Life was very uneventful for me, not much work being done by the REs and no excitement except a few bombs at night from Jerry’s planes. Some of his bombs made holes big enough to drop a house in, but none reached us in the dugout, and very little damage was done by them with the exception of a few horses killed.
I made several trips to Albert, a decent-sized town, but it had very little of interest in it, with the exception of an Expeditionary Forces Institute (EFI) canteen, and a battered cathedral. A very remarkable thing about the cathedral was the figure of the Virgin Mary hanging in a horizontal position from the top of the main and only remaining spire. The whole place was a wreck and it seemed wonderful that the figure should be hanging on as it were by the toenails. I believe the French engineers had been up and secured the figure and the French people said the war would end when the Virgin fell. It’s surprising some of our credulous men hadn’t tried a Mills bomb on her before then. (The Virgin, with the remains of the Cathedral at Albert, was battered flat by the Germans in March 1918, just before they re-took the place.)
The 2nd Royal Marines should have been relieved by 1 RM on 8 February, but for some reason or other they couldn’t bring off the relief till the 9th. I went over to Englebelmer to see the boys on the Saturday morning and got to know all the latest news and rumours. The chief buzz was to the effect that the RND was to be relieved and sent home to Blighty. The relief came off alright; 1 RM was only up the line a day before turning over to the Army and going back to Englebelmer.
My company had a decent few casualties during their last spell up the line. German planes came over Aveluy again at dusk on Saturday and dropped more than twenty huge bombs in the valley where our dugout was situated. Very little damage was done, however, beyond a few more horses killed and maimed. I fail to see what attracted the silly blighter over that valley.
Heard news that 190 Brigade, who took over from our brigade on the left, had been making things hum. The HAC went forward another 600 yards and took Baillescourt farm with eighty-one prisoners. They lost their commanding officer, Colonel Boyle, who had been in command since the battalion landed in France.
On 14 February 2 RM was once more wending the weary way up the line again, battle orders with two days’ extra emergency rations. More business, and I was missing it nicely, although I was sorry in a way not to be with them: it looked like being a decent-sized scrap. Two or three fresh divisions were sending troops up the line and Albert was full of 2nd and 8th Division troops and one had to nearly fight to get anything from the canteen there. Our artillery was busy and was pumping hundreds of tons of high explosive into the Bosch every day. His guns weren’t altogether idle and there were times when it was hardly safe to go far from cover.
The attack came off at 5.45am on the 17th, the RN Division on the left of the Ancre, led by our brigade, (1 RM and two companies of our battalion) and 2nd and 18th Divisions on the right of the river. From what news we could get, the attack was a howling success, although both marine battalions suffered badly. The Bosch barrage had caught them in the open before the attack started and they had to stick it in the shell holes until the time came to get a move on. It’s bad enough in a trench when Jerry puts a barrage down, but a hundred times worse when one is lying out in the open with hardly a scrap of cover. The marine casualties were over 400 killed and wounded, nearly 40 per cent. The loss for the whole brigade was about 700, but what’s 700 casualties when the objective is gained?
I had a casualty in my party on the Saturday night. One of my men, Thompson, who had been with the battalion nearly as long as me, had a walk to Albert after tea and, whether he got drunk or not I can’t say, he managed to fall over the low parapet of the railway bridge, and his cold body was found on the lines twenty-five feet below in the morning. Nearly every bone in his body was broken and his neck too, so that he didn’t suffer a deal.
The thaw had set in with a vengeance and the ground, which for months had been frozen solid was now a stinking, slimy quagmire, in which one floundered up to the waist.
Orders were issued on the 19th to the effect that all details of 188 Brigade were to re-join their respective battalions on the 20th. Paraded at 8.00am and found I was in charge of fifty-seven men with three NCOs from the Ansons and Howes. One leading seaman of the Ansons went sick straightaway when he heard that our destination was the front line. He got away with it, although there was nothing more wrong with him than a bad attack of funk. For myself, I felt fit for anything and took charge in quite a happy frame of mind. The rest with the REs had done me no end of good and I felt fairly eager to get back to my own chums and a bit more real soldiering.
I was given the position of our Brigade HQ where I had to report and got all my party there by about 1.00pm. There we got rigged out in battle order and were given a good hot feed of bully stew and tea. We set off at 7.00pm from there with a guide who would take us to the Advanced HQ. ‘Do you know your way there, Corporal?’ asked the officer to our guide. ‘Yes, Sir,’ the guide replied. ‘I’ve only just come from there.’ Yes, he had! My God, what a guide. He had us wandering about for two hours in that godforsaken stretch of mud and shell holes with the rain beating right through us, flashing his electric torch all over the place and remarking every few minutes ‘Yes, this is the right way’. The chap was dizzy; there was no doubt about that and he was wandering about aimlessly, lost. The remarks he kept getting from the men in the rear did nothing to help steady him and I kept cursing him. ‘Where the hell are you going?’ I asked him after about an hour and a half. ‘I don’t know, I’m B--- if I do,’ he said. Soon after a voice called out ‘What party are you?’ ‘RND details, are you the Advance Battalion Headquarters?’ I asked. ‘What the devil are you doing here? You left this place two hours ago.’ That guide got chewed up a treat and he deserved it. We had wandered in a complete circle, and off we had to go again. We were in a murderous mood.
