Chapter 8
As the German plane banked and flew off, a few of the Tommies in the strongpoints near the guns spared a moment to speed it on its way with a volley of rifle fire. But their more immediate concern was holding off a substantial force of enemy infantry which was pressing in from the slope to the north. With the help of Heybittel’s guns and another of B Battery, which was covering the approach to Caponne Farm, they were succeeding admirably. Although he prudently increased his altitude, the pilot could see enough of the fighting below to judge that it was more than a little confused. There were no clear-cut battle lines, no chequerboard pattern of troops advancing in orderly columns, and no movement on the roads behind the battle zone which would suggest that the British were demoralized or in flight. From such a height it was hardly possible to distinguish the sombre grey of the German uniforms from the dingy khaki of the Tommies, but it was plain to see that there was still spasmodic firing in places close to the original front line where the fighting should have died down long ago.
It was now mid-afternoon and, although German troops had penetrated deep into the line just a mile or so to the north, the battle zone south of Caponne Farm had not been breached. To the annoyance of the Germans, it now seemed that even the flimsy outpost line had not been completely cleared. The German generals wished to know why, and the aeroplane circling overhead was expected to come back with the answer. This small area of resistance was seriously impeding their advance and, furthermore, preventing a full-scale attack on the 58th Division to the south of it. According to the well-laid German plan, the line should have been almost rolled up by now.
The ground south of Caponne Farm comprised most of the 53rd Brigade sector and, seen from a height of a thousand feet, it formed a rough trapezium. From Ly-Fontaine it ran eastward to the river, from the redoubt in the battle zone at its top left, to the village of Vendeuil in the outpost line at the bottom right. The main road to St Quentin bisected the village, and the canal and the River Oise ran across marshy ground on the village’s eastern edge. Here the mist had been thickest, and here, hours after it had lifted further to the west, it had still not entirely dispersed. As late as one o’clock a breathless runner from the 7th Royal West Kents brought a final message from Colonel Crosthwaite, who was fighting the Germans off at his battalion headquarters, not very far in front of Ly-Fontaine. It read, ‘Holding out 12.30 p.m. Boches all around within 50 yards except rear. Can only see 40 yards, so it is difficult to kill the blighters. Signed J. D. Crosthwaite.’
After that no more was heard of the Royal West Kents. It was less than forty-eight hours since they had taken over from the 10th Essex in the line, and, reading the message at his own battalion headquarters before sending it on to Brigade, Major Tween of the Essex was acutely aware that, had the chips fallen differently, he might have been sending a similar message himself. Late in the morning, when the mist began to thin, the Essex had anxiously observed the firing at Crosthwaite’s headquarters just half a mile away. They had also spotted small parties of the enemy creeping forward between them and the fort on the rising ground behind the village of Vendeuil.
The fort at Vendeuil had been built in the seventeenth century by the military architect Vauban to guard the road to St Quentin and the river crossing beyond. It was a classic lozenge-shape, and in front of it its outer ditches had been incorporated into a redoubt which formed part of the defensive scheme of the village. The fort itself was protected by a deep dry moat, high ramparts, and a stout stone gateway approached by a causeway and a drawbridge. As a defensive position in itself it was almost invincible. Situated on a slope behind the village, it was well sited to give covering fire to the two areas of defence in the village beyond, occupied by A and B Companies of the 7th Buffs, and also to the areas held by C and D Companies to the south of the track that ran from Vendeuil to Remigny. With a grandstand view from behind the ready-made parapets of its stout ramparts, it was an ideal observation post from which vital information could be passed to Colonel Ransome at Battalion Headquarters in Clarence Keep.
The so-called ‘keep’ was nothing more than a small chalk quarry half a mile along the track, and, while it provided a certain amount of shelter for the HQ staff, they could see little of what was happening in the low-lying outpost zone. But it was a long time now since there had been any news either of the fort itself or the outpost zone beyond it. After four hours’ back-breaking labour, crawling across gas-soaked ground, hardly pausing to shelter from frequent tornadoes of shelling, the Battalion signallers managed to repair the telephone lines, which were cut in so many places that they gave up counting at forty. But Captain Fine, in the fort, had only time to give the briefest of reports before the line was lost again, this time for good. After that the only news of the outpost line was brought unexpectedly by A Company’s cook.
