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THE IRISH GUARDS IN THE GREAT WAR


      *      *      *      *      *      *

BOOKS BY RUDYARD KIPLING


  ACTIONS AND REACTIONS

  BRUSHWOOD BOY, THE

  CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS

  COLLECTED VERSE

  DAY’S WORK, THE

  DEPARTMENTAL DITTIES AND BALLADS AND BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS

  DIVERSITY OF CREATURES, A

  EYES OF ASIA, THE

  FEET OF THE YOUNG MEN, THE

  FIVE NATIONS, THE

  FRANCE AT WAR

  FRINGES OF THE FLEET

  FROM SEA TO SEA

  HISTORY OF ENGLAND, A

  IRISH GUARDS IN THE GREAT WAR, THE

  JUNGLE BOOK, THE

  JUNGLE BOOK, SECOND

  JUST SO SONG BOOK

  JUST SO STORIES

  KIM

  KIPLING ANTHOLOGY, PROSE AND VERSE

  KIPLING STORIES AND POEMS EVERY CHILD SHOULD KNOW

  KIPLING BIRTHDAY BOOK, THE

  LETTERS OF TRAVEL

  LIFE’S HANDICAP: BEING STORIES OF MINE OWN PEOPLE

  LIGHT THAT FAILED, THE

  MANY INVENTIONS

  NAULAHKA, THE (With Wolcott Balestier)

  PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS

  PUCK OF POOK’S HILL

  REWARDS AND FAIRIES

  RUDYARD KIPLING’S VERSE: Inclusive Edition, 1885-1918

  SEA WARFARE

  SEVEN SEAS, THE

  SOLDIER STORIES

  SOLDIERS THREE, THE STORY OF THE GADSBYS, AND IN BLACK AND WHITE

  SONG OF THE ENGLISH, A

  SONGS FROM BOOKS

  STALKY & CO.

  THEY

  TRAFFICS AND DISCOVERIES

  UNDER THE DEODARS, THE PHANTOM ’RICKSHAW, AND WEE WILLIE WINKIE

  WITH THE NIGHT MAIL

  YEARS BETWEEN, THE

      *      *      *      *      *      *


[Illustration:

  _ITINERARY
  of the
  FIRST BATTALION IRISH GUARDS_
  _AUGUST 1914-DECEMBER 1918._

  _Emery Walker Ltd. del. et sc._]


PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY EMERY WALKER LTD., LONDON


THE IRISH GUARDS IN THE GREAT WAR

Edited and Compiled from
Their Diaries and Papers

by

RUDYARD KIPLING


[Illustration: (decorative diamond icon)]

VOLUME I

The First Battalion






Garden City      New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1923


[Illustration: (personal colophon of Rudyard Kipling)]


Copyright, 1923, by
Rudyard Kipling

All Rights Reserved, Including That of Translation
into Foreign Languages, Including the Scandinavian

Printed in the United States
at
The Country Life Press, Garden City, N. Y.

First Edition




                               CONTENTS

                                                           PAGE
  INTRODUCTION                                               ix


                                 1914

  MONS TO LA BASSÉE                                           1


                                 1915

  LA BASSÉE TO LAVENTIE                                      53


                                 1916

  THE SALIENT TO THE SOMME                                  130


                                 1917

  THE SOMME TO GOUZEAUCOURT                                 194


                                 1918

  ARRAS TO THE ARMISTICE                                    252




                              LIST OF MAPS


  Itinerary of the First Battalion Irish Guards       _Frontispiece_

  The Retreat from Mons, 1914. Northern Section    _Facing page_   6

  The Retreat from Mons, 1914. Southern Section            ”      14

  The Ypres Salient. First Battalion Actions               ”      32

  Actions and Billets. First Battalion                     ”      58

  The Somme. First Battalion               _Between pages_  164, 165

  The Final Advance, August-November 1918         _Facing page_  288




INTRODUCTION


These volumes try to give soberly and with what truth is possible,
the experiences of both battalions of the Irish Guards from 1914 to
1918. The point of view is the battalions’, and the facts mainly
follow the Regimental Diaries, supplemented by the few private
letters and documents which such a war made possible, and by some
tales that have gathered round men and their actions.

