BEFORE THE GREAT ATTACK
ON THE EVENING of August 3, an evening with a sinister lowering sky, we settled in our newest headquarters: wooden huts, perched on the long steep slope of a quarry just outside the crumbling ruins of Heilly, celebrated in the war annals of 1916 for an officers’ tearooms, where three pretty daughters of the house acted as waitresses.
Excitement was in the air. Marshal Foch’s bold strategy at Soissons had had dramatic effect. The initiative was passing again to the Allies. A faint rumour had developed into an official fact. There was to be a big attack on our immediate front. Yet few of us dared to conceive the mark in history that August 8 was to make. All we really hoped for was a series of stout resolute operations that would bring Germany’s great offensive to a deadlock.
Along the road that wound past the quarry - offshoot of a main route that will for ever be associated with the War - there flowed a ceaseless stream of ammunition waggons. “This goes on for three nights…. My Gad, they’re getting something ready for him,” remarked our new adjutant to me. Gallant, red-faced, roaring old Castle had been transferred to command the Small Arms Ammunition section of the D.A.C., where his love of horses was given full play, and had already gained his section many prizes at our Horse Show a week before.
Rain descended in stinging torrents, and the Australian colonel and his adjutant, who would leave as soon as they heard that our batteries had relieved theirs, looked out disgustedly. I called for a bottle of whisky, and when the Australian adjutant toasted me with “Here’s to the skin of your nose,” I gathered that his gloom was lessening. The soup came in and we started dinner.
Talk ran upon the extraordinary precautions taken to surprise the enemy. Field-guns were not to be moved up to their battle positions until the night before the attack. There was to be no digging in of guns, no earth was to be upturned. Reconnaissance likely to come under enemy observation had to be carried out with a minimum of movement. As few officers and men as was possible were to be made aware of the date and the scope of the operation. On a still night the creaking rattle of ammunition waggons on the move may be heard a very long way off. To prevent this noise of movement wheel tyres were lapped with rope; the play of the wheels was muffled by the use of leather washers. Straw had even to be laid on some of the roads - as straw is laid in front of houses where the seriously sick are lying.
“I think,” said the Australian signalling officer, “that the funniest thing is the suggestion in orders that telephone conversations should be camouflaged. I suppose that if some indiscreet individual asks over the ’phone whether, for instance, a new telephone line has been laid to a certain map point it is advisable to reply, ‘No, he’s dining out to-night.’”
“Why not try a whistling code?” put in our adjutant. “Suppose you whistled the first line of ‘Where my Caravan has rested,’ that could mean ‘At the waggon line.’”
“And ‘Tell me the old, old Story’ would be ‘Send in your ammunition returns at once,’” laughed Wilde, our signalling officer, who had been angered many times because his line to Divisional Artillery had been held up for that purpose.
“And ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’ could be taken as ‘Lengthen your Range,’” said one of the Australian officers in his soft drawl; while the exuberance reached its climax when some one suggested that “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee” might be whistled to indicate that the Divisional Commander was expected at any moment.
“You’ve had some of the Americans with you, haven’t you?” asked our colonel of the Australian colonel. “How do you find them? We heard a humorous report that some of the Australian infantry were rather startled by their bloodthirstiness and the vigour of their language.”
The Australian colonel - one of those big, ugly, good-tempered men who attract friendship - laughed and replied, “I did hear one good story. A slightly wounded Boche was being carried on a stretcher to the dressing station by an American and one of our men. The Boche spoke a bit of English, and was talkative. ‘English no good,’ he said. ‘French no good, Americans no good.’ The stretcher-bearers walked on without answering. The Boche began again. ‘The English think they’re going to win the war, - they’re wrong. You Americans think you’ve come to win, - you’re wrong.’
“Then the American spoke for the first and last time. ‘You think you’re going to be carried to hospital, - you’re wrong. Put him down, Digger!’ And that ended that.
“Speaking seriously, though,” he went on, “the Americans who have been attached to us are good stuff - keen to learn, and the right age and stamp. When they pick up more old-soldier cunning, they’ll be mighty good.”
“From all we hear, you fellows will teach them that,” answered our colonel. “I’m told that your infantry do practically what they like with the Boche on their sector over the river. What was that story a Corps officer told me the other day? Oh, I know! They say your infantry send out patrols each day to find out how the Boche is getting on with his new trenches. When he has dug well down and is making himself comfortable, one of the patrol party reports, ‘I think it’s deep enough now, sir’; and there is a raid, and the Australians make themselves at home in the trench the Boche has sweated to make.”
The Australian colonel nodded with pleasure. “Yes, our lot are pretty good at the cuckoo game,” he agreed.