Like most of A Company, this man had been rounded up by the Germans, but, being in charge of the Company’s stores, he had the wit to bribe his captors to let him go. He bribed them with bacon. Suspecting a plot, they had first insisted by signs that the cook should eat some himself. Raw bacon was not entirely to his taste, but, since three Germans were holding him at bayonet-point, he obligingly carved off a slice and chewed it with every appearance of relish. His captors consequently tucked into the raw bacon with so much gusto that the cook was able to slide away into the mist while their attention was distracted. He was delighted with his escapade and, although chastened by the fate that had befallen the rest of his comrades, he clearly felt that he at least had upheld the honour of his company by scoring one over the enemy.
A few other men of A Company had managed to slip away into Vendeuil fort, but it was hardly a refuge. The officers in Clarence Keep had a grandstand view of the Germans’ attempt to storm it and had watched anxiously while the fort was viciously shelled, but all they knew for certain when the smoke cleared was that the garrison was still firing, still holding out, and still holding the enemy off. They had also seen the blink of a signal lamp from the ramparts, and the message was flashed at intervals throughout the long afternoon: ‘Counter-attack urgently required.’ But there was no possibility of a counter-attack, and Captain Fine himself must have known it. After a while the signals stopped.
Although in one sense they were picked men, not even the most partial observer would have looked on the soldiers defending the fort as élite troops. The age at which a man could be conscripted for military service had recently been lowered to eighteen, and raised to forty-two. Rigid medical standards had been relaxed, and recruits were no longer rejected on grounds of height, or because they had bad teeth. The standard of robustness had dropped, and in some cases the hardships of war service had affected even the fittest. Many had bad feet, and two of the platoons in Vendeuil fort were made up of men who were indifferent marchers and had been weeded out and sent to the Royal Engineers to serve as unskilled labourers. During the previous weeks they had been usefully, if not always congenially, employed in digging trenches, humping duckboards, toting bales of wire and excavating dugouts at the behest of the Royal Engineers, and it was something of a shock to find that they now seemed to be a bulwark in the path of the Germans. A company of REs plus a platoon of the Buffs made up the rest of Captain Fine’s command. In terms of military prowess they could fairly be described as mediocre, but they could shoot, they were sticking it, and, although the Germans were all around, they were doing their best to stop them. Their best was pretty good. If the enemy attempted the slightest move, rifles blazed from every corner of the ramparts, machine-gun bullets streamed from loopholes, and the two Stokes mortar guns firing at short range deterred even the boldest from coming closer. The fort was more than a stumbling block to the Germans. It was a hornets’ nest. But hornets can fly away, whereas Captain Fine was uncomfortably aware that he and his men more closely resembled rats caught in a trap.
A mile or so to the north, where fourteen German divisions had been pitched against the three British divisions holding the line that looped around St Quentin, the gunners of Lieutenant Herbert Asquith’s battery on the southern edge of Holnon Wood had been firing a defensive barrage since before dawn.1 From their position they had been shooting on fixed targets, and Asquith did not doubt that they had done some damage because, as one of the battery’s forward observation officers, he knew that they had pinpointed their targets and registered their guns to an inch. But their forward observation post on the hill outside St Quentin had vanished, like the hill itself, in a whirlwind of explosions.
For several weeks Asquith had climbed almost daily to the post on the eastern slope of the hill. From this sturdy concrete emplacement the officers observing for the artillery could look directly into the sizeable town of St Quentin, half a mile away. It was a haunting sight. The great bulk of the cathedral loomed over empty streets. Not a wisp of smoke rose from innumerable chimneys. When the wind rose, a shredded curtain might flap from a windowless house, but, despite the rumble and roar of the war and the occasional rattle of fire somewhere along the line, an eerie silence seemed to brood over the deserted city in a way that was almost uncanny. But after nightfall the infantry guarding the redoubt on the hill could hear the trundle of wheels in the streets, the muffled tramp of booted feet, the rattle of loaded wagons or, when the British guns had been active during the day, the sound of men shovelling rubble.
