Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  The initial Guards attack was as tactically advanced as was possible. In addition to artillery the men were to co-operate with sixteen tanks, which would pass in front of them at zero hour and mop up any German resistance. Ralph was to have five of them in all and in addition to paving the way for his company, they would cover their consolidation as well as then searching all the ground in front of their final objectives. Whilst all of this was very well thought out, if the tanks got into difficulties the attack had to carry on. ‘Opportunites by the action of the tanks must be exploited but the advance is not dependent on the progress of the tanks and will continue without them if necessary,’ he had been ordered.

  Ralph’s battalion was full of Etonians – Collegers, to be exact. Ralph would take charge of No.3 Company, with an old boy of Rugby School, Roderick, as a subaltern. He had as another subaltern young Jack Rowlatt KS, out of Eton just about a year, the younger brother of Charles, Logie Leggatt’s good friend. Another of the battalion’s subalterns was William Roe, a Colleger and future housemaster who like Jack had only left Eton in 1917. With headquarters for the day was Charles Austin, or ‘Charlie’ Pittar, a third Colleger who had left in 1917 with Roe and Rowlatt. Although a phenomenally talented athlete and a bright boy, Charlie had trouble with his eyesight and so operated with divisional troops rather than a fighting unit. One of his main responsibilities in the hot weather was getting a sufficient supply of water up to Ralph, his fellow officers and their Guardsmen as they attacked.

  After 10.30 p.m. the battalion began moving up in companies. Behind them Evelyn Fryer had pored over his maps and learned everything he could about Moyenville, Hamelincourt and their environs. But he had done that at Boesinghe a year before, and what he had memorised had been gone by the time that he arrived, wiped out by artillery. ‘We all knew our objectives on the map; those of us who had taken part in big offensives before were less sanguine of finding them easily on the actual ground.’

  The 1st Coldstream were in position by 3 a.m. with Ralph’s company on the left of the line. It was a very quiet night for shelling. They fared better than Henry’s battalion, who in his absence were sitting with their gas masks on being pelted with noxious fumes. As the night wore on a thick mist began to envelop them. The tanks, which had set out to rendezvous with them, were fumbling around in the fog somewhere, lost. The terrain was unknown to them and they were unable to find the assembly positions.

  As per orders, the infantry attack was not to be influenced by the presence or otherwise of the tanks. Zero hour arrived at 4.35 a.m. By this time the fog was impenetrable. The situation was compounded by a smoke barrage that the 75th Brigade of the Royal Field Artillery had been ordered to lay down across this section of the front. Ralph and his Guardsmen were unable to see 3 yards in front of them. At the head of his company on the left of the line, Ralph anxiously awaited the arrival of the tanks. He gave them ten minutes’ grace and then, not wanting to get left behind the rest of the attack, he ordered his Guardsmen forward into the dense pall.

  As luck would have it, the tank shortages had little impact on the Guards’ advance. The Scots Guards ran into some nests of machine guns but the German shells being flung in their direction were inaccurately aimed and caused few casualties. Despite a total lack of vision, by 6.30 a.m. Ralph and the rest of his battalion had advanced some 1,000 yards in the right direction, taken Moyenville and were rounding up prisoners. Roderick was killed by a chance bullet as they reached their objective but across the Guards’ front casualties were markedly light as a result of the Germans’ disinterest in engaging them. By 7 a.m. they were all consolidating their ground and, as planned, Evelyn Fryer’s battalion of Grenadiers passed through and attacked the railway embankment ahead.

  By mid morning the summer sun had burnt off the mist and it was a hot, stifling day. ‘A frightfully hot day. Ye Gods, how hot!’ remarked Henry. Boy Brooke had been crashing around, dripping with sweat, which amused him no end. Pip Blacker appeared in the evening for a chat, as did his own company sergeant major, with stories of how he ‘did in’ eight Germans coming out of a dugout which he described to Henry ‘with gusto’. Henry’s only complaint was the weather. ‘The heat is a little trying, but McIntosh is getting the water situation in hand. I must shave, then I shall be more comfortable.’