As evidence is released, historians may be able to reconstruct what
happened in or behind the battle-line; what motives and necessities
swayed the actors; and who stood up or failed under his burden.
But a battalion’s field is bounded by its own vision. Even within
these limits, there is large room for error. Witnesses to phases of
fights die and are dispersed; the ground over which they fought is
battered out of recognition in a few hours; survivors confuse dates,
places, and personalities, and in the trenches, the monotony of the
waiting days and the repetition-work of repairs breed mistakes and
false judgments. Men grow doubtful or oversure, and, in all good
faith, give directly opposed versions. The clear sight of a comrade
so mangled that he seems to have been long dead is burnt in on one
brain to the exclusion of all else that happened that day. The shock
of an exploded dump, shaking down a firmament upon the landscape,
dislocates memory throughout half a battalion; and so on in all
matters, till the end of laborious enquiry is too often the opening
of fresh confusion. When to this are added the personal prejudices
and misunderstandings of men under heavy strain, carrying clouded
memories of orders half given or half heard, amid scenes that pass
like nightmares, the only wonder to the compiler of these records
has been that any sure fact whatever should be retrieved out of the
whirlpool of war.

It seemed to him best, then, to abandon all idea of such broad
and balanced narratives as will be put forward by experts, and to
limit himself to matters which directly touched the men’s lives and
fortunes. Nor has he been too careful to correct the inferences of
the time by the knowledge of later events. From first to last, the
Irish Guards, like the rest of our armies, knew little of what was
going on round them. Probably they knew less at the close of the war
than at the beginning when our forces were so small that each man
felt himself somebody indeed, and so stood to be hunted through the
heat from Mons to Meaux, turned again to suffer beneath the Soupir
ridges, and endured the first hideous winter of the Salient where,
wet, almost weaponless, but unbroken, he helped in the long miracle
of holding the line.

But the men of ’14 and ’15, and what meagre records of their day were
safe to keep, have long been lost; while the crowded years between
remove their battles across dead Belgian towns and villages as far
from us as the fights in Homer.

Doubtless, all will be reconstructed to the satisfaction of future
years when, if there be memory beyond the grave, the ghosts may
laugh at the neatly groomed histories. Meantime, we can take it for
granted that the old Regular Army of England passed away in the mud
of Flanders in less than a year. In training, morale, endurance,
courage, and devotion the earth did not hold its like, but it
possessed neither the numbers, guns, nor equipment necessary for
the type of war that overtook it. The fact of its unpreparedness
has been extolled as proof of the purity of its country’s ideals,
which must be great consolation to all concerned. But, how slowly
that equipment was furnished, how inadequate were our first attempts
at bombs, trench-mortars, duck-boards, wiring, and the rest, may
be divined through the loyal and guarded allusions in the Diaries.
Nor do private communications give much hint of it, for one of the
marvels of that marvellous time was the silence of those concerned on
everything that might too much distress their friends at home. The
censorship had imposed this as a matter of precaution, but only the
spirit of the officers could have backed the law so completely; and,
as better days came, their early makeshifts and contrivances passed
out of remembrance with their early dead. But the sufferings of our
Armies were constant. They included wet and cold in due season,
dirt always, occasional vermin, exposure, extreme fatigue, and the
hourly incidence of death in every shape along the front line, and
later in the furthest back-areas where the enemy aeroplanes harried
their camps. And when our Regular troops had been expended, these
experiences were imposed upon officers and men compelled to cover,
within a few months, the long years of training that should go to
the making of a soldier--men unbroken even to the disturbing impact
of crowds and like experiences, which the conscript accepts from his
youth. Their short home-leaves gave them sudden changes to the tense
home atmosphere where, under cover of a whirl of “entertainment” they
and their kin wearied themselves to forget and escape a little from
that life, on the brink of the next world, whose guns they could hear
summoning in the silences between their talk. Yet, some were glad to
return--else why should youngsters of three years’ experience have
found themselves upon a frosty night, on an iron-bound French road,
shouting aloud for joy as they heard the stammer of a machine-gun
over the rise, and turned up the well-known trench that led to their
own dug-out and their brethren from whom they had been separated
by the vast interval of ninety-six hours? Many have confessed to
the same delight in their work, as there were others to whom almost
every hour was frankly detestable except for the companionship that
revealed them one to another till the chances of war separated the
companions. And there were, too, many, almost children, of whom no
record remains. They came out from Warley with the constantly renewed
drafts, lived the span of a Second Lieutenant’s life and were spent.
Their intimates might preserve, perhaps, memories of a promise
cut short, recollections of a phrase that stuck, a chance-seen act
of bravery or of kindness. The Diaries give their names and fates
with the conventional expressions of regret. In most instances, the
compiler has let the mere fact suffice; since, to his mind, it did
not seem fit to heap words on the doom.

For the same reason, he has not dealt with each instance of valour,
leaving it to stand in the official language in which it was
acknowledged. The rewards represent but a very small proportion of
the skill, daring, and heroism actually noted; for no volume could
hold the full tale of all that was done, either in the way of duty,
under constraint of necessity and desire to keep alive, or through
joy and pleasure in achieving great deeds.