It had been so quiet that artillery officers had begun to regard duty at the observation post as a mere morning stroll followed by a day’s sport. It had amused them to select their targets on aesthetic grounds, and one particularly ugly modern villa which offended their artistic sensibilities had come in for a good deal of punishment in the course of registering the guns. They were gratified to observe that it had been more or less demolished by the third shot. The roof disappeared in an avalanche of shattered tiles, the walls bulged and crumbled, and a large object slid across a teetering floor and see-sawed to a precarious halt, half in and half out of the top storey. Raising his binoculars, Asquith saw that it was the frame of a four-poster bed. More and more it seemed to him that St Quentin was a city of the dead, both ghostly and sinister, for in the run-up to the battle not a gun on the German side had replied. But now that the Germans had unleashed all the might of their artillery the vantage point on the edge of No Man’s Land in front of St Quentin was getting the full force of the bombardment. Before the war the hill had been a favourite spot for picnics and Sunday outings. There was a pleasant inn on its lower slopes and a fine view from the top. The people of St Quentin called it ‘la montagne de la ville’, but to the British Army it was ‘Manchester Hill’, for it was the Manchesters who had captured it in the spring of 1917 in the last skirmish of the German retirement to the Hindenburg Line.
It was quite a coincidence that a battalion of Manchesters was again in possession of Manchester Hill when the German assault came, and in Colonel Elstob’s view it was a happy one, for both he and his men regarded it as a point of honour to defend it. Manchester Hill was a good defensive position. It had an all-round field of fire, it was well entrenched, and well-wired machine-gun posts were set up at intervals around its forward slopes. On the reverse slope a small quarry had been fortified, and machine-guns and Stokes mortars had been strategically sited to defend it. There were shelters and dugouts for the cooks and signallers, and another for Battalion Headquarters, and for many hours since the attack had been launched the Manchesters had been standing fast.
The 2nd Battalion, which had first captured Manchester Hill, was the old 96th Regiment of Foot. It had first come into existence in 1760, and had been part of the Manchester Regiment since 1881. The regimental battle honours ranged from Egypt in 1801 to Ladysmith in 1900, via the Peninsular Wars, the Crimea and the Afghan War, with many other half-remembered engagements on the way. Since 1914 a new generation of Manchesters had added another honour to the Regiment’s escutcheon, for the 2nd Battalion had arrived in France in time to distinguish itself at Mons.
The soldiers of the 16th Battalion who now held Manchester Hill were infants by comparison, for their own battalion had come into being only in August 1914, a full ten days after their seniors had landed in France. But they were infants no longer, and, although they had been at the front for less than two and a half years, they had given a good account of themselves. They had captured Montauban on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, and had also served with distinction at Ypres the following year. More to the point, they had been recruited in Manchester – the first of eight battalions raised by the city’s lord mayor – and, unlike other service battalions, whose recruits were drawn from surrounding districts, they considered themselves to be Manchesters in the truest sense. As such, these sons of the city had no intention of losing Manchester Hill, and no one was more heartily determined to hold on to it than their Commanding Officer, temporary Lieutenant-Colonel Wilfrith Elstob. The Colonel had not been born within the city boundaries, but his home in the village of Chelford was just a stone’s throw to the south, he was a graduate of Manchester University, and it was in Manchester that he had joined up on the first day of the war. He had enlisted as a private, and, although he was no more a soldier than any other man in his unit, the Colonel’s military career was some weeks longer than that of the Battalion itself.
Elstob had not served long as a private soldier. In the first hectic days of the war, when men of all types and from every level of society had flocked to join the Army, the number of would-be soldiers soon outnumbered the peacetime establishment, and rapidly burgeoned into a force whose enthusiasm far outstripped its capabilities. The number of officers who could be pulled out of retirement was far from sufficient to organize it into anything like a fighting force, and the ranks had been scoured for men who could be trained to officer the raw battalions of Kitchener’s Army. Elstob was an obvious candidate. He was a man of culture and education and, above all, a man of intelligence.
