The Heroic Gangster by Neil Hanson

Author:Neil Hanson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

16

THE MEN MUST GO FORWARD

During the night of September 2 through 3, the exhausted troops of the 106th had been relieved by the British 122nd Infantry. They trudged back across the Franco-Belgian border, leaving their billets at Micmac Farm at 1:30 a.m. and marching to Napier, where they boarded a narrow gauge railway to Rattekot, Saint-Eloi. After spending what was left of the night in tents there, they made a three-hour march the following night to Wayenburg and boarded another train, though they first had to shovel out the manure left by the animals that had previously been transported in it. They finally entrained at 1:30 a.m. on the morning of September 5, but did not reach Mondicourt until 6:30 that evening, and then faced another two-and-a-half-hour march before finally reaching their billets at Doullens. When they at last arrived, the surviving 12 officers and 654 enlisted men of the Second Battalion of the 106th ate for the first time in thirty-six hours.

They were quartered in the ancient stone citadel on a hill just outside Doullens, or in barns in the surrounding countryside. “There were prior tenants in these barns . . . some of them were quite large and every night they came out of their hiding places to chase each other over the blankets of the soldier occupants...We were involved in a serious training mission and were too tired to be bothered with rats. We just went to sleep, pulling our lone blanket over our heads.” There were other prior tenants, too: “cooties”—lice—infested the men, their clothing, and their hay and straw bedding. Despite the army’s attempts to delouse their troops, steaming or fumigating their uniforms to kill the lice while the men stood naked and shivering, they were louse-free only until they again lay down to sleep, when they at once became reinfested.

General Read, Commander of the Second Corps that included the 27th Division, had already made a request for replacements for his depleted ranks—now 62 officers and 2,547 men short. The request was not answered; the 27th Division received no replacements at all until late October 1918, by which time its fighting service was at an end.

The 106th Infantry remained in Doullens for a fortnight, reorganizing the depleted ranks, which were slowly being augmented by a trickle of returning wounded and gassed men, and reequipping and retraining, despite torrents of rain that left them once more knee-deep in mud and water. These tired and bloodied soldiers showed an understandable lack of enthusiasm for drill sessions during their rest period, drawing complaints from a regimental adjutant who noted that almost seven hundred men of the 106th and the other regiments of the division were “in billets at time of inspection . . . this number is out of all proportion and appears beyond reason.”

There was also a problem with men going absent without leave, some of whom must have been classified as deserters. A report produced on September 6, 1918, showed that about fifty men had been AWOL at some time during the previous fortnight, with two companies particularly badly affected.

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