Next morning our shaving operations were enlivened by the swift rush of three high-velocity shells that seemed to singe the roof of the hut I was in. They scattered mud, and made holes in the road below. “The nasty fellow!” ejaculated our new American doctor, hastening outside, with the active curiosity of the new arrival who has been little under shell fire, to see where the shells had burst. Our little Philadelphia medico had gone, a week before, to join the American forces. His successor was broad-built, choleric, but kind of heart, and came from Ohio. I suspected the new doctor of a sense of humour, as well as of an understanding of current smart-set satire. “They kept me at your base two months,” he told me, “but I wanted to see the war. I also heard an English doctor say he would be glad of a move, as the base was full of P.U.O. and O.B.E.’s.”
After breakfast the colonel and myself passed through the battered relics of Heilly on our way to the batteries. The rain and the tremendous traffic of the previous night had churned the streets into slush, but the feeling that we were on the eve of great events made me look more towards things of cheer. The sign-board, “——th Division Rest House,” on a tumble-down dwelling ringed round with shell-holes, seemed over-optimistic, but the intention was good. At the little railway station a couple of straw-stuffed dummies, side by side on a platform seat as if waiting for a train, showed that a waggish spirit was abroad. One figure was made up with a black swallow-tailed coat, blue trousers, and a bowler hat set at a jaunty angle; the other with a woman’s summer skirt and blouse and an open parasol. B Battery, who had discovered excellent dug-outs in the railway cutting, reported that their only trouble was the flies, which were illimitable. A and C had their own particular note of satisfaction. They were sharing a row of dug-outs equipped with German wire beds, tables, mirrors, and other home comforts. “We adopted the Solomon method of division,” explained Major Bullivant. “I picked out two lots of quarters, and then gave C first choice.”
“We’ve got to select positions still farther forward for the batteries to move to if the attack proves a success,” said the colonel next day; and on that morning’s outing we walked a long way up to the infantry outposts. We struck a hard main road that led due east across a wide unwooded stretch of country. A drizzling rain had set in; a few big shells grunted and wheezed high over our heads; at intervals we passed litters of dead horses, rotting and stinking, and blown up like balloons. At a cross-road we came to a quarry where a number of sappers were working. The captain in charge smiled when the colonel asked what was the task in hand. “General —— hopes it will become his headquarters three hours after zero hour, sir.”
“That ammunition’s well hidden,” remarked the colonel as we followed a lane to the right, and noted some neat heaps of 18-pdr. shells tucked under a hedge. We found other small dumps of ammunition hidden among the corn, and stowed in roadside recesses. Studying his map, the colonel led the way across some disused trenches, past a lonely burial-place horribly torn and bespattered by shell fire, and up a wide desolate rise. “This will do very well,” said the colonel, marking his map. He looked up at the grey sky and the heavy drifting clouds, and added, “We’ll be getting back.”
We came back along the main road, meeting occasional small parties of infantry, and turned to the right down a road that led to the nearest village. A Boche 5·9 was firing. The shells fell at minute intervals four hundred yards beyond the road on which we were walking. The colonel was describing to me some of the enjoyments of peace soldiering in India, when there came a violent rushing of air, and a vicious crack, and a shower of earth descended upon us; and dust hung in the air like a giant shroud. A shell had fallen on the road forty yards in front of us.
We had both ducked; the colonel looked up and asked, “Well, do we continue?”
“We might get off the road and go round in a semi-circle, sir,” I hazarded. “I think it would be safer moving towards the gun than away from it.”
“No, I think that was a round badly ‘layed,’” said the colonel. “We’ll keep on the road. Besides, we shall have time to get past before the next one comes. But I give you warning,” he added with a twinkle, “the next one that comes so near I lie down flat.”
“I shall do exactly as you do, sir,” I responded in the same spirit.
The colonel was right as usual. The next round went well over the road again, and we walked along comfortably. At the entrance to the village lay two horses, freshly killed. The harness had not been removed. The colonel called to two R.A.M.C. men standing near. “Remove those saddles and the harness,” he said, “and place them where they can be salvaged. It will mean cutting the girths when the horses commence to swell.”
At 4.30 next morning the batteries were roused to answer an S.O.S. call. The rumble of guns along the whole of our Divisional front lasted for two hours. By lunch-time we learned that strong Hun forces had got into our trenches and penetrated as far as the quarry where the colonel and myself had seen the sappers at work. Twenty sappers and their officer had been caught below ground, in what had been destined to become General ——’s headquarters. Our counter-attack had won back only part of the lost ground.
“I’m afraid they’ll spot all that ammunition. They are almost certain now to know that something’s afoot,” said the colonel thoughtfully.
“Something like this always does happen when we arrange anything,” broke in the adjutant gloomily.
There were blank faces that day. We waited to hear whether there would be a change of plan. But after dark the ammunition waggons again poured ceaselessly along the roads that led to the front.