Wilfrith Elstob’s life and background could hardly have been less likely to fit him for the role. His father was a country vicar, and like many sons of the clergy Elstob spent his schooldays at Christ’s Hospital, dressed like a sixteenth-century clerk in holy orders, in the knee-breeches, long blue coat and yellow stockings which had been the uniform of the school since its foundation. He had flourished as an athlete, and, although he was no swot, he had a flair for languages that took him on to Manchester University and a more than respectable degree. He intended to be a schoolmaster, took a diploma in education, and followed it by two years’ study in France, first at the Lycée in Beauvais and then at the Sorbonne. By 1914 he was employed as a schoolmaster at Merchiston Castle in Edinburgh, where two years spent teaching French to inky schoolboys of varying aptitude had not quenched his enthusiasm for France and its language. Elstob was a scholar, a born schoolmaster, and he loved his job.
Until the war had rudely interrupted his summer holiday in the quiet vicarage at Chelford, Elstob had never envisaged a military career. Now, three years after being commissioned as a humble second lieutenant, it was hard to envisage any other. He had won the Military Cross, he had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order, he had been through the mill with his battalion, and now, as its Commanding Officer – albeit a ‘temporary’ Lieutenant-Colonel – he was in command of the 16th Manchesters at the most critical moment of the Battalion’s existence. It was up to him to conduct the defence of Manchester Hill, and he was perfectly confident that his men would not let him down.
Two nights earlier, when the Battalion had taken over the position, Elstob had made the situation plain to his officers as they mulled over a plan of the defences. Jabbing his finger on the quarry redoubt to which, in the last resort, they might be pushed back, he had said, ‘Here we fight – and here we die!’ The language was a shade colourful, the sentiment a little on the dramatic side, but, right down to the rag-tag of cooks and orderlies at the tail-end of the Battalion, there was not a man who did not agree with it. By noon on 21 March they were doing exactly what he had predicted.
The line from the observation post to Asquith’s battery had long ago been ruptured, but a forward observation officer managed to get back to the battery position south of Holnon Wood. He hardly needed to report that the situation was desperate, since to the right and left of Manchester Hill they could already hear machine-gun fire drawing closer and the sound of savage fighting near the villages of Savy and Salency. When the battery was ordered to retire to the battle zone, no one was surprised. Asquith’s section stayed on to cover the retirement. The guns were screened by an outcrop of trees on the edge of the wood, and when all the remaining shells had been fired the horses were brought forward and the guns were limbered up and pulled back to the new position near Etreillers.
Now, if the battery was to be of any use in stopping the advance of the enemy, if its fire were not to be haphazard, a new vantage point would have to be found and, for lack of any other means of communication, messages would have to be semaphored across the open ground and possibly in view of the enemy. Asquith volunteered to go forward with one signaller to direct the battery’s fire.
Lieutenant Herbert Asquith, C 149 Bty., Royal Field Artillery
In front of Holnon Wood the ground slopes gradually upward to the Round Hill, then there is a slight dip in the land, and beyond it are the lower slopes of Manchester Hill. A dead corporal lay on the slope, and halfway up the hill a platoon of our infantry was retiring in open order towards the battle zone.
When I reached the crest, I saw that our outpost redoubt at the Brown Quarry, that held out so gallantly for more than seven hours against the full tide of the attack, was now cut off on the north and west by the German infantry. A large number of grey misty figures, easily recognizable as Germans by the shape of their helmets, stood halted on the skyline of Manchester Hill, and two platoons had detached themselves from the mass and were advancing towards us down the western slope. They were about 500 yards in front of us, advancing in close order, grey steely lines, with low-flying German aeroplanes passing above them.
There was heavy machine-gun fire, and bullets whizzed past us probably aimed at our flag as we sat signalling the target from the edge of a shell-hole. Some British shrapnel burst above the German troops in glinting spirals of smoke, and to avoid it they turned slightly to their left, advancing near the line of the St Quentin railway.
The German artillery were pouring their fire on the battle zone behind, and there was a continuous background of thunder which seemed to extend for many miles on either side of us.