Here the Irish rank and file by temperament excelled. They had
all their race’s delight in the drama of things; and, whatever
the pinch--whether ambushed warfare or hand-to-hand shock,
or an insolently perfect parade after long divorce from the
decencies--could be depended upon to advance the regimental honour.
Their discipline, of course, was that of the Guards, which, based
upon tradition, proven experience, and knowledge of the human heart,
adjusts itself to the spirit of each of its battalions. Though the
material of that body might be expended twice in a twelvemonth, the
leaven that remained worked on the new supplies at once and from the
first. In the dingy out-of-date barracks at Warley the Regimental
Reserves gathered and grew into a full-fledged Second Battalion
with reserves of its own, and to these the wounded officers and
men sent home to be repatched, explained the arts and needs of a
war which, apparently always at a stand, changed character every
month. After the utter inadequacy of its opening there was a period
of hand-made bombs and of loaded sticks for close work; of nippers
for the abundant wire left uncut by our few guns; of remedies for
trench-feet; or medicaments against lockjaw from the grossly manured
Belgian dirt, and of fancy timberings to hold up sliding trenches.
In due course, when a few set battles, which sometimes gained several
hundred yards, had wasted their many thousand lives, infallible forms
of attack and defence developed themselves, were tried and generally
found wanting, while scientific raids, the evolution of specialists,
and the mass of regulated detail that more and more surrounded the
life of the trenches, occupied their leisure between actions. Our
battalions played themselves into the game at the awful price that
must be paid for improvisation, however cheery; enduring with a
philosophy that may have saved the war, the deviations and delays
made necessary by the demands of the various political and other
organisations at home.

In the same spirit they accepted the inevitable breakdowns in the
business of war-by-experiment; for it is safe to say that there
was hardly an operation in which platoons, companies, regiments,
brigades, or divisions were not left with one or both flanks in the
air. Among themselves, officers and men discussing such matters make
it quite clear how and why such and such units broke, were misled,
or delayed on their way into the line. But when a civilian presumes
to assist, all ranks unite against his uninformed criticisms.
He is warned that, once over the top, no plans hold, for the
machine-gun and the lie of the ground dictate the situation to the
platoon-commander on whom all things depend and who sees, perhaps,
fifty yards about him. There are limits, too, of shock and exhaustion
beyond which humanity cannot be pressed without paying toll later.
For which cause it may happen that a Division that has borne long
agony unflinching, and sincerely believes itself capable of yet more,
will, for no reason then apparent (at almost the mere rumour of
noises in the night) collapse ignominiously on the same ground where,
a month later, with two thirds of its strength casualties, it cuts
coolly and cleanly to its goal. And its fellows, who have borne the
same yoke, allow for this.

The compiler of these records, therefore, has made little attempt
to put forward any theory of what might or should have happened if
things had gone according to plan; and has been scrupulous to avoid
debatable issues of bad staff-work or faulty generalship. They were
not lacking in the war, but the broad sense of justice in all who
suffered from them, recognising that all were equally amateurs, saved
the depression of repeated failures from turning into demoralisation.

Here, again, the Irish were reported by those who knew them best, to
have been lenient in their judgments, though their private speech
was as unrestrained as that of any other body of bewildered and
overmastered men. “Wearing down” the enemy through a period of four
years and three months, during most of which time that enemy dealt
losses at least equal to those he received, tested human virtue upon
a scale that the world had never dreamed of. The Irish Guards stood
to the test without flaw.

They were in no sense any man’s command. They needed minute
comprehension, quick sympathy, and inflexible justice, which they
repaid by individual devotion and a collective good-will that showed
best when things were at their utter worst. Their moods naturally
varied with the weather and the burden of fatigues (actions merely
kill, while fatigue breaks men’s hearts), but their morale was
constant because their unofficial life, on which morale hinges, made
for contentment. The discipline of the Guards, demanding the utmost
that can be exacted of the man, requires of the officer unresting
care of his men under all conditions. This care can be a source of
sorrow and friction in rigid or over-conscientious hands, till,
with the best will in the world, a battalion may be reduced to the
mental state of nurse-harried children. Or, conversely, an adored
company commander, bold as a lion, may, for lack of it, turn his
puzzled company into a bear-garden. But there is an elasticity in
Celtic psychology that does not often let things reach breaking-point
either way; and their sense of humour and social duty--it is a race
more careful to regard each other’s feelings than each other’s
lives--held them as easily as they were strictly associated. A jest;
the grave hearing out of absurd complaints that might turn to tragedy
were the hearing not accorded; a prompt soothing down of gloomy,
injured pride; a piece of flagrant buffoonery sanctioned, even
shared, but never taken advantage of, went far in dark days to build
up that understanding and understood inner life of the two battalions
to which, now, men look back lovingly across their civilian years.
It called for a devotion from all, little this side of idolatry; and
was shown equally by officers, N.C.O.’s, and men, stretcher-bearers,
cooks, orderlies, and not least by the hard-bit, fantastic old
soldiers, used for odd duties, who faithfully hobbled about France
alongside the rush of wonderful young blood.