We met a party of officers and men looking for us with flash lamps about half a mile from the place we were trying to find. An officer was waiting there to guide us up the line and I could see as soon as he opened his mouth that he didn’t like his job and was all for speed. ‘Tell your men to keep closed up, Corporal, and whatever they do they must hurry,’ he said. He told me our way was through the Valley of Death or Death Valley and every so often the Bosch opened up with all sizes of guns and nothing could live in the place once he started.
He was a most cheerful officer and went on to say that the whole place was full of dead men and nobody dared out to bury them. A pity he wasn’t one of them. ‘Quick march,’ he shouted as though he were on parade at Crystal Palace and off he toddled, his long legs making light work of the knee-deep mud. After five minutes, ‘Ease off in front, we’re not bloody racehorses’ and off I had to dash to the rear to buck the stragglers up. There was no easing up in front though, and I had to fairly skim along the top of the mud to catch up that brilliant officer. ‘We shall have to go steady, Sir,’ I told him, but he wouldn’t have it. ‘If they can’t keep up they will get left behind,’ he said, ‘I’m not hanging about in this place.’ He said he was expecting the Germans to open up any minute, and off he went again.
I was on a continual run backwards and forwards along the line, trying to keep the men together. Some of the poor devils were about all in and, after an hour, some of them sat down in the mud and refused to budge. I left one of the leading seamen with them and told him to bring them along as best he could. I never saw that officer again and about a dozen of the leading men had gone with him. Where to go I hadn’t the faintest notion, but one thing I was determined on and that was to get out of that stinking ‘Valley of Death’ and the sight of two GS wagons with horses and drivers smashed to bits lying in the stinking mud just by the side of the so-called track speeded my resolution up.
It bucked the men up too. ‘Get out of this bloody place, Corporal,’ someone yelled and I made off for the high ground on my left. I struck a trench on top just as Jerry opened up with a battery of 5.9s and we could hear them as they exploded with a sickening squelch in the valley below. The trench was full of water. In places we were wading up to the armpits in the foul stuff.
I had no idea how far the line was ahead, but after struggling on for about 500 yards up the trench, I came across two chaps trying to patch up a telephone wire that the Bosch had smashed, and got to know from them that there was a battalion HQ about half a mile ahead under a bank.
We got there, more dead than alive, and I found the imperturbable Lieutenant Abrahams, our acting adjutant, in a shell hole with a roof on. I reported to him and gave him my opinion of the officer who was supposed to guide us up here. ‘All right, Corporal Askin,’ he said, ‘I know the swine and I’ll send a report back to Brigade Headquarters about him.’ And I guessed he would too.
One o’clock in the morning, nearly dead with fatigue and with soul cases nearly dragged out of us with the mud. And I reckon I had dragged my way through three times as much mud as the other men. I had been on the double continually, first finding the way and then dashing back to the rear of the line to herd the stragglers together, then on again to the front. I just felt like something that had been left on a plate in the rain all night for the cat. I hadn’t finished though, not by any means.
Our adjutant gave me instructions to take the men of 2nd Marines to our Company HQ somewhere in the front line. He said we were to be relieved any time now; in fact some of the relieving troops were already making their way up the line ahead. I set off again, very nearly on my hands and knees and soon struck a communication trench, more like a young canal though than a trench. The going in that trench was worse than anything I had ever experienced before and progress was a terrible struggle. We soon came across parties of the relieving troops, absolutely stuck fast in the mud and many of them making no effort whatever to get out of it. ‘What division are you, Mate?’ I asked one poor devil. ‘Sixty-second,’ he said. That was the division that had earned the nickname of John Bull’s Division; and this was its first trip out from England. What a breaking in. One of its other members told me they had been three days making their way up the line from Englebelmer. Some were crying out of sheer despair at their inability to move. Others were just sitting in the mud cursing.
Found the company at last in the front line, sadly depleted and nearly dead with exhaustion from the mud and effects of the attack they had made. ‘Have you seen anything of a relief, Harry?’ Billy asked me when I saw him. ‘I’ve seen it Billy, but don’t set hopes on it, they’ll want relieving before they get up here.’ I set about making a canteen of tea as soon as I settled down with my own platoon. None of the men had had anything hot to drink for four days and had lived on nothing but dried bully and biscuits with water to drink. Fires for cooking were out of the question, wood was practically nonexistent, and so were Tommy cookers, but I had taken a few candles up in my haversack and one of those broken in two, wrapped in a piece of 4x2 and put in a cigarette tin was just sufficient to get a canteen of water on the sing. That was good enough to mash tea when one wanted it as badly as I was.
