Blood and Thunder (62 page)

It was not the first time that Henry had shown an utter disregard for his own personal safety, despite General John's warnings about his role as a company commander and how precious he was. On one occasion, when his men were laying a wooden track at Pilckem Ridge, they came under heavy fire. ‘The Captain just kept walking up and down the slip of road as if nothing was happening,' wrote one Guardsman. ‘When the men saw the example that [he] was showing … they very soon all returned and resumed work.' One of the men noticed a hole in the Henry's burberry, made by debris from one of the shells. He did not shout at his men for running away, he simply smiled when he saw them coming back to join him.

On another occasion, in front of Langemarck, Henry crawled 300 yards in broad daylight with an orderly to begin marking an alternative route out for his men in miserable weather to save them from a mile of drudgery and a shower of German shells. The area was void of landmarks and ‘a sea of mud'. All he had to mark their route was remnants of tape he had scraped together stuck end to end.

On such missions his sense of humour did not fail him. Henry's reconnaissance reports were a source of entertainment for the brigade staff. ‘When his report was presented it was written as likely as not on the back of a private envelope and among a mass of useful information gathered … and by taking quite unjustifiable risks, there would be one or two deductions intended to be merely farcical.'

Despite his record Henry felt guilty about his elbow wound as it meant he would be sent home for a month. ‘I'm afraid I feel rather a scrimshank getting hit just now when things are so uncertain.' It had not escaped him though, that it would be a period of respite for his parents. ‘I am awfully pleased for your sakes, you poor darlings. It means a good long spell of freedom from anxiety and we shall have enormous fun.'

He utilised his time at home fully. His sister Anne was pulled away from school and with their mother they spent a few days in London including a day down at Eton, where Henry had spent much of his time. His father was with him to see the Eton and Harrow match. It was a low-key affair played at school rather than the usual grand Lord's affair. Mr Dundas watched proudly as Henry, Ivan Cobbold and another friend went on a recruitment drive trying to talk boys into the idea of joining the Scots Guards when the time came for them to stake a regimental allegiance.

The reality of the war, though, was never far from his mind. Towards the end of June word arrived that a non-OE officer named Holmes, affectionately known as ‘Sherlock' by his fellow officers, had been sitting on Henry's bunk in their dugout when he had been killed by a German artillery shell. Shocked, Henry's first inclination was to get back to the front as quickly as possible. By the end of July he had returned to his company and the daily grind had resumed. ‘Everyone seems to be very confident that the Germans are very low, and the line seems to be very quiet and comfortable.'

While Henry was away the Guards had undergone a month of training and recuperation. There was a real sense amongst them ‘that Hindenburg and Ludendorff had done their worst … that their bolt was shot' and that when they went back on the offensive the Allies would have the upper hand. They were being thoroughly versed in open warfare for the next phase of the war, incorporating and developing lessons learned during the grand German spring attacks. Different national contingents were pooling their ideas. The New Zealanders sent NCOs along to the Guards to be trained and the Canadians supplied others to give a demonstration in patrolling and raiding in daylight. Feilding was trying very hard to give the men some time for rest and relaxation too. There was a gymkhana organised by one brigade, a horse show by another and the Grenadiers played the Welsh Guards in a ‘mass football match', twenty-five men on each side with four balls in what turned out to be a ‘Homeric struggle'.

The Guards were also busy instructing American newcomers to the Western Front, ready for their induction into the war proper. Their visitors were from the 80th Division. All of the men appeared to be from a Pennsylvania mining district and ‘American' was only a loose description of these troops, who had been born all over the world and communicated in ‘a babel of tongues'. Henry found them ‘amusing, interesting and rather arduous'. They were ‘very apt, very keen and very ignorant'. Britain had had four years to adapt to the industrialised warfare of the Western Front; now their new allies would have to catch up quickly.

Henry could hear his servant McIntosh chatting away to their NCOs in the next room of their dugout and his company sergeant major, Mitchell, was enjoying himself immensely bossing them around. Henry found the Americans' effervescent enthusiasm amusing, ‘so full of ardour to get over to the Germans and do them in'. Their commanding officer was remarkably energetic and eager to oblige. He went constantly around the lines, which Henry found wryly amusing. ‘Four years hence?' After a period of instruction there were then stints in the line in the company of the Guards. Henry was to act as a consultant of sorts. ‘I shall give excellent advice, but avoid exercise as much as possible. The hot weather makes one very lazy and disinclined for active participation in the war.'

On 8 August a British assault was led by General Rawlinson and his Fourth Army that the Germans would refer to as the ‘Black Day'. Aimed at pushing the enemy away from Amiens, to which they remained perilously close after Operation Michael in March, in five days the British managed to drive the Germans up to 12 miles back in some places. Although the British were outnumbered significantly they took thousands of prisoners and captured hundreds of guns. The French attacked too and forced the enemy to hurriedly evacuate a large swathe of territory to the south.

As of 13 August though, German resistance began to harden, even if they were still on the defensive. Haig decided at this point to change things. Rather than push an ailing attack forward he switched the focus to another sector. Byng's Third Army now came into play, attempting to surprise the enemy with a strike near Bapaume.

By mid August the Germans had begun pulling back in front of the Guards. They remained in Moyenville and Hamelincourt, but were in no mood for a fight. The Division flung nearly 700 gas drums at them in the former village, which they had now been looking at since April, and the enemy barely reacted. Byng's attack was to take place on 23 August in conjunction with some of the Fourth Army north of the Somme. It was decided though, that two days prior to this it was necessary for some of his men, including the Guards, to launch a limited attack north of the Ancre to take care of a line of fierce German resistance. The 2nd Guards Brigade, including Ralph Gamble's 1st Coldstream Guards and Henry Dundas' 1st Scots Guards, were selected for the job.

The relevant units were pulled from the line and sent back to Saulty on 16 August for training. They were not told what was afoot but Evelyn Fryer, with the last of the brigade's three battalions, the 3rd Grenadier Guards, was suspicious. ‘There was much conjecture as to what this meant, the official explanation being given out that the enemy was massing opposite us and a new attack was imminent and therefore it had been decided that each division should have a complete brigade in reserve for counter-attacking purposes.' They swallowed this tale at first, but once the Guardsmen began to practice counter-attacking and their research focus fell on positions such as Moyenville
in front
of their positions he surmised that they would be going forward themselves.

Ralph had missed almost all the final preparations, even though he would be commanding one of the Coldstream companies in battle. He arrived back at the front from leave on 19 August and dined with Henry at Corps HQ; ‘very pleasant, with a band playing Pinafore'. Twenty-four hours later Ralph was loading his men into lorries for the journey to their assembly positions. Loaded down with ammunition, sandbags and shovels, they were issued with rations, including lemons, chocolate, tea, rum and cigarettes as they waited for zero hour. Henry would be acting as his battalion's second-in-command and thus not leading his company into battle. That job would fall to Marsham-Townshend. Henry spent a strenuous night with a roll of tape, marking out assembly positions before heading back to battalion headquarters to help oversee the attack.

The attack on 21 August was to take place along a 9-mile stretch from Miraumont to Moyenville to try to turn the line of the old Somme defences from the north. On their front, the 2nd Guards Brigade were to push south-east. In charge of the brigade since the departure of General John was Bertram Sergison-Brooke. Youthful, just as precious to Henry as his predecessor and more commonly known as ‘Boy' Brooke, he planned to have Ralph's battalion on the left moving on Moyenville itself and Henry's on the right, with Evelyn Fryer's waiting in a sunken road at Boiry to come up an hour and a half later to push through towards a railway line which comprised his brigade's final objective.

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.