Were instances given, the impression might be false, for the tone
and temper of the time that set the pace has gone over. But while
it lasted, the men made their officers and the officers their men
by methods as old as war itself; and their Roman Catholic priests,
fearless even in a community none too regardful of Nature’s first
law, formed a subtle and supple link between both. That the priest,
ever in waiting upon Death or pain, should learn to magnify his
office was as natural as that doctors and front-line commanders
should find him somewhat under their feet when occasion called for
the secular, not the spiritual, arm. That Commanding Officers, to
keep peace and save important pillars of their little society, should
first advise and finally order the padre not to expose himself
wantonly in forward posts or attacks, was equally of a piece with
human nature; and that the priests, to the huge content of the
men, should disregard the order (“What’s a casualty compared to a
soul?”) was most natural of all. Then the question would come up for
discussion in the trenches and dug-outs, where everything that any
one had on his mind was thrashed out through the long, quiet hours,
or dropped and picked up again with the rise and fall of shell-fire.
They speculated on all things in Heaven and earth as they worked in
piled filth among the carcases of their fellows, lay out under the
stars on the eves of open battle, or vegetated through a month’s
feeding and idleness between one sacrifice and the next.

But none have kept minutes of those incredible symposia that made for
them a life apart from the mad world which was their portion; nor
can any pen recreate that world’s brilliance, squalor, unreason, and
heaped boredom. Recollection fades from men’s minds as common life
closes over them, till even now they wonder what part they can ever
have had in the shrewd, man-hunting savages who answered to their
names so few years ago.

It is for the sake of these initiated that the compiler has loaded
his records with detail and seeming triviality, since in a life where
Death ruled every hour, nothing was trivial, and bald references to
villages, billets, camps, fatigues, and sports, as well as hints of
tales that can never now fully be told, carry each their separate
significance to each survivor, intimate and incommunicable as family
jests.

As regards other readers, the compiler dares no more than hope that
some of those who have no care for old history, or that larger number
who at present are putting away from themselves odious memories, may
find a little to interest, or even comfort, in these very details and
flatnesses that make up the unlovely, yet superb, life endured for
their sakes.

  RUDYARD KIPLING.




THE IRISH GUARDS IN THE GREAT WAR




1914

MONS TO LA BASSÉE


At 5 P. M. on Tuesday, August 4, 1914, the 1st Battalion of the Irish
Guards received orders to mobilize for war against Germany. They were
then quartered at Wellington Barracks and, under the mobilization
scheme, formed part of the 4th (Guards) Brigade, Second Division,
First Army Corps. The Brigade consisted of:

  The 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards.
   “  2nd    “      Coldstream Guards.
   “  3rd    “      Coldstream Guards.
   “  1st    “      Irish Guards.

Mobilization was completed on August 8. Next day, being Sunday,
the Roman Catholics of the Battalion paraded under the Commanding
Officer, Lieut.-Colonel the Hon. G. H. Morris, and went to
Westminster Cathedral where Cardinal Bourne preached; and on the
morning of the 11th August Field-Marshal Lord Roberts and Lady Aileen
Roberts made a farewell speech to them in Wellington Barracks. This
was the last time that Lord Roberts saw the Battalion of which he was
the first Commander-in-Chief.

On the 12th August the Battalion entrained for Southampton in two
trains at Nine Elms Station, each detachment being played out of
barracks to the station by the band. They were short one officer, as
2nd Lieutenant St. J. R. Pigott had fallen ill, and an officer just
gazetted--2nd Lieutenant Sir Gerald Burke, Bart.--could not accompany
them as he had not yet got his uniform. They embarked at Southampton
on a hot still day in the P. & O. s.s. _Novara_. This was a long and
tiring operation, since every one was new to embarkation-duty, and,
owing to the tide, the ship’s bulwarks stood twenty-five feet above
the quay. The work was not finished till 4 P. M. when most of the men
had been under arms for twelve hours. Just before leaving, Captain
Sir Delves Broughton, Bart., was taken ill and had to be left behind.
A telegram was sent to Headquarters, asking for Captain H. Hamilton
Berners to take his place, and the _Novara_ cleared at 7 P. M. As
dusk fell, she passed H.M.S. _Formidable_ off Ryde and exchanged
signals with her. The battle-ship’s last message to the Battalion
was to hope that they would get “plenty of fighting.” Many of the
officers at that moment were sincerely afraid that they might be late
for the war!

