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Transport and stores, for extricating which credit was due to Abraham and Murray, alone came out complete. Effects of the German offensive. The Battalion amalgamated with the Bucks. Entrainment for the Merville area. A dramatic journey. The enemy break-through on the Lys. The Battalion marches into action. The defence of Robecq. Operations of April 12, 13, 14. The fight for Baquerolle Farm.
After the inspection we sent a large party, six officers and 230 N.C.O.'s and men, to Sailly Labourse, to carry gas cylinders and other material to trenches, but except for this we were spared all fatigues during our period of rest. A week later we marched through Béthune and Robecq to Calonne sur la Lys, a little village outside Merville, where we remained another week before going to the line.
Madame de Merville had dismissed her woman, and was seated in her own room, leaning her head musingly on her hand. Beside her was the table that held her MSS. and a few books, amidst which were scattered vases of flowers. On a pedestal beneath the window was placed a marble bust of Dante.
All through this country between Estaires and Merville, to Steenwerck, Metern, and Bailleul, thousands of civilians had been living on the edge of the battlefields, believing themselves safe behind our lines. Now the line had slipped and they were caught by German shell-fire and German guns, and after nearly four years of war had to abandon their homes like the first fugitives.
Before, however, he had joined it, and while yet in the full flush of a young man's love for a woman formed to excite the strongest attachment, she she " The Frenchman's voice trembled, and he resumed with affected composure: "Madame de Merville, who had the best and kindest heart that ever beat in a human breast, learned one day that there was a poor widow in the garret of the hotel she inhabited who was dangerously ill without medicine and without food having lost her only friend and supporter in her husband some time before.
At Steenbecque station, which is three miles short of Hazebrouck and hidden behind the Nieppe Forest, we received the latest news of the battle into which we were being so dramatically plunged: the enemy had broken through the feeble resistance of the Portuguese and was outside Merville.
For a while our route lay through country that some of us had traversed before, and Merville, Vieux Berquin, and other places were hailed with delight. There is a certain charm in returning to places that one has never expected to see again.
Madame de Merville, however, though a person of elegant taste, was neither ostentatious nor selfish; she had no children, and she lived quietly in apartments, handsome, indeed, but not more than adequate to the small establishment which where, as on the Continent, the costly convenience of an entire house is not usually incurred sufficed for her retinue.
The officiating priest, which on this occasion happened to be the clergyman from our own hospital, slowly mounted the steps of the stage as the chant swelled into greater volume, and the whole crowd went down upon its knees in prayer. After certain offices had been performed by the priest at the altar he descended and the procession dispersed. Such was the interesting "Fete de Feu" of Merville.
Gloucesters and Berks rushed forward at misty dawn and flung bridges over the stream; but the machine-gun fire was too intense, and though some parties got across, others did not, co-operation broke down, and the attack gained no result. A few days afterwards the Germans went back, giving up Calonne, Merville, and Neuf Berquin-villages which our artillery had utterly pulverised.
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