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For two days the position remained unchanged, the Battalion being engaged in repairing the trenches and carrying up rations and ammunition, till on the night of the 18th it was relieved by a Company of the 7th Northumberland Fusiliers and a Battalion of the Wiltshire Regiment, and went to F. hutments south of Vlamertinghe. This concluded the Battalion's first tour in the "Salient." First Phase.
On the 8th July, after five months continuous duty in the forward zone, the Battalion went into Divisional Reserve at Gouy-en-Artois, where the Battalion was housed in hutments close by the Divisional School. The Somme Battle had commenced, and there was every likelihood of the Division being called upon either to attack on the front it already held or as reinforcements.
Gradisca had not been badly damaged, the Austrians having made no great resistance here against the Italian advance in May 1915, but Peteano had been laid absolutely flat by Austrian twelve-inch guns. It had been utterly destroyed in half an hour's intense bombardment some months before, and many Italian hutments in the neighbourhood had been destroyed at the same time.
A quarter of a league from the fortifications, which Marshal Oudinot claimed were not equipped with cannon, I came on a Russian battalion, whose left flank was protected by the river and whose front was covered by the planks and hutments of an abandoned camp. In such a position the enemy was very difficult for cavalry to attack; however the Marshal ordered me to attack them.
Did they have any faint idea of life in a sector where men stood, slept, ate, worked, under the fire of eight-inch shells, five-point nines, trench-mortars, rifle-grenades, machine-gun bullets, snipers, to say nothing of poison-gas, long-range fire on the billets in small farmsteads, and on every moonlight night air raids above wooden hutments so closely crowded into a small space that hardly a bomb could fall without killing a group of men.
He had lain down in his truckle-bed and listened to the last echoing sounds in the too-resonant corridor of the hutments, and thought of the wisdom of Sir Isaac Davids, and of the peril to his wife, and of the peril to the earth, and of his own irremediable bondage to the military machine.
The orderly-room whispers: "June the fifteenth"; the senior officers' quarters murmur: "France on June the fifteenth"; the mess echoes to the tidings spread by the subaltern-who-knows: "We're for it on June the fifteenth, me lad"; through the men's hutments the word is spread: "It's good-bye to this blinking hole on June the fifteenth"; the Home receives a letter and confides to other homes: "Reginald's lot are going to the war on June the fifteenth"; finally, if we are to believe Mr.
These civilians were much impressed by the nightly retreat sounded by the bugles and drums which had attained a high pitch of efficiency. A long tedious railway journey on the 10th brought the Battalion to Maroeuil. The night was spent in "Y" hutments, and it then entered General Horne's First Army.
He had loved the ranks for their quiet self-effacement and had preferred to be reckoned in their number. It had been dawn when he had started. From the top of the hill above the camp he had gazed back at the huddled, sleeping rows of hutments. How lacking in individuality they were! How wilfully ugly! You could see their like in the rear of all armies.
Sliding and slipping we descended, burying ourselves in these profundities and gropingly encountering the hurly-burly of a convoy of carts and the advance guard of the regiment we were relieving. We passed heaped-up hutments at the foot of the circular chalky cliff that we could see dimly drawn among the black circles of space.
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