The following is the list of officers who went out with the Battalion
that night:


  Lieut.-Col. Hon. G. H. Morris          Commanding Officer.
  Major H. F. Crichton                   Senior Major.
  Captain Lord Desmond FitzGerald        Adjutant.
  Lieut. E. J. F. Gough                  Transport Officer.
  Lieut. E. B. Greer                     M. Gun Officer.
  Hon. Lieut. H. Hickie                  Quartermaster.
  Lieut. H. J. S. Shields (R.A.M.C.)     Medical Officer.
  Lieut. Hon. Aubrey Herbert, M.P.       Interpreter.


_No. 1 Company._

  Capt. Hon. A. E. Mulholland.
  Capt. Lord John Hamilton.
  Lieut. Hon. H. R. Alexander.
  Lieut. C. A. S. Walker.
  2nd Lieut. N. L. Woodroffe.
  2nd Lieut. J. Livingstone-Learmonth.


_No. 2 Company._

  Major H. A. Herbert Stepney.
  Capt. J. N. Guthrie.
  Lieut. E. J. F. Gough.
  Lieut. J. S. N. FitzGerald.
  Lieut. W. E. Hope.
  2nd Lieut. O. Hughes-Onslow.


_No. 3 Company._

  Capt. Sir Delves Broughton, Bart.
      (replaced by Capt. H. Hamilton Berners).
  Capt. Hon. T. E. Vesey.
  Lieut. Hon. Hugh Gough.
  Lieut. Lord Guernsey.
  2nd Lieut. Viscount Castlerosse.


_No. 4 Company._

  Capt. C. A. Tisdall.
  Capt. A. A. Perceval.
  Lieut. W. C. N. Reynolds.
  Lieut. R. Blacker-Douglass.
  Lieut. Lord Robert Innes-Ker.
  2nd Lieut. J. T. P. Roberts.


_Details at the Base._

  Capt. Lord Arthur Hay.
  2nd Lieut. Sir Gerald Burke, Bart.

They reached Havre at 6 A. M. on August 13, a fiercely hot day, and,
tired after a sleepless night aboard ship, and a long wait, in a
hot, tin-roofed shed, for some missing men, marched three miles out
of the town to Rest Camp No. 2 “in a large field at Sanvic, a suburb
of Havre at the top of the hill.” Later, the city herself became
almost a suburb to the vast rest-camps round it. Here they received
an enthusiastic welcome from the French, and were first largely
introduced to the wines of the country, for many maidens lined the
steep road and offered bowls of drinks to the wearied.

Next day (August 14) men rested a little, looking at this strange,
bright France with strange eyes, and bathed in the sea; and Captain
H. Berners, replacing Sir Delves Broughton, joined. At eleven
o’clock they entrained at Havre Station under secret orders for the
Front. The heat broke in a terrible thunderstorm that soaked the new
uniforms. The crowded train travelled north all day, receiving great
welcomes everywhere, but no one knowing what its destination might
be. After more than seventeen hours’ slow progress by roads that were
not revealed then or later, they halted at Wassigny, at a quarter to
eleven on the night of August 15, and, unloading in hot darkness,
bivouacked at a farm near the station.

On the morning of August 16 they marched to Vadencourt, where, for
the first time, they went into billets. The village, a collection of
typical white-washed tiled houses with a lovely old church in the
centre, lay out pleasantly by the side of a poplar-planted stream.
The 2nd Coldstream Guards were also billeted here; the Headquarters
of the 4th Guards Brigade, the 2nd Grenadier Guards, and 3rd
Coldstream being at Grougis. All supplies, be it noted, came from a
village of the ominous name of Boue, which--as they were to learn
through the four winters to follow--means “mud.”

At Vadencourt they lay three days while the men were being inoculated
against enteric. A few had been so treated before leaving Wellington
Barracks, but, in view of the hurried departure, 90 per cent.
remained to be dealt with. The Diary remarks that for two days “the
Battalion was not up to much.” Major H. Crichton fell sick here.

On the 20th August the march towards Belgium of the Brigade began,
_via_ Etreux and Fesmy (where Lieutenant and Quartermaster Hickie
went sick and had to be sent back to railhead) to Maroilles, where
the Battalion billeted, August 21, and thence, _via_ Pont sur Sambre
and Hargnies, to La Longueville, August 22. Here, being then five
miles east of Malplaquet, the Battalion heard the first sound of the
guns of the war, far off; not knowing that, at the end of all, they
would hear them cease almost on that very spot.