  Across the board the British attack had met with success and they were now lined up ready for the larger advance on 23 August. Henry was surprised at how easy it all seemed in their sector. ‘The tanks who were assigned to us were not very helpful; however, the chaps did everything themselves and the casualties are very light.’ His precious company, in fact, had suffered just one Guardsman wounded.

  That evening the Germans began shelling Moyenneville heavily but made no attempt to counter-attack. As darkness set in Ralph took his company and another, and managed to advance the Guards’ line some 500 yards further on into the outskirts of Hamelincourt. In the course of the night Jack Rowlatt was severely wounded, badly enough that the 19 year old would lose a leg. Ralph was now the last officer with No.3 Company.

  In spite of fierce German resistance he managed to establish a number of strongpoints that they clung on to until dawn. Shortly afterwards though the German infantry moved up to counter-attack. At 4 a.m. an SOS signal shot up along the Guards’ front. The British artillery blasted into life and Lewis and machine gunners took up their weapons. Saxon troops brought up especially to retake the area from the British failed with heavy casualties. As elsewhere on the British front, advances were made to prepare for the main attack the following day, recapturing Albert and advancing between the Somme and the Ancre. The enemy had to be content with skulking backwards raining shells down on the Guardsmen nearby.

  The German artillery shelled Ralph and his Coldstream battalion unrelentingly for the rest of the day. Explosives cascaded down on what was left of Moyenville, picking off the men. Ralph managed to grab a brief respite at lunchtime when he retreated to a sunken road to the rear and ate lunch with Henry, but then he was compelled to return to the battered village. Their commanding officer, a fiery OE named Jack Brand, was frustrated. ‘The battalion could have taken Hamelincourt without a casualty in the afternoon of 21 August, and further, could have advanced the whole of 22 August (if only the tactical situation had allowed it) with very much fewer casualties than we had sitting still acting as a target to the enemy’s guns.’

  Young Viscount Holmesdale was going about his business two hours later when a deeply distressed messenger came rushing from No.3 Company. ‘Mr Gamble has been killed, sir.’ A shell had gone off right next to Ralph, and although spared obliteration, death for the 21-year-old was instantaneous. As he absorbed the news, a darker realisation began to sink in for Jeffrey Holmesdale. Somebody was going to have to go and tell Henry. He walked along to the Scots Guards to do it himself. It was ‘a ghastly business’. Henry was staggered, shocked, totally speechless. They remained in silence for some time until he asked Ralph’s fellow Coldstreamer if he could get him the regimental badge from Gamble’s cap. Holmesdale agreed and left him to his thoughts.

  A few hours later Henry sat down with a pencil and some paper and poured his heart out to his parents:

  I can only write about myself tonight. Ralph was killed this evening, and nothing is the same. I love Ralph more than anyone in the world except you two. It was only this afternoon that I had lunch with him in his company headquarters and now I shall never see him again in this world … But writing is no good. God, how I wish I could talk to you about him … John and Eric and Sherlock – I could remain the same because I had him to talk to: they were his friends as well as mine and now he has gone and I can’t be quite the same … But I can’t write anymore. I can’t see the paper properly. My friendship with him was perfect and life can’t be quite the same, especially out here, where I am alone.

  There was no time for Henry to dwell on Ralph’s death though, for the Scots Guards were being ordered back into the battle. That evening
instructions were given for the battalion to continue the attack the next day. Henry was to help orchestrate proceedings from the Scots Guards’ headquarters as they attempted to capture Hamelincourt. They were moving off to their assembly positions four hours after he began writing his letter.

  The battalion went forward on Hamelincourt with the aid of three tanks just after dawn and, despite a heavy artillery bombardment, managed to take it. The Coldstream Guards continued the advance. At 5 p.m. orders were received for the 3rd Guards Brigade to relieve them all. It became a miserable, drawn-out process but finally by the following morning Henry was back at Ayette with his battalion where they would now spend time regrouping. But all he cared about was getting to Ralph.

