1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [47]
Lieutenant Milner narrowly escaped being the very first casualty of the entire division and, compared to his dramatic entrance into the field of war, the arrival of the 6th South Staffs was something of an anti-climax. It was also a deep disappointment to Colonel Water-house. His men played their part to perfection, marching smartly through the streets to the transit camp, lustily whistling The Marseillaise’ in compliment to their French allies. But the allies, as represented by the civilian population of le Havre, took not the slightest notice. The 46th Divisional supply column had been longer on the way for it was a laborious job to pack up and move the 200 wagons, 600 men and as many as 550 horses that made up the Divisional train. The men who had reached France before the supply column got there were more than pleased to see it when it finally arrived. No one was happier than Captain Ashwell of the 8th Battalion, Notts and Derby, known to the army as the Sherwood Foresters. Ashwell had drawn what turned out to be the short straw, for he had been sent to France in charge of the advance guard, and if the fifty men who made up this vanguard had been inclined to crow over the laggards who were left behind, they very soon regretted it.
Advance guards were nobody’s children. Even at le Havre, while waiting for space in a train going north, no one seemed inclined to find them billets. They were obliged to shift for themselves and bed down in empty trucks and, when they finally did reach their destination, with no transport, and with no Divisional, Brigade or Battalion headquarters to issue orders or to turn to in case of difficulty, they felt more than ever like lost sheep. There were naturally no battalion postal arrangements and one new arrival, anxious to let his family know his whereabouts, scribbled a hasty note and posted it in a village post-box. No one had told him that troops in France were forbidden to use the civilian postal service and the question of censorship had not entered his head: ‘Dear Mum and Dad, Well, we got away all right. At the moment I am at a place near Cassel with a few other fellows. I expect the rest will arrive soon. I am in the pink, and hope this finds you as it leaves me…’This letter caused consternation, first in his family and later in the Battalion, for his parents looked up Cassel on a small-scale map of Europe, found only Kassel in Germany, and made the natural assumption that their son had been taken prisoner the moment he set foot in France. They wrote straight off to the War Office for information. Later, after the arrival of his Battalion, when the wrath of Whitehall eventually descended on the head of his Commanding Officer, the unfortunate soldier received a wigging he was unlikely to forget.
The task of the advance guard was to pave the way for the Battalion, to find billets for a thousand weary men at the end of their long journey, to select premises suitable for Battalion Headquarters and orderly rooms, places nearby where the cookers could set up, and suitable fields for the wagon lines. Finding billets in the scattered hamlets north of Cassel, Ashwell discovered, was a simple task compared to that of feeding his fifty men. Iron rations were soon exhausted, they had to forage further and further afield for supplies and, in the three days before the Battalion arrived, Ashwell reckoned that he had personally trudged no less than forty-five miles in search of food. They arrived on the evening of 4 March. Ashwell was heartily pleased to see them and even more pleased, when the next move came, to be back in the fold and travelling as one of the crowd.
It had taken ten days for the whole division to congregate. There had been time – but only just – to give a few of the earliest arrivals a brief stint in some quiet sector of the trench-line but soon after the last straggling unit arrived and the division was complete, the order came to move south. This time it was the real thing for they were moving into general reserve for the Battle