At three o’clock in the morning of August 23 the Brigade marched
_via_ Riez de l’Erelle into Belgian territory and through Blaregnies
towards Mons where it was dimly understood that some sort of battle
was in the making. But it was _not_ understood that eighty thousand
British troops with three hundred guns disposed between Condé,
through Mons towards Binche, were meeting twice that number of
Germans on their front, plus sixty thousand Germans with two hundred
and thirty guns trying to turn their left flank, while a quarter of a
million Germans, with close on a thousand guns, were driving in the
French armies on the British right from Charleroi to Namur, across
the Meuse and the Sambre. This, in substance, was the situation at
Mons. It supplied a sufficient answer to the immortal question,
put by one of the pillars of the Battalion, a drill sergeant, who
happened to arrive from home just as that situation had explained
itself, and found his battalion steadily marching south. “Fwhat’s all
this talk about a retreat?” said he, and strictly rebuked the shouts
of laughter that followed.[1]


THE RETREAT FROM MONS

The Brigade was first ordered to take up a position at Bois Lahant,
close to the dirtier suburbs of Mons which is a fair city on a hill,
but the order was cancelled when it was discovered that the Fifth
Division was already there. Eventually, the Irish Guards were told
to move from the village of Quevy le Petit, where they had expected
to go into billets, to Harveng. Here they were ordered, with the 2nd
Grenadier Guards, to support the Fifth Division on a chalk ridge
from Harmignies to the Mons road, while the other two battalions of
the Brigade (the 2nd and 3rd Coldstream Guards) took up position
north-east of Harveng. Their knowledge of what might be in front
of them or who was in support was, naturally, small. It was a hot,
still evening, no Germans were visible, but shrapnel fell ahead of
the Battalion as it moved in artillery formation across the rolling,
cropped lands. One single far-ranging rifle bullet landed with a
_phtt_ in the chalk between two officers, one of whom turning to
the other laughed and said, “Ah! Now we can say we have been under
fire.” A few more shells arrived as the advance to the ridge went
forward, and the Brigade reached the seventh kilometre-stone on the
Harmignies-Mons road, below the ridge, about 6 P. M. on the 23rd
August. The Irish Rifles, commanded by Colonel Bird, D.S.O., were
fighting here, and Nos. 1 and 2 Companies of the Irish Guards went
up to reinforce it. This was the first time that the Battalion had
been personally shelled and five men were wounded. The guns ceased
about dusk, and there was very little fire from the German trenches,
which were rather in the nature of scratch-holes, ahead of them. That
night, too, was the first on which the troops saw a searchlight used.
They enjoyed also their first experience of digging themselves in,
the which they did so casually that veterans of after years would
hold up that “trench” as a sample of “the valour of ignorance.” At
midnight, the Irish Rifles were ordered to retire while the Irish
Guards covered their retirement; but so far they had been in direct
contact with nothing.

The Battalion heard confusedly of the fall of Namur and, it may be
presumed, of the retirement of the French armies on the right of the
British. There was little other news of any sort, and what there was,
not cheering. On front and flank of the British armies the enemy
stood in more than overwhelming strength, and it came to a question
of retiring, as speedily as might be, before the flood swallowed what
remained. So the long retreat of our little army began.

The large outlines of it are as follows: The entire British
Force, First and Second Army Corps, fell back to Bavai--the First
without serious difficulty, the Second fighting rear-guard actions
through the day. At Bavai the two Corps diverged, not to unite
again till they should reach Betz on the 1st September. The Second
Army Corps, reinforced by the Fourth Division, took the roads
through Le Quesnoy, Solesme, Le Cateau, St. Quentin, Ham, Nesle,
Noyon, and Crépy-en-Valois; the First paralleling them, roughly,
through Landrecies, Vadencourt, La Fère, Pasly by Soissons, and
Villers-Cotterêts.

[Illustration:

  _The RETREAT from MONS_
  1914
  _Northern Section_

  _Emery Walker Ltd. del. et sc._]

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY EMERY WALKER LTD., LONDON

At 2 o’clock in the morning of August 24 the Battalion, “having
covered the retirement of all the other troops,” retired through
the position which the 2nd and 3rd Coldstream Guards had taken up,
to Quevy le Petit, where it was ordered, with the 2nd Grenadiers,
to entrench another position north of Quevy le Petit (from the
third kilometre-stone on the Genly-Quevy le Petit road to the tenth
kilometre-stone on the Mons-Bettignies road). This it did while the
whole of the Second Division retired through the position at 4 P.
M., the Battalion acting as rear-guard. Their notion of “digging-in”
was to cut fire-steps in the side of the handy bank of any road. At
nine o’clock that night the Battalion “came out of Belgium by the
same road that it had marched into Belgium” through Blaregnies, past
Bavai where the First and Second Army Corps diverged, and through La
Longueville to Malgarni, where they bivouacked in an orchard “having
been forty-four hours under arms.” Here the first mail from England
arrived, and was distributed by torchlight under the apple-trees in
the warm night.

