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  Now the South African Mob were appreciating the break at Auxi more than any others in the battalion. The weather was fine, the spring sun shone and, after the unaccustomed rigours of a European winter spent almost entirely in the open in the trenches, or, when out of them, billeted in draughty barns which were not much better, for the first time since arriving in France they felt actually warm. After the intricacies of command on the parade ground had been mastered by the young officers in training, and the perfection of ‘serluting’ was deemed to have been adequately demonstrated, they had moved on to the real thing – command of troops in battle. That was a lot more fun, at least for the guinea pigs. They mounted mock attack after mock attack. They sniped, they machine-gunned, they mopped up, they consolidated, they signalled, they advanced and they vanquished the Kaiser’s imaginary Army a thousand times over.

  But the battles and the manoeuvring across the springtime meadows stopped promptly at five o’clock. There was time for a kip and a clean-up, before ‘Men’s Supper’, which in itself was a heartening improvement on the meagre fare that reached the troops at the front, and, afterwards, for those intent on pleasure, an embarrassment of riches to choose from. Auxi-le-Château itself was a real town, with streets where civilians and, in particular, pretty girls, could be seen, just as if there were no war on; there were buildings undamaged by shellfire, cafés and estaminets, concerts in the Hôtel de Ville and, best of all, a British Expeditionary Force Canteen which even the most impecunious could afford to patronize. In the ‘Officers Only’ cafes, earnest young subalterns fought table-top skirmishes and, assisted by Messrs Bryant and May, disposed platoons of matchsticks to illustrate the finer points of the tactical theories they were obliged to master in order to return to their battalions with satisfactory reports. As the spring evenings lengthened, the sportsmen of the battalion preferred to eschew the pleasures of Auxi. Even after the exertions of the day there was pleasure in a scratched up football match. To the golfers, most of whom had found some devious means of bringing a club or two to France, or having them sent on afterwards, the gentle slopes around the green valley of Auxi were natural reminders of Gleneagles, of Turnberry, of Deal or Lytham St Annes. They spent happy competitive evenings, putting and driving, joined occasionally by some officers who shared their passion and were only too happy to pick up a few professional hints.

  The rugger players, like the footballers, never tired of training and practising. Since the Rifle Brigade had gone into wartime khaki, they were the only people who were privileged to sport its traditional colours of green and black, admittedly only in the stripes of their team jerseys, but the colours of the Regiment, nevertheless. It was a sore point with some of the non-sporting riflemen who, like Joe Hoyles, had been dazzled by pre-war glamour.

  Rifleman Joe Hoyles, MM, No. 3237, 13th (S) Btn., The Rifle Brigade

  There were five of us joined up together, Archie Nicholson, Fred Lyons, Frank Bell, Sid Birkett and myself. We all worked at W. H. Smith’s in Nottingham. I’d absolutely made up my mind and, when we went up to the barracks to join up, I said, ‘We’re going into the finest regiment in the British Army.’ And they said, ‘What’s that?’ And I said, ‘The Rifle Brigade. Left of the Line and pride of the British Army.’ I was only seventeen, but it was a unique regiment to me. In my own little town of Oakham, there were two officers of the Rifle Brigade who used to come home on leave and they looked so smartly dressed in the green and black and always with a black sash around their shoulders. It caught my eye. I thought it was wonderful. And there was another fellow in the town who also struck me when I was a boy. He’d been a private, they called him Scotchie Waterfield, and he must have been quite old then. But he’d been in the Rifle Brigade and when you saw him walking down the main street he looked marvellous. It was his quick step. I found out afterwards it was a hundred and forty steps to the minute. From just a young boy I’d thought what a wonderful champion regiment this must be.

  The practical wartime khaki which had succeeded green jackets and red coats alike was a poor substitute for the peacock traditions of peacetime, but at least the riflemen sported black buttons on their khaki and they had learned, as generations of riflemen had learned before them, to march at one hundred and forty steps to the minute. It was when the glorious month at Auxi was over and they were marching back to the trenches that this particular aptitude got them into trouble, for, by then, most of the Fourth Army was on the move and fanning out across the face of Picardy.

