Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - 9th October 1914

 

The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade

August 1914 to March 1915

BY 

Brigadier-General COUNT GLEICHEN,

(now Major-General Lord Edward Gleichen),
K.C.V.O., C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O.

Oct. 9th.

It was a nice sunny day on the morrow, and we got our orders by midday that we were to move off at 2 P.M. We wrote out Brigade orders and prepared to start, when suddenly post-haste came some orders cancelling these, and telling us that we were to drop our transport and be moved off at once in a series of motor-buses to a place called Diéval.

And then began a lovely jumble, which resulted (not our own fault) in getting to Diéval rather later than we should have done had we trusted to our own unaided powers of locomotion.

We moved off at 2 P.M., only taking blanket-waggons which were to dump blankets and supplies into the buses. These were to have turned up on the Haravesnes-Fillièvres road at 7 P.M.; in any case it would have been a complicated job getting into them in the dark, but they did not arrive till midnight, owing to some mechanical breakdowns in the column. The first lot of "camions" were to have taken six battalions—i.e., the 14th Brigade, which was just ahead of us, and half of the 15th Brigade. But when they did arrive, there were only enough for three and three-quarter battalions; so we bivouacked in more or less peace by the roadside until this bunch had moved off and returned from Diéval to fetch us. Horribly cold it was too, and we only kept moderately warm by pulling down several straw stacks—which we carefully put together again next day—and covering ourselves up in the straw.

I had, by the way, an extremely narrow escape from being killed that night. I had been lying down just off the road, when it struck me that I should find out more of what was happening and going to happen if I went to the head of the camion column and interviewed the officer in charge. It was a tramp of a mile or more through the 14th Brigade, and I found out something of what I wanted; but when I returned to the bivouac I heard that, not two minutes after I had started, a motor-bus had swerved off the road and passed exactly over the place where my head had been. It very nearly went over St André and Moulton-Barrett, who were lying a few feet away, as it was. Of course the driver could not see any one lying down in the dark.