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The corporal, pulling out his cigarette case, offered cigarettes all round, and we started to smoke. The last scene that I saw in Hébuterne was that of three men dressing a tall badly wounded Prussian officer lying on the side of the road. The ambulance turned the corner out of the village. There followed three "crashes" and dust flew on to the floor of the car.
No one was therefore sorry when on the 25th we returned to Authie, after an interval of three months, to the great delight of the inhabitants, and enjoyed the spring for a short while in that pleasant valley. Before returning to the line the battalion spent a few days at Sailly and Couin, furnishing working parties for Hébuterne each night and day.
To them it was sacred ground, this line from the long ridge of Notre Dame de Lorette, past Arras, the old capital of Artois, to Hebuterne, where it linked up with the British army already on the Somme. Every field here was a graveyard of their heroic dead.
We entrained at Rue early on the morning of the 21st, and made our way via Etaples and St Pol to Ligny St Flochel, whence we had a long fifteen miles march to Humbercourt. That night we had our first experience of night bombing. From here several senior officers went for a day or two's experience of trench life to a New Zealand Division in the Hebuterne sector north of Albert.
Slowly our guns broke forth upon them in a tumult of rage. The Germans in retaliation sprayed our nearer batteries with shrapnel, and threw a barrage of whizz-bangs across the little white road leading into the village of Hébuterne. This feeble retaliation was swallowed up and overpowered by the torrent of metal that now poured incessantly into their territory.
Sailly was full of camps and dumps; the bare and desolate slopes to the east harboured tier upon tier of guns. Reliefs from the Brigade worked day and night without a pause in Hébuterne and the adjacent trenches.
Immediately to the south of the Serre road, the ground rises into one of the many big chalk spurs, which thrust from the main Hébuterne plateau towards the Ancre Valley. The spur at this point runs east and west, and the lines cross it from north and south. They go up it side by side, a hundred and fifty yards apart, with a greenish No Man's Land between them.
Early on the 26th the Germans had broken through our old line between Beaumont-Hamel and Hébuterne and taken Colincamps, where they had not been since 1914; but in the afternoon they were driven out again, and the recovery was permanent.
For several consecutive days in February, Hébuterne received a ration of several thousand shells, and cases of shell shock made their appearance. During one of these bombardments Company-Sergt.-Major Lawrence, of B Company, was blown to pieces as he came up from the cellar of the sergeants' mess in the Keep.
On the contrary, the work and responsibility, especially for officers and N.C.O.'s was considerably increased, and the difficulty of finding accommodation in the teeming hive of Hébuterne for an extra 250 men added to the general discomfort.
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