On the afternoon of August 25 the Battalion reached Landrecies, an
unlovely, long-streeted town in closely cultivated country. The
German pressure was heavy behind them, and that evening the 3rd
Coldstream Guards on outpost duty to the north-west of Landrecies,
on the Mormal road, were attacked, and, as history shows, beat
off that attack in a night-fight of some splendour. The Battalion
turned out and blocked the pavé entrance to the town with improvised
barricades, which they lined, of stones, tables, chairs, carts, and
pianos; relieved the Coldstream at 1.30 A. M., August 26; and once
again covered the retirement of the Brigade out of the town towards
Etreux. The men were very tired, so weary indeed that many of them
slept by the roadside while waiting to relieve the Coldstreams at
Landrecies fight. That night was the first they heard wounded men
scream. A couple of Irish Guards officers, sleeping so deeply that
only the demolition by shell-fire of the house next door waked them,
were left behind here, but after twenty-four hours of fantastic and,
at that time, almost incredible adventures, rejoined safely next day.
It was recorded also that one of the regimental drums was seen and
heard going down Landrecies main street in the darkness, strung on
the fore-leg of a gun-horse who had stepped into it as a battery went
south. A battalion cooker, the sparks flying from it, passed like
a fire-engine hastening to a fire, and men found time to laugh and
point at the strange thing.

At Etreux, where with the rest of the Brigade the Battalion
entrenched itself after the shallow pattern of the time, it had
its first sight of a German aeroplane which flew over its trenches
and dropped a bomb that “missed a trench by twenty yards.” The
Battalion fired at it, and it “flew away like a wounded bird and
eventually came down and was captured by another division.” Both
sides were equally inexperienced in those days in the details of
air war. All that day they heard the sound of what they judged was
“a battle in the direction of Le Cateau.” This was the Second Army
Corps and a single Division of the Third Corps under Smith-Dorrien
interrupting our retirement to make a stand against four or more
German Army Corps and six hundred guns. The result of that action
caused the discerning General von Kluck to telegraph that he held
the Expeditionary Force “surrounded by a ring of steel,” and Berlin
behung itself with flags. This also the Battalion did not know.
They were more interested in the fact that they had lost touch with
the Second Division; and that their Commanding Officer had told the
officers that, so far as he could make out, they were surrounded and
had better dig in deeper and wait on. As no one knew particularly
where they might be in all France, and as the night of the 26th was
very wet, the tired men slept undisturbedly over the proposition,
to resume their retreat next day (August 27) down the valley of the
Sambre, through Vénérolles, Tupigny, Vadencourt, Noyales, to the
open glaring country round Mont d’Origny where the broad road to
St. Quentin crosses the river. It was in reserve that day, and the
next (August 28) was advance-guard to the Brigade as the retirement
continued through Châtillon, Berthenicourt, and Moy to Vendeuil
and the cross-roads west of the Vendeuil-La Fère road while the
Brigade marched on to Bertaucourt. After the Brigade had passed, the
Battalion acted as rear-guard into Bertaucourt. Here No. 2 Company,
under Major Stepney, was sent to Beautor to assist a section of the
Royal Engineers in demolishing a bridge across the river there--an
operation performed without incident--and in due course joined up
with the Battalion again. By this time, the retreat, as one who
took part in it says, had become “curiously normal”--the effect,
doubtless, of that continued over-exertion which reduces men to the
state of sleep-walkers. There was a ten minutes’ halt every hour, on
which the whole Battalion dropped where it stood and slept. At night,
some of them began to see lights, like those of comfortable billets
by the roadside which, for some curious reason or other, could never
be reached. Others found themselves asleep, on their feet, and even
when they lay down to snatch sleep, the march moved on, and wearied
them in their dreams. Owing to the heat and the dust, many suffered
from sore feet and exhaustion, and, since ambulance accommodation was
limited, they had to be left behind to follow on if, and as best,
they could. But those who fell out were few, and the Diary remarks
approvingly that “on the whole the Battalion marched very well and
march-discipline was good.” Neither brigade nor battalion commanders
knew anything of what was ahead or behind, but it seemed that, since
they could not get into Paris before the Germans and take first-class
tickets to London, they would all be cut off and destroyed; which did
not depress them unduly. At all events, the Battalion one evening
forgot its weariness long enough to take part in the chase and
capture of a stray horse of Belgian extraction, which, after its
ample lack of manners and mouth had been proved, they turned over for
instruction and reformation to the Transport.

