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By Root 1900 0

Coldstream Guards had been fighting from the start. They had fought their way back in the long retreat from Mons in a series of brilliant rearguard actions. They had fought in the battles of the Marne and the Aisne and raced north in October to meet the Germans at Ypres in the great battle that brought the German army to a standstill and saved the Channel ports. At the end of the autumn fighting the Battalion had been reduced to a hundred and fifty officers and men. But the drafts of reinforcements from the Reserve Battalion which had brought them almost up to strength were also Regular soldiers and Guardsmen, long-schooled in the discipline and traditions that had forged the reputation of the Guards as the best of all the soldiers in an army that was generally acknowledged to be the best army in the world.

Fighting in the trenches was a sad comedown from the cut and thrust of mobile warfare and the particular length of trench-line the Coldstream were now inhabiting was not one that would have been easily envisaged by a guardsman drilling on the immaculate parade ground at Caterham or mounting the King’s Guard at Buckingham Palace in the piping days of peace. It was in a particularly nasty sector of the line at Cambrin near the la Bassée Canal where the tunnellers of both sides had been busy and the frequent explosions had reduced the trenches to a meandering shambles of loops and saps. The British and German lines were barely thirty yards apart and in the sector occupied by the Coldstream Guards the distance was even narrower. Two large mine craters nicknamed Vesuvius and Etna lay between them and the German front line and each side held one lip – a good deal too close for comfort. The Guards had constructed a new front line a little further back with a long listening-sap running forward to ‘their’ side of the crater. Every sound and every movement could be heard clearly by the troops across the way and although silence was rigidly observed and orders were given as far as possible by hand signals, it was difficult even for the disciplined Guards to make no sound at all in the ordinary way and, no matter how stealthily they went about changing places with an incoming battalion, almost impossible during a relief. A few nights earlier the Coldstream had suffered badly when the Scots Guards moved in to relieve them. The Germans were alerted by the shuffling of movement and the occasional inadvertent clink of equipment and sent over a shower of mortar bombs, giant Minenwerfers fired from close range, which had caused havoc in 2 Company’s trench. There were several casualties, including two of the senior sergeants, and the Company Commander, Captain the Honourable Thomas Agar Robartes was furious.

Lt. G. Barry, MC, 1st Bn., Coldstream Guards.

Tommy Robartes was a remarkable man. He was a Member of Parliament, and one of the very few men I’ve ever come across who appeared to be entirely devoid of any form of fear. Nobody ever saw him duck for a shell or take cover when bullets were flying around. His company would have followed him anywhere. He was infuriated at the loss of his two sergeants and swore he would get his own back on the Germans.

Now it so happened that while he was on leave in England Tommy had bought a number of musical instruments, including a drum, which he’d had sent over to France with the intention of forming a company band. It numbered about ten men under a corporal and when we were out of the line or in billets they used to practise and they soon became so good that they were even allowed to play on route-marches. So when Tommy’s fertile imagination got to work on how to avenge the death of his two sergeants he immediately thought of the band. A large number of Germans would be lured to a certain spot by the music of the band, whereupon they would be well and truly shelled!

Before we went back to the trenches Tommy explained his plan to the Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel John Ponsonby, and the Colonel was tickled to death at the idea and gave him his blessing. At three minutes to midnight on