As dawn had broken by the time I had finished, I set to and shaved and washed in the remains of the tea and felt heaps better. Poor old Charlie Hamilton had got his ticket at last. To get through the nine months of hell fire on Gallipoli without a scratch, then all these last months in France. Billy told me how he had died; quite a peaceful end for the old boy. He had laid back on the trench for a sleep, with the mud for a bed and a shell had burst killing him as he lay asleep. Billy was walking round the trenches and came across him and thought him asleep. Charlie had gone though, and with a smile on his fine face. Billy cried like a kid when he told me. It had only happened on the day before I got up, but I couldn’t get to see him as Billy had helped to bury him. He had taken his things from his pockets and said that he would write to Charlie’s wife when he got down the line. Another of the old boys gone, another real pal, and there’s a bonny little chap in Portsmouth will never see his dad again.
And what in Hell’s the reason for it all and what good can possibly come from all this rotten sacrifice and bloodshed? The hundreds of splendid men and lads I’ve seen killed in this war and the hundreds of thousands killed that I haven’t seen. What have they gone for? It makes you curse war when you come to think about it and curse the men, too, who made the war and who no doubt get out of it scot free. It’s a blessing, really, that we get hardened both in body and mind and that we lose all sentiment and feeling, otherwise we should go stark staring mad. It’s not that way, though, it’s just a shrug and a brief moment of regret at still another good pal gone west. ‘Poor old Charlie,’ and then we have to carry on. No time to dwell on it, we might have to go any time. And who cares a damn when the time should come? I am certain that when a man has reached such a state of abject misery and exhaustion as some of the lads around me, death must seem a merciful relief and an easy way out of it all.
Apart from the relief when one is killed, one is placed amongst the immortals amongst the glorious dead heroes, all who died for a cause, while the ones who struggle on through the lot will earn for themselves nothing but the name of fool.
I managed to get through that day, the 21st, safely, although the Bosch strafed us pretty badly in spasms and his snipers had a fair command of sections of the line. The company had a few casualties during the day and several men had to go back suffering from exhaustion. The news that a sufficient number of 62nd Division had managed to crawl up the line to effect a relief was greeted joyfully and a few smiles were seen on the gaunt, haggard faces of some of the men. Nightfall came and with it some very tired mud-caked and fed-up men from Yorkshire who would relieve us. Our 190 Brigade was to go forward and clear the enemy rearguards out of his positions at Miraumont and Gommecourt, while we were recuperating at Englebelmer.
We left the line at 1.00am on 22 February and struggled back to Englebelmer as best we could. When we reached the road at St Pierre Divion we found our cooks and kitchens there and were served with hot tea and a good tot of rum. It helped us well on our way and we hardly troubled about the state of the roads, which in places were nothing but rivers, in places knee deep in water and mud. Just imagine the splash when a lorry loaded with 8-inch shells went lumbering past. Who cared? Were we not being relieved, going back for a rest, where we should have our buttons and badges clean and perhaps start saluting and turning by numbers and once more go through the thrilling exercise of loading by numbers. What a life! From one hell to another. We dribbled back to our billets at Englebelmer just anyhow and in any order, and on being told off to our particular ruin we dropped down like logs.
It was 7.00am when I arrived and by 9.30 I was told off to take charge of a scavenging party to clean up some billets that 62nd Division had left, collect all the refuse and burn it in an incinerator. Some idiot threw a Mills bomb or a dud shell in and the thing went off when we were all stood around. It blew the incinerator to blazes and covered us all with scalding hot jam, Maconochie’s etc., but hurt no one.
I thought that after that little episode we had done enough cleaning up for other people and that it was high time we started on ourselves. Personally, I was in a shocking state of filth and some of the men were far worse. Kelly Clayton, for instance, even when sleeping like a log, was one continual move and so was his opposite number George Hedley. I’ll bet it’s impossible to find two lousier men in the whole of the British Army. I paraded my men in front of Company Sergeant Major Chapman who had just rejoined us from England. ‘All right, Corporal,’ he said, ‘Dismiss your men and tell them to get themselves cleaned up.’ We spent all the day on the job but made very little impression on the dirt.
Saturday we spent in a similar manner with the exception of a speech to the officers, NCOs and men of the two marine battalions by the commander of the corps to which we were attached. He didn’t say much, but what he did say came right from the bottom of his heart, and I think I am right in saying that every man present felt himself very proud indeed to belong to the Royal Marines and to be a part of the Royal Naval Division. The old man made us feel like real soldiers, veterans in fact, and said that the results of our attack would be far more important than many people would imagine. The Bosch was already going back; how far, nobody knew as yet, but he thought he’d go back a long way.
Sunday came and fairly late in the morning we got news through that 190 Brigade had occupied Miraumont without firing a shot and with no loss of men. Our dear Company Sergeant Major Chapman and Company Quartermaster Sergeant Jerry Dunn celebrated the occasion by drinking most of the company’s issue of rum and were caught by Colonel Hutchinson, who happened to be looking for our captain. Both were put under arrest, but didn’t care; they were too drunk. Poor old Jerry Dunn was insensible and didn’t know he was under arrest; Chapman was only partly aware of it.
Orders round on 26 February to pack up and stand by to move. Which way, up or down? That was what interested us most. The Bosch was getting out of it as quick as the rotten state of the country would permit him and we quite expected the order to chase him.
The next day he was reported to have gone back as far as the line running through le Transloy and Loupart. Our 190 Brigade was relieved then by IV Corps and we joyfully commenced our march back for another rest.