  His body was waiting at a casualty clearing station and Henry was insistent that he see him. ‘He must have been killed instantaneously, thank God.’ That afternoon they buried Ralph at Bac-du-Sud British Cemetery on the road from Arras to Doullens. Henry was desolate. ‘Life without him will be almost unbearable.’ In his grief Henry found solace in Tennyson’s In Memoriam.’ Written by the poet over a number of years in honour of his beloved friend who had died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage when the pair were much the same age as Ralph and Henry, it felt startlingly relevant. ‘You can’t realise what it is and to what extent the war binds people together out here,’ he told his parents. ‘I try to think that it is only seeing him off on a long journey, at the end of which we shall meet again as we used to do – but it’s terribly hard. I suppose, like John Dyer he was too good for this filthy world. He was so marvelously brave and so wonderful with the men. Because war and soldiering were no more his aim than they were mine.’ Suddenly Henry began making constant references to the idea of the afterlife. It became a theme in his letters:

  ‘Deep folly! yet that this could be –

  That I could wing my will with might

  To leap the grades of life and light,

  And flash at once, my friend, to thee.

  ‘I thought I had forgotten to cry,’ he wrote in anguish. ‘Now there are times when I just can’t stop … God has taken him now, and I’m left with the memory of him in all the phases and chances of the last unforgettable two years. And so one must just go on, never doubting that the time will come when I shall see him again. I wish you’d known him better, but you will some day.’

  Having come out of the line the Coldstream were next door to the Scots Guards and Henry went to see Ralph’s servant. He still couldn’t believe that his friend was gone and the loneliness he felt was painful. ‘What a meeting we should have had after the battle. He would have dined here and I should have lunched there, and this afternoon we should have gone and had tea with the brigade. But what’s the use of saying all this?’ Henry invited Jeffrey Holmesdale for a drink after dinner, but once he arrived he couldn’t find it in himself to talk. ‘Again he said almost nothing, but asked if I would go for a short walk with him. We went out and we sat down. One of his Scots Guards Pipers came up and he asked him if he would please play his pipes a little, perhaps a hundred yards or so away.’ Henry had become attached to a particular piece of music, but sitting in the moonlight Holmesdale found it agonising to have to sit and listen to it. ‘The Piper marched up and down playing that desperate lament “The Flowers of the Forest” … Emotionally it was almost unbearable. After a little while I got up to walk back to my unit leaving Henry sitting there, the Piper still playing. We had spoken no word.’

  Whilst the Guards reorganised and underwent training at Ayette, Henry visited Ralph’s grave whenever he could. He was keeping a cursory eye on the war’s progress. ‘The battle goes well. These marvellous Canadians captured Monchy Le Preux today. All the eagles are gathered together for the stroke which is to break the Hindenburg Line forever.’ Always though he came back to his grief. ‘How he would have loved it. We would have discussed it and gone over all the old ground again – Ribecourt, Flesquieres, Bourlon Wood.’ On 27 August there was a renewed attack on a brilliant summer’s day and then the Scots Guards were again relieved from the line.

  The fact that he still had his company to concentrate on was helping Henry to hold it together, just. Numbers were dwindling in left flank too but he had another young OE subaltern left. ‘I can talk to him so easily about Ralph. It does me such a lot of good going over these last two years. How wonderful they’ve been. John and Eric and Sherlock and old Logie Leggatt and I shall see them all some day.’ As September approached and the advance continued, Henry was faced with having to go over ground from 1917 that was simply full of old associations and reminders. ‘Even looking at a map now is perfectly grim:’

  I climb the hill: from end to end

  Of all the landscape underneath,

  I find no place that does not breathe

  Some gracious memory of my friend.’

  ‘Just a week ago today I was sitting with him in the sunken road the other side of Moyenville … Old Scott has got The Mikado out here. The gramophone is a great comfort. All the tunes he liked, and we used to play at Arras, I expect he can hear them now:’

  He is not here; but far away

  The noise of life begins again,

  And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain

  On the bald street breaks the blank day.