We were now in a new No Man’s Land between the two armies. After repeating our signal several times, we went down to another gun position at the foot of the hill and warned the officer of the line of advance. This gun opened rapid fire on the enemy, and while it was doing so a German aeroplane swooped down out of the mist and fired at us with a machine-gun from a height of about 200 feet. The crew drove it off with a Lewis-gun, and I went to the battle-zone OP to report the German advance to the major.
On Manchester Hill itself, although the battle had outflanked it, the last remnants of the Manchesters were still holding on to the quarry. The village of Savy had not yet fallen, but the Germans had advanced well along the road and had infiltrated the trench that linked it to the redoubt. ‘Here we fight,’ Colonel Elstob had said – ‘and here we die.’ And he had meant it. Elstob was as good a shot as any man in the Battalion. He took his turn firing from the parapet, he carried ammunition, he directed the defence. Now there was not much left to direct and all that remained was his own Battalion Headquarters staff, a few orderlies and signallers, and a handful of D Company pushed back into the quarry redoubt. Many of them were wounded, including the Colonel himself, but, although it was plain to see that the situation was hopeless, Elstob had no intention of giving in. The enemy were on the edge of the quarry itself, and had even entered it, fighting hand to hand, but they could not pass the barricade of sandbags that now blocked the trench. There were only a few to defend it, but a supply of Mills bombs was piled within easy reach and cooks and clerks and first-aid men who had seldom lobbed anything more lethal than a cricket ball hurled them with such enthusiasm that, again and again, the Germans withdrew to count their losses and recover their shaken strength before launching another attack.
Each time they lunged forward, Colonel Elstob was waiting on the barricade, urging on his bombers, hardly troubling to take cover as he fired, taking careful aim, making every bullet count. He was firing his revolver, for a rifle was a slow and unwieldy weapon in the circumstances, and the Germans too were hampered by the narrow limits of the trench. Time and again they called on the Manchesters to surrender. ‘Ergeben Sie sich!’ As a linguist, Elstob must have understood, but he did not deign to reply in German. The men heard him call out ‘Never!’ just a moment before he was struck. The bullet that killed him drilled a neat hole in the centre of his forehead.
When their Colonel fell, the heart went out of the men, and very soon the Germans swarmed across the barricade to take possession of Manchester Hill.1
A thousand yards away, on the northern edge of the Holnon plateau the few remaining men of the second-line battalion of the 4th Ox & Bucks who were holding out at Battalion Headquarters at Enghien redoubt had been almost surrounded since three o’clock. It was only a matter of time before the enemy closed in, but even at this late hour they believed they could fight their way out. Still, they were unwilling to retire without orders, and they should have been able to obtain them, for their deep-buried telephone line to Brigade Headquarters was still functioning. The trouble was that there was no one at Brigade HQ who had the authority to give the order that would release them. Many hours ago, to his astonishment, the Brigade-Major, Harold Howitt, had found himself to all intents and purposes in command of the 184th Brigade and, for a General Staff Officer, grade 3, even one who was acting as Brigade-Major, it had been a disconcerting discovery. When the bombardment began in the early hours of the morning he had been sharing a dugout with the Brigadier. It was a comfortable dugout, for Brigadier-General White was an officer of the old school, who insisted on maintaining mess standards even in the trenches.
The mess basket that accompanied Brigade Headquarters to its forward battle position contained an ample supply of linen tablecloths and napkins, silver cutlery and glassware, and, even if the cooking facilities were basic and the dishes owed more to the efforts of Messrs Crosse and Blackwell than to those of the mess cooks, they were served on china plates. Even after the most modest of repasts the Brigadier-General insisted that the King’s health should be drunk in port or, if supplies failed, in whisky. White was a stickler for etiquette, and did not regard the proximity of the enemy as any reason for failing to observe this indispensable formality. If need be, he would have obliged his officers to drink the loyal toast in water.
