Child and the 262nd Siege Battery were then deployed in Vaulx-Vraucourt , up the Noreuil valley, which had been christened “Death Valley” by the troops. The Germans opened up with a tremendous artillery barrage just after 04:30, and within minutes Child and his men were responding to SOS flares from troops in the front trenches. Communications were cut between the forward observation officers, the battery’s guns, and the officer commanding the battery, Major du Neufville. At 05:15, the left and right sections of the battery were pounded by German artillery fire and each section took heavy casualties; German 5.9" shells were raining in at a rate of about three a minute, but the battery somehow maintained their rate of fire, their shelling being the lifeline for the overwhelmed infantry.
Just before about 09:00, Philip Child was hit by shrapnel, and though his wounds were light he was momentarily knocked unconscious and evacuated to a first aid post for treatment. Shortly after, the intensity of the German artillery fire increased, and the battery command post had to be abandoned. His wounds bandaged, Child returned to the fight shortly before the Germans overwhelmed the British trenches in front of them. The gunners reported German machine gun fire was coming over, and there was hand-to-hand fighting in a trench on their right flank a thousand yards away. By 12:30, RGA Lewis gunners were defending the battery’s guns from direct German infantry assault.
The major went forward to assess the situation, and seeing no British infantry in front of him, with vast numbers of the enemy pouring down the valley, he gave the order to scupper their four forward guns and retire. Major De Neufville visited every dugout and gun emplacement to make sure all his men were safely away; on his way out, he was caught by German machine guns sweeping the road. He was hit in the head and killed instantly.
Major Eustace Charles De Neufville was awarded the Distinguished Service Order as well as the Belgian Croix de Guerre, and he is commemorated on the Arras Memorial. His grave was never found. Philip Child would pay homage to his fallen commanding officer years later in God’s Sparrows ; Child gave his character Uncle Charles the major’s courage, character and name.
Over the course of the next weeks, the German advance would falter in the face of overstretched supply lines and the British and Commonwealth reinforcements who were rushed into defensive positions. The Germans had captured much ground, but they could not hold it, nor could they take the key Allied positions of Arras and Amiens. It was their last, desperate chance of winning the war, and the gamble failed.
The 262nd Siege Battery was knocked out of the war in the short term. Having lost four of its 8" howitzers in the initial German advance, another was damaged in the withdrawal on the evening of March 21. The battery’s last gun was damaged the following day by German shell fire. Without armaments, the unit was pulled out of the line, rested and refitted. It would be operational again by June.
One of Philip Child’s fellow officers in the 262nd, Captain Philip Russell Knightly, wrote long letters home throughout the war, and they provide the only accurate record of the battery’s movements throughout the spring and summer of 1918.[8] In June and July he complains of boredom: “We are back again to the old, old round of stationary warfare — observation post shoots, shells, and shelling. Once more these have come to seem part of our everyday life, which is now almost monotonous. There are now no heroic stunts or strategic movements. We are once again a dull, lifeless crowd, but with one burning topic — leave.”[9] Philip Child was granted leave to Paris for ten days from July 7 to 16, and to the U.K. from September 9 to 23.
They would need the rest. The Hundred Days Offensive, a series of attacks against the Germans across the Western Front, began with the Battle of Amiens on August 8, and would continue until the Germans were driven from France and Belgium, forced to retreat behind the Hindenburg Line and, finally, agree to an Armistice on November 11. The pace of the Allied advance was staggering; it was the breakout they had been hoping for since 1914.
In The War Memorial Volume of Trinity College , published in Toronto in 1922, Philip Child states that he saw service “in actions of August 28, Sept 2 [Croisilles], Sept 27–29 [Hermies and Etricourt along the Fins-Gouzeaucort Road], Oct 11 [Montigny], Oct 21 [the Le Fayt Audencourt Road], and Nov 6, 1918 [Ovillers].”
The war diary of the 54th Heavy Artillery Brigade states where the 262nd Siege Battery was located, and when they moved to a new location, but does not contain details of when the guns were firing, what the objective was, or which guns were held in reserve. The record of September 27, 1918 in the official war diary is a representative example: “Hermies 27/08/18 5:20 am. Zero Hour. Infantry attacked covered by H.A. [heavy artillery].” In each of these attacks, Philip Child and the 262nd Siege Battery would have been well back of the advancing troops of General Julian Byng’s British Third Army, providing fire support as needed. But the details that exist for engagements earlier in the war have been lost for this final phase.
Two weeks after the Armistice, Philip Child fell ill. Exhausted from the frenetic pace of the Hundred Days Offensive and the cumulative effects of a year in France, he was admitted to hospital on November 28, 1918. Child had contracted the Spanish Flu and would be in hospital recovering for nearly a month. Throughout his illness, he was plagued by fevered dreams of all he had witnessed in his time at the front. He returned to his battery on December 22 in time for their final Christmas dinner in France, but, still weak, he was overcome both with the realization that the war was finally over and at the absence of so many comrades who had perished. In mid-January , he was en route back to England and would be demobilized on January 25, 1919. But nightmares of the war would continue to haunt him for months after he’d left the artillery.[10]
This photograph of Philip Child was most likely taken post war (he’s in the uniform of the RGA, and he couldn’t have had that shot taken before he returned home).
Philip Child Fonds, Local History and Archives Department, Hamilton Public Library.
Philip Child returned to Canada in 1919, and resumed his studies at Trinity College, University of Toronto, graduating with a B.A. in 1921, and winning the Moss Scholarship for the best all-round student. He would study at Christ College, Cambridge, in the fall of 1921, completing an affiliated Bachelor’s degree before earning a Master’s degree at Harvard in 1923. In the fall of 1923, he was hired as a lecturer in English at Trinity College, University of Toronto, a post he would hold until 1926.
It was in this period that Child began working on the poems that would end each section of God’s Sparrows. The poems “The Apple” and “Brother Newt to Brother Fly,” which follow the first and third sections of the novel respectively, were written in the summer of 1924. An early version of the latter poem was briefly entitled “Brother Rat to Brother Fly,” but rats had become an all-too-common device in war poetry, and, thus, one that Child wanted to avoid. He also began playing with the couplet “Beyond my sight the cloudless sky / Is troubled with artillery” in his notebooks; it would become the final couplet of his poem “Macrocosm,” published years later in The Victorian House and Other Poems (1951). There are a handful of unpublished war poems from this period as well amongst Child’s papers: “An Eight-Inch Howitzer,” and “Battle Scene” both date from 1924, while Child began to draft a much longer poem at about this time called “Thompson’s Death,” in which a soldier explains to a grieving father how his son really died.
On August 5, 1925, Philip Child married Gertrude Helen Potts (b. July 30, 1900) in Saint Thomas Anglican Church in Toronto. They’d met at Trinity College when Child returned from the war, where she was doing honours work in English and history. They were ideally suited: as bookish as Philip, Gertrude was the head of the college library and editor of the school’s literary