  ‘The Coldstream are in reserve this time, and I should be writing to him via Brigade to tell him what was happening.’ Everything that wasn’t related to death and destruction at the front for Henry had been connected to his best friend. ‘All that Cambrai time – I always used to find the Brigade or he would come along to the Battalion. Every day at Gouzeaucourt he and the Brigadier used to come up – and then when we came out of the line what meetings and arrangements; and most of the time I find myself thinking it was all unchanged – and then the truth comes back and hits one a great blow.’ Jack Brand had recommended Ralph for a gallantry award and he was posthumously awarded the Military Cross. The Colonel gave Henry a copy of the recommendation. ‘It says as much as any words can say. But nothing can describe what he was.’

  On 29 August the Germans evacuated Bapaume and two days later Australian troops crossed the River Somme. The following day they seized back Peronne. As Henry and the rest of the Guards remained in reserve, the rest of Third Army helped to push the enemy back right across the battlefields of 1916. By the beginning of September the Germans were falling back ‘in haste and obvious disorder’ to positions covering the Hindenburg Line and the Canal du Nord north of Havrincourt. It was now the turn of the Guards to resume fighting and they would assume the responsibility for pushing towards the canal.

  They commenced their attack on 3 September and it was surprisingly easy to advance. The Germans put up almost no fight. ‘So strange and novel, indeed, was the sensation caused amongst officers and men by the unwanted absence of hostile machine-gun fire and the comparative silence of the enemy’s guns, that the troops first advanced with an unnecessary caution, suspecting some cleverly concealed trap.’ In front of Henry’s men there was little save for a lot of dead horses, a few corpses and the inevitable flies. ‘The advance became a route march, a Sunday walk-out, edged with tense suspicion … Twice or thrice they halted and began to dig in for fear of attack.’ Cautiously they approached the old British front line to the north-west of Lagnicourt.

  It was here, on the banks of the Canal du Nord, that the Germans had elected to defend in force. The Guards got to within 5 miles of it, but the approaches to the west bank were held in strength and the impetus of the Guards’ advance slowed. They were now faced with machine guns and heavy artillery bombardments as well as gas shells being pelted on their rear positions.

  The Germans had dropped their front line just in front of the Hindenburg Line and before an attempt could be made on this formidable defensive system, these covering positions had to be dealt with. This task would occupy the British for much of September. On 4 September Henry reported that he was back by Bourlon Wood, with all its memories of 1917. ‘The Germa
ns are retreating … and we are just walking after them to see what happens. The sight of Bourlon Wood brings Ralph back so tremendously. All these places do.’ Attempts to continue to push the Germans back towards the canal continued, but to no effect.

  By the middle of the month it had become clear to the higher authorities that the enemy could not be dislodged from their positions along the canal to the north of Havrincourt and south down to Ephey without a properly organised attack. These outworks of the Hindenburg Line had to be taken in this way before a final attack could be made on the canal and the main defensive system behind, and the general advance could continue.

  The Guards took a passive role on 12 September when the Battle of Havrincourt began. Other units managed to take Trescault and Havrincourt itself, whilst to the north 57th Division took Moeuvres. The weather began to turn and Henry and his men had to contend with thunderstorms. Cautiously, because of the rising intensity of the German artillery, they had also been setting themselves out to defend in the face of a counter-attack if necessary. Probing across the canal in their sector was proving frustrating. The ‘in-and-out skirmishing’ in the nearby trenches reminded all who had survived it of the Hohenzollern Redoubt in 1915. ‘The fighting was well nigh as intricate and, to those who were actually concerned in it, it appeared to be equally unprofitable.’

  Preparations were underway for a major offensive to be launched on 27 September that would require the Guards to cross the canal. By 15 September, despite incessant artillery harassment, they were close enough to the canal to start reconnaissance of the obstacle. The main point, one of which they were already well aware, was that there was no water in it. The Canal du Nord was under construction in 1914 when the war began and, unsurprisingly, work had been curtailed by four years of conflict. Getting across it though was not going to be easy. The canal varied in width but the walls were almost perpendicular and smooth. Aside from where shells had taken chunks out of them and created footholds, it would be impossible to climb without using portable ladders. On the opposite bank the ground sloped uphill toward the enemy trench systems and so the first battalions across could expect to be met by fierce fire.