  The sheer logistics of assembling the troops on the Somme in time to familiarize them with their sectors of the trenchline, and to move them back and forwards to rehearse the battle, was a monumental headache that had spread from the apex of GHQ down through the chain of command to furrow the brows of several thousand quartermasters and transport officers at battalion level. A single brigade on the move with its transport occupied at least three miles of road. With the tail of the column an hour’s march behind the vanguard and the obligatory ten minutes’ rest in every hour, it took two hours and a half, marching easy, to cover that distance. If one such procession met another at a crossroads proceeding in the opposite direction, the subsequent contretemps could hold up ten thousand men in a chain reaction that stretched for miles and hours behind and could throw out the carefully planned arrangements of a dozen hapless billeting officers, who had earmarked three or four adjacent villages for the accommodation of their brigades that night.

  Working out the permutations by which the mass migration could be smoothly achieved, was a task so tortuous that the compilation of Cook’s International Timetable would have been child’s play by comparison. It took long laborious calculations, endless consultations with the scattered commands of a dozen other units and the careful working out of routes over a countryside whose roads could hardly be described as arterial, and where the main access roads must be left clear, so far as possible, for the endless columns of lorries carrying supplies and munitions to the forward areas. Marching along what was little more than a country track, the last thing a battalion of the Royal Warwicks had needed was a quick-stepping battalion of the Rifle Brigade marching up on its heels and creating mayhem in its rear ranks. The ensuing discussion between the two battalions turned the air blue and it was popularly supposed that it was about the time of the move to the Somme that Rifle Regiments earned the epithet ‘Black Buttoned Bastards’.

  If the ‘Black Buttoned Bastards’returning to the trenches in the Third Army area were a touch despondent that their halcyon month was over, the troops of the Fourth Army arriving from the north, although they had no illusions about what was ahead of them, were revelling in the change of scene.

  Private Tom Easton, No. 1000, 21st Btn., Northumberland Fusiliers (2nd Tyneside Scottish)

  We thought it was lovely country when we got there, because we’d been up in the north before where it was very flat and uninteresting. Here it was all hillier and there were little cottages with gardens and spring flowers coming out. There was a lovely stream nearby and the lads used to bathe in it. It was cold when we first got there but the water gradually got warmer and warmer. What I liked especially was the delight of lying in the grass among the apple trees bursting into blossom and listening to the birds singing, instead of the whistling of the shells. Some lads got fishing rods and gear and were fishing in the stream, and there were plenty of sports and football matches. It was so peaceful you just couldn’t believe it. Later on it got more strenuous.

  Early in May we marched off again from the lovely peace and quiet and went to la Houssaye, where we joined up with the Third Corps and started training with the 8th and the 21st Divisions for the Battle of the Somme. The ground was supposed to correspond to the ground on the Somme and we were hard at it training; first in platoon and company movement under orders and then even on battalion movement on a wider basis, so that we could practise our art of offensive soldiering. Then we took over our sector of the front but there was always one or two brigades out o
f the line occupied with training.

  They practised moving in the open by platoons, they practised manoeuvring in companies, then moving in waves as a battalion. Then came a whole week when all four battalions trained as a brigade, carrying out the complicated procedures of consolidation, reinforcement, ‘leapfrogging’ a second line of troops through the first and passing on to the second and third lines of enemy ‘trenches’ and even beyond. The bombers ‘bombed’, the snipers ‘sniped’. The moppers up went through the motions of bombing ‘dugouts’, represented by flags inside the shallow ‘trenches’. They were mere lines, scratched with spade or plough across the field and they did it all over and over again, until every man from a battalion’s colonel downwards knew precisely what to do and when to do it.

