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Updated: June 12, 2025
On the Battalion's front Pond Farm, a small concrete stronghold, remained the sole fruit of the attack of August 22. It was after the 61st Division had been withdrawn, wasted in stationary war, that what success could be associated with this third battle of Ypres commenced. Judged by its efforts, the 61st was ill paid in results.
A soldier was on guard with bayonet fixed inside that little room, which had passageway to the cellar past the table, among straw beds. This seemed rather peculiar. The reason lay on one of the beds in a private's khaki. He had come into the battalion's trenches from our front and said that he belonged to the D regiment and had been out on patrol and lost his way.
Those officers inspected the Battalion at Oxford before it left, at the end of January, 1915, for Northampton. The move from Oxford terminated the first phase in the Battalion's history. At Northampton fresh conditions were in store. Smaller billets and army rations replaced the former system of billets 'with subsistence. Elementary training was reverted to.
Corps lines ceased to be the show-places for Russian colonels, and the Corps Commander's gardener paused before sowing a new season's peas in the château grounds. G.H.Q. were agog. A German vantage-point. Shell-ridden Holnon. A night of confusion. Preparing for the raid of April 28. The enemy taken by surprise. The Battalion's first V.C. The affair at Cepy Farm.
It was impossible to go to bed, and a weary miserable night was passed by everyone praying for the rain to go off. An unfortunate feature was that the Quartermaster the day before received from Ordnance the Battalion's winter clothing, and had issued it that morning. It had been issued by companies to the men in the afternoon and by night it was sodden with rain.
There was the point whether liaison duties between infantry and artillery could be more usefully conducted in the swift-changing individual fighting of recent days from infantry brigade or from infantry battalion; there were conflicting statements by junior officers upon short-shooting, and they required sifting; a few words had to be said about the battalion's own stretch of front and its own methods of harassing the enemy.
The East side of the valley, where the Support Battalion's dug-outs had been built, was immune from German shells owing to the steepness of the hill side, and here for six days we had comparative rest, except at nights, when we most of us went digging on the new line.
The rest of the march passed uneventfully, but the country became less flat than hitherto an addition to their trials! He tried his French on the Battalion's interpreter, who in peace time had been an Avocat in Paris, and who told him many things of the French Army.
Captain Maxey sprang to his feet as if he had been caught in a disgraceful act. He called his sergeants, and they began to beat the men up out of the strawstacks and puddles. In half an hour they were on the road. This was the Battalion's first march over really bad roads, where walking was a question of pulling and balancing. They were soon warm, at any rate; it kept them sweating.
They by no means necessarily contain its most distinguished pages. The close of the second year of the Battalion's active service is, however, a fitting point to end this volume.
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