drop down. Each successive man who followed was to drop down on either side of me until the whole company was extended and ready for attack. The surprise was almost as complete as one could wish it, but through anxiety or over-eagerness, the last few men blundered into the apron wire, which twanged like banjo strings in the darkness. The German sentry knew the significance of that sound. He immediately challenged and fired, but before they could do much more I shouted the order to charge, and the company rose and dashed for their trench.
Quite obviously they had no warning this time of our visit, indeed we had little notice of it either. A few bombs were thrown; they waited until we were within thirty yards, and then ran like scared rabbits. With a few casualties to a unit on the left which met some opposition, we broke into the trench and bombed down the bays which, placed at intervals of about thirty yards, were especially roomy. With a few men I followed the enemy for about fifty yards beyond the trench. They stayed not upon the order of going, but went at once, making barely a show of fight. That is the way of the Hun. When assured of his strength, or his advantage in position, he will ‘stick it’ as well as the next. But when the unknown comes to him suddenly out of the darkness the superman softens, and all his iron turns to putty. A few of us chased him for fifty yards beyond his line with little hope of catching up, and the work of more immediate necessity was to consolidate and hold what we had won.
Here was an instance where what seemed to be an almost helpless adventure had, with a little luck and a lot of pertinacity, turned out almost a bloodless success. Feeling that I was being a bit unfairly blamed for circumstances beyond control, I was fuming with rage, determined to force a way through or over the wires at all cost, even though it had to be done by carrying over the duck boards from our own trench and throwing them across the enemy wire to bridge a passage. That was a last extremity and, with the flares up and the machine guns sweeping us at point blank range, would have meant heavy casualties.
In the brief trench turmoil I had lost my steel helmet, wound a woollen comforter round my head and armed with a German rifle which one of the enemy, in his eagerness to get quickly off the mark, had thrown away, I must at the moment have looked rather more like a Turk than a Briton. I was quite aware when, as I left half the company forward later to work around the village of Warlencourt, that my men were finding much amusement in the spectacle. I was probably the first Britisher amongst the ruins of Warlencourt, where the Germans as usual, had left ‘the mark of the beast’.14