From Bertaucourt, then, where the Battalion spent another night in
an orchard, it marched very early on the 30th August to Terny _via_
Deuillet, Servais, Basse Forêt de Coucy, Folembray, Coucy-le-Château,
then magnificent and untouched--all closer modelled country and,
if possible, hotter than the bare lands they had left. Thence from
Terny to Pasly, N.W. of Soissons. Here they lay down by moonlight in
a field, and here an officer dreamed that the alarm had been given
and that they must move on. In this nightmare he rose and woke up all
platoon-officers and the C.O.; next, laboriously and methodically,
his own company, and last of all himself, whom he found shaking and
swearing at a man equally drunk with fatigue.

On the 31st August the Battalion took position as right flank-guard
from 9 A. M. to 3 P. M. on the high ground near Le Murger Farm and
bivouacked at Soucy. So far, there had been little fighting for them
since Landrecies, though they moved with the comforting knowledge
that an unknown number of the enemy, thoroughly provided with means
of transportation, were in fixed pursuit, just on the edge of a
sky-line full of unseen guns urging the British always to move back.


VILLERS-COTTERÊTS

On the 1st September, the anniversary of Sedan, the Battalion
was afoot at 2 A. M. and with the 2nd Coldstream Guards acted as
rear-guard under the Commanding Officer, Lieut.-Colonel the Hon. G.
Morris. There had been heavy dew in the night, followed at dawn by
thin, miserable rain, when they breakfasted, among wet lucerne and
fields of stacked corn, on the edge of the deep Villers-Cotterêts
beech-forests. They fell back into them on a rumour of advancing
cavalry, who turned out to be troops of German infantry running
from stack to stack and filtering into the forest on their either
flank. Their first position was the Vivières Puiseux line, a little
south-west of Soucy village: the Battalion to the right of the
Soucy-Villers-Cotterêts road, and the Coldstream to the left on a
front of not more than a mile. Their second position, as far as
can be made out, was the Rond de la Reine, a mile farther south,
where the deep soft forest-roads from Soucy and Vivières join on
their way to Villers-Cotterêts. The enemy ran in upon them from
all sides, and the action resolved itself into blind fighting in
the gloom of the woods, with occasional glimpses of men crossing
the rides, or firing from behind tree-boles. The Germans were very
cautious at first, because our fire-discipline, as we fell back, gave
them the impression that the forest was filled with machine-guns
instead of mere trained men firing together sustainedly. The morning
wet cleared, and the day grew close and stifling. There was no
possibility of keeping touch or conveying orders. Since the German
advance-guard was, by comparison, an army, all that could be done was
to hold back as long as possible the attacks on front and flank, and
to retain some sense of direction in the bullet-torn woods, where,
when a man dropped in the bracken and bramble, he disappeared. But
throughout the fight, till the instant of his death, Lieut.-Colonel
the Hon. G. Morris, commanding the Battalion, rode from one point
to another of an action that was all front, controlling, cheering,
and chaffing his men. And so that heathen battle, in half darkness,
continued, with all units of the 4th Brigade confusedly engaged,
till in the afternoon the Battalion, covered by the 2nd Coldstream,
reformed, still in the woods, a mile north of the village of
Pisseleux. Here the roll was called, and it was found that the
following officers were missing: Lieut.-Colonel the Hon. G. Morris,
Major H. F. Crichton, Captain C. A. Tisdall, Lieutenant Lord Robert
Innes-Ker, 2nd Lieutenant Viscount Castlerosse, Lieutenant the Hon.
Aubrey Herbert, and Lieutenant Shields, R.A.M.C.

Captain Lord Desmond FitzGerald and Lieutenant Blacker-Douglass were
wounded and left with the field-ambulance. Lieut.-Colonel Morris,
Major Crichton, and Captain Tisdall had been killed. The others
had been wounded and captured by the Germans, who treated them with
reasonable humanity at Villers-Cotterêts till they were released on
September 12 by the French advance following the first Battle of the
Marne. Colonel Morris’s body was afterwards identified and buried
with that of Captain Tisdall; and one long rustic-fenced grave,
perhaps the most beautiful of all resting-places in France, on a
slope of the forest off the dim road, near the Rond de la Reine,
holds our dead in that action. It was made and has been religiously
tended since by Dr. Moufflers, the Mayor of the town, and his wife.

The death of Colonel Morris, an officer beloved and a man