  It was in the brigade and divisional exercises that signallers like Tom Easton truly came into their own, for the Royal Flying Corps took part, flying up and down the divisional front, swooping down towards the troops and climbing away with a cheerful waggle of wings when the troops signalled back their position in response to a loud klaxon horn sounded by the pilot. They signalled by spreading out white groundsheets bearing an outsize divisional sign which transmitted the categorical statement, We are here and so far as we know are the leading infantry and within fifty yards of the firing line. Some signallers were taught to operate an even more sophisticated piece of equipment.

  Private Tom Easton, No. 1000, 21st Btn., Northumberland Fusiliers (2nd Tyneside Scottish)

  I was on aircraft communications. All the time we were doing these movements over open countryside, the aeroplanes were going up and down the line all the time and we had to practise communicating with them with flare lamps and groundsheet signals. We signallers had to carry out a giant shutter, six foot square, lay it on the ground, peg it down, go to one end, grasp the ropes and it pulled open like a venetian blind. The surface was all brown when it was closed but it was a pure white surface when we pulled it open and we had to make coded letters in Morse Code: series of Cs, series of Hs, and so on, which were all part of the code. In my experience as a battalion signaller these were never used. They might have been used by other battalions – though I doubt it – but later on in battle, our reception was so hot that there was no possibility of using it. In fact we never even carried it into the battle.

  In the long weeks of conferring and drawing up the battle plans at GHQ, at Army H Q and at Corps Headquarters, the question of signals had an important place in every agenda. Once the troops went over the top, a fool-proof system of communications was the sole means by which the Staff could control the battle. Only on the basis of a constant flow of up-to-the-minute information from the thick of the fight itself, would they be able to send in, or withhold, reinforcements, assist the troops with artillery fire, help them out of difficulties and support them in exploiting success – and do all these things instantly.

  The lifeline that would carry vital news of the situation at the front far and fast to command posts in the rear, was the network of telephone wires and cables. For every mile of front, five hundred miles of cable had been buried – and buried six feet deep in the forward areas. Behind Divisional Headquarters, no less than three thousand miles of wire linked the infantry to the artillery, the artillery to the Flying Corps, to balloon sections, to transport lines, to reserves, and to corps and Army HQ in a cat’s cradle of circuits and connections that would carry the news from the front, with mercurial despatch, through every stage of liaison and command to the ear of Sir Douglas Haig himself. Thus far the army could make its arrangements, but all would depend, and well they knew it, on the troops sending back information equally fast, once they had gone over the top. Signallers, of course, would go over with them as part of the second wave, reeling out heavy rolls of cable as they went to link up with the communications behind, but, in the hazards of battle, it would be foolish to depend on either all of them or all the cable escaping unscathed. What was needed were failsafes and in such profusion as to guarantee ten times over that communications could not possibly break down.

  There were to be signalling lamps, power buzzers, black and white discs by which Morse messages could be signalled back visually and even the despised semaphore flags were to be carried. There would be heliographs, telephones and carrier pigeons, which even now were being taken daily into the trenches and trained to fly back, straight and fast, to the lofts behind the line. There were to be runners – and twice the usual number of them, travelling in pairs – to bring messages back from the forward troops to the old jumping-off line. There were to be marker-pennants, six feet high, carried by the leading man of each company. There were to be coloured flares, five hundred per battalion, to be fired on the instructions of an officer or senior NCO in a complicated series of coded patterns and sequences which they were studiously committing to memory.

  Towards the end of the training period, when such instructions as were not marked ‘SECRET’ reached company level, some officers poring over the long lists of equipment that were to be carried into the attack, came gloomily to the conclusion that the only thing the Army had neglected to consider was the provision of extra pairs of arms for the men to carry them.1 But, somehow it would have to be managed, for these long and slender lines of communication were the reins by which the Army would direct its fledgling infantry and drive it forward to success.