In the cubbyhole he shared with his Brigade-Major the sleeping arrangements were adequate, if not luxurious, but the strength of the dugout was not. It was a deepish dugout, but, since it was not in the forefront of the battle zone, it had been only sketchily reinforced and was not nearly strong enough to withstand the pounding of heavy-calibre shells. The ground shook and rumbled and shivered alarmingly. They could feel it trembling even through the soles of their boots, and it was not many minutes before Howitt saw the ominous sign of loosened chalk trickling from the roof and realized that it was about to fall in. He shouted a warning, pushed the General up the ladder, and scrambled hastily after him. As Howitt cleared the last rung, the ladder slid from beneath his feet and vanished in a shower of chalk and brick as the dugout collapsed and buried all their possessions from shaving gear to steel helmets.
It was bad luck about the steel helmets, for the whole place was alive with missiles, and almost at once a flying shell splinter furrowed the General’s scalp and knocked him to the ground. Howitt was appalled. He was hugely relieved to find that the General was still alive, but he was bleeding profusely, he was half unconscious, and he was clearly hors de combat. Howitt hastily patched up the General’s wound with his own field dressing, summoned two orderlies to take him down the line, and, with quaking trepidation, realized that it was up to him to co-ordinate the three battalions of the Brigade in the greatest battle of the war.
The one saving grace was that the telephone lines to the signallers’ dugout had held, and time and time again during the course of the long day Major Howitt blessed the engineers who had laid the communications and buried them deep. He kept in close touch with the Ox & Bucks at Enghien redoubt and anxiously followed their fortunes, issuing whatever orders and encouragement he could, but at half past four a message came through which stumped him.
Brigade-Major Harold Howitt, 184th Bde., 61st Division
The last message I received was ‘We are surrounded now, Sir, what are we to do?’ It was an agonizing position, so I rang the Divisional Commander and, as the whole front had collapsed, I was told to give them permission to cut their way out if they could. It was five o’clock before I was able to get back to them, and after that I heard no more. I believe that many of them did.1 The position from then onwards was chaos and, as brigade control was largely gone, I went along to Lawson of the 5th Gloucesters, who was my senior colonel on the right, to get his instructions. He asked me to go along to his right and make touch with the brigade there. So I set off.
The Germans were advancing fast by then, now that Enghien redoubt had gone. I met a group of disorganized men whom I got into position just as some Germans tried to get through. We drove them off, and when they had retired I continued down a sunken road to try to contact the brigade on the right. I saw another group of men and, knowing that the situation was critical by now, I ran towards them to ask for their help – hoping, of course, to repeat the last performance. The light was going by now, but when I was very close I saw by the shape of their tin hats that they were Germans! They fired at me and they missed, but they were at such close range that the blast from their rifles knocked me over. The next moment I was on the ground with Germans all around me, pointing their bayonets at my middle. I was a prisoner – and I couldn’t do a thing about it!
They stripped me of everything I had of any value and marched me away. The first stop was at their company headquarters, which had been established in one of our gun emplacements, and they sat me down on a pile of shells. I couldn’t help admiring the young officers I saw at the desk. There they were, just arrived, a mile or two behind our old lines and with no accurate maps of them, and yet they were working out their plans by candlelight in a most efficient manner. They kept asking me questions, pointing down the road and saying ‘Kamerad?’ – obviously intending that I should tell them where my friends were.
After a time they handed me over to two soldiers armed with revolvers and I was sent outside. I could see the next assault being prepared, mules carrying machine-guns and mortars, and all in full array.
But it was late in the day and, although the front of the 61st Division was fluid, the redoubts in the forward zone had fought stubbornly and had fought for so long that the German sweep forward had been seriously dislocated. It was true that the situation on the left of the 61st Division was shaky, but they had thrown back a defensive flank from south of Maissemy to Vermand. The encroachments into the battle zone were haphazard, and across the whole of the corps front it was largely intact. In places the Germans were even having the worst of it. Few of the guns had been overrun, and the bulk of the forward guns – now back in prepared positions – were still firing vigorously as evening approached, and out in front the infantry were giving as good as they got. Some even managed to counter-attack.
Leutnant Hermann Wedekind, 11th Coy. Commander, 79th Infantry Rgt., 20th [German] Division
Suddenly, there was heavy firing from machine-guns, and infantry came towards us from somewhere in front. Our artillery was laying down its shells far beyond and must have missed these hidden enemy nests. We threw ourselves to the ground. Everyone seemed paralysed, but soon we overcame the surprise. I screamed to my men, ‘You must defend yourselves and shoot back, otherwise the English will pop you off like rabbits. Set sights, 600 metres!’ I shook a comrade lying next to me and yelled, ‘Shoot, man! You have to shoot!’ But he made no effort. He was dead! Not far from me a machine-gun began to fire. I knelt up in order to better observe the direct hits on the ground, and within minutes my left shoulder was struck by a terrific blow. I had been hit by a bullet, and blood began to spurt from my sleeve. A man jumped up, ripped my coat open, and tried to bandage my shoulder with the strap of a bread-bag.
I managed to drag myself back to the nearest trench, which was now full of reserve troops. There I met the Regimental Commander, who wished me a fast and speedy recovery. Soon I had the good fortune to get emergency bandaging from a field doctor, and got a ride to the rear in a truck which had brought up trench-bridging materials.
Leutnant Wedekind was in considerable pain, and the jolting progress of the cart did not help to soothe him. But at least he was out of it with a ‘good wound’ – the Heimschuss which, like the British soldiers’ ‘Blighty’, would guarantee a trip home to the Fatherland and a welcome period of convalescent leave. Even the loss of his equipment did not much concern him. Shortly before he was wounded he had polished off the last of the good red wine in his spare water-bottle, and it was some consolation to know that it had not gone to waste.
General Gough had moved his army headquarters to an advanced position at Nesle, roughly fifteen miles in a direct line from the nearest point of the front, although Gough suspected that the ‘front’ was now a good deal closer. All morning he had fought the impulse to go forward to his divisions and brigades to judge their situations for himself, but long years of discipline and experience had taught him to curb his inclinations. His job was to stay put, to keep his distance, and to take the overall view of his forty-mile front as reports came in. But the reports had been few and far between. The eleven divisions under his command were divided into four corps, and the news that filtered through from the hard-hit battalions in the confusion of the fighting line took a long time to travel back from battalions to brigades, from brigades to divisions and on to Corps Headquarters. By the time it was passed on from Corps HQ to the commander of the army, it inevitably described circumstances which had existed two hours earlier.
But Gough contained himself. He was a sensible man. Early that morning, when he had been wakened by the bombardment and received the unwelcome news that it was falling all along his front, he had issued a few orders and, knowing that for the present there was no more to be done, had then gone back to bed and slept soundly for another hour. Years of soldiering in India and campaigning in the Boer War had taught him the value of proper rest and proper food. If he neglected them, no man, from a private soldier to the commander of an army, could do his job efficiently – and so, at the end of an anxious morning, despite his reluctance to be parted from his telephone, the General and his staff officers had sat down to lunch. It was not a happy meal. Messengers came and went incessantly, the conversation was subdued, and General Humbert, whom Gough had courteously invited to join them, did not add to the conviviality of the occasion. General Humbert was embarrassed.
When he had arrived from French Headquarters a short while earlier, he had been greeted with open arms. Gough had personally rung French HQ to report the position on his front, and, remembering Pétain’s promise to support him in case of need, he reasonably supposed that the French troops under Humbert’s command were already moving to his assistance. The French general reluctantly disabused him. General Pétain, justifiably fearful for his own front, had put no troops at the disposal of the British. Gesturing towards the pennant that hung on the bonnet of his staff car, Humbert said despondently, ‘All I have is my fanion.’ It came as a severe shock. It meant that, for the moment at least, the Fifth Army was on its own. Two divisions in GHQ Reserve had already been ordered to proceed to the front, but they were a long way away and it was a moot point where the ‘front’ would be by the time they got there. Indeed, it was not at all clear where the front was now, or even if it was still intact.
Now that the fog had lifted, the Royal Flying Corps had taken to the air, and the first reports came in while the staff were at lunch. An officer who had hastily excused himself came back and whispered in Gough’s ear. Masses of Germans had been seen moving forward, and for miles behind their line every road was teeming with troops. They were all making for the Fifth Army front, and they were coming in such numbers that there was no longer the slightest doubt that they meant to overwhelm it.