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Having driven them out, the 75th pushed on to gain the pass into the hills and to begin two days of fighting which earned the unstinted praise of General Bulfin who witnessed it.
More than three-quarters of the summit of the ridge had been won, the entire Second Infantry Brigade was across, the Twenty-fifth Artillery Brigade was across, ready to support, and General Bulfin, instead of tiring his men by making them intrench there, ordered them to rest, throwing their outposts in front of the hamlet of Moulins. This ended the first day's fighting on the battle of the Aisne.
General Bulfin realised it would be risking heavy losses to ask his troops to make another immediate effort against a numerically stronger enemy in positions of his own choice, and he therefore applied to General Allenby that the XXth Corps the 60th Division was already at Latron attached to the XXIst Corps might take over the line.
General Bulfin saw General Hill and his brigadiers on the afternoon of the 20th. The brigadiers were depressed owing to the floods and the state of the ground, because it was then clear that causeways would have to be made through the mud to the river banks. General Hill remained enthusiastic and hopeful and, the Corps Commander supporting him, it was decided to proceed with the operation.
His plan was agreed to by General Bulfin, although the Corps Commander had doubts about the possibility of its success, and had his own scheme ready to be put into instant operation if General Hill's failed. In the state of the weather General Hill's own brigadiers were not sanguine, and they were the most loyal and devoted officers a divisional commander ever had.
Realising that, if General Allenby's operations were successful, and no one doubted that, we should have a period of open warfare when troops would be called upon to make long marches and undergo the privations entailed by transport difficulties, General Bulfin brought as many men as he could spare from the trenches back to Deir el Belah and the coast, where they had route marches over the sand for the restoration of their marching powers.
The 60th Division came over from Salonika and we were delighted to have them, for they not only gave us General Bulfin as the XXIst Corps Commander, but set an example of efficiency and a combination of dash and doggedness which earned for them a record worthy of the best in the history of the great war.
General Bulfin gave the plan most careful consideration, but decided that to base so important an operation on the success of a surprise attack was too hazardous, and he adhered to his scheme of a deliberate operation to be carried through systematically.
So desirous was General Bulfin to conceal the concentration of heavies that the wireless code calls were only those used by batteries which were in position before his Corps was formed, and the volume of fire came as an absolute surprise to the enemy. It came as a surprise also to some of us in camp at G.H.Q. one night at the end of October.
Who will sing the arrival of General Moussy, and of the French corps on the last day of that first battle of Ypres, when a motley gathering of cooks and laborers with staff officers and dismounted cavalry, in shining helmets, flung themselves pellmell into a bayonet charge with no bayonets, to relieve the hard-pressed English division under General Bulfin? And did it.
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