  Chapter 4

  Standing on either side of the German Salient at Gommecourt, beyond the northern limit of the planned offensive, the 56th and 46th Divisions did not take much part in extensive rehearsals for the Big Push. For one thing, although they had an important supporting role to play, like the 37th Division they were part of the Third Army; for another they were part of the Territorial Force and they had been part-time soldiers since 1910 when the Territorials were formed as an emergency arm of the Army. But most battalions had long since outgrown the peacetime soubriquet of ‘Saturday Afternoon Soldiers’. They had been fighting in France since the early days of the war, and justifiably considered themselves to be as good as the Regulars.

  As an officer of the 3rd Londons, Arthur Agius had fought at Neuve Chapelle, at Aubers Ridge, at Festubert and at Loos. In more than a year of heavy fighting, the Battalion had been sadly depleted by casualties and brought up to strength again by drafts of soldiers who were just as inexperienced as any in the ranks of Kitchener’s Army, but who had had the foresight to join local Territorial Battalions in August 1914. Even from the start they had considered themselves to be one up on ‘Kitchener’s Mob’. As Territorials, they were issued with uniforms months before their less fortunate comrades had glimpsed so much as a khaki sock, and they had been equipped with rifles even before they knew how to fire them. They also had the advantage of serving on their own doorsteps. At first, some of the Kensingtons were even allowed to continue living at home and to endow their grateful mothers with the Army billeting allowance of seven and a six a week, travelling daily by tram-car to the White City at Shepherd’s Bush, where the Battalion was housed in the garish pavilions left over from the Empire Exhibition of 1913. Fortunately, not all of the temporary buildings had been demolished and the old pavilions made admirable orderly rooms, offices, gymnasiums and dining halls where the troops enjoyed meals supplied by courtesy of Messrs Lyons whose tea rooms adorned almost every corner in the West End of London. Lyons’ factory and head offices were conveniently situated nearby at ‘Cadby Hall’ in High Street, Kensington, where a large staff of girls never failed to rush to the windows to shout and wave to the Kensingtons, marching past on their way to drill in Hyde Park. The Kensingtons, in their turn, never failed to favour this admiring throng with a lusty rendering of their favourite marching song:

  We are the Kensington Boys

  We are the Kensington Boys

  We spend our tanners

  We mind our manners,

  We are respected wherever we go,

  When we’re marching down the High Street Ken,

  Doors and w
indows open wide.

  You can hear the sergeant shout,

  Put those blooming Woodbines out,

  We are the Kensington Boys.

  The complacency of some of the Kensington Boys was jolted when they were drafted to France and discovered that their seniors in the 56th London Division did not look kindly on such vociferous self-praise. They had adopted as their anthem and marching song a music-hall ditty which had enlivened their peacetime Saturday evenings at Joy’s or Wilton’s:

  I’m ‘Enery the Eighth I am.

  ‘Enery the Eighth I am, I am,

  I got married to the widow next door,

  She’d been married seven times before.

  AND every one was an ‘Enery,

  She wouldn’t have a Willie or a Sam.

  I’m ‘er eighth Old Man called ‘Enery,

  ‘ENERY THE EIGHTH I AM!

  They marched for miles and miles singing it, and neither its swing nor its charm ever palled. Early in May they had marched to the village of Hébuterne and taken over a trenchline beyond it, facing the Germans to the right of Gommecourt village. Almost their first job had been to dig a trench, which struck some of the troops as being slightly ironic in view of the fact that at Hébuterne there were more trenches than there were troops to fill them. Hébuterne itself consisted of a long village street with a half-ruined church, a few run-down farms whose tenants had long since decamped and which now served, like the tumbledown rows of cottages, as advanced headquarters and billets for signallers, orderlies, and regimental police whose duties kept them near the front line. The front line itself ran parallel to the village street, a few hundred yards ahead of it, and the lanes that ran through orchards to the vestiges of the old fields served as communication trenches to the line – or lines, for the French, during their occupancy, had dug a complete complex of trenches. The British, thinking them too wide, too shallow and ‘not much good’, had dug a whole new system when they had taken over, a fact which runners of the newly arrived 56th Division frequently cursed whenever their travels between the front and Battalion Headquarters were delayed by involuntary meanderings that terminated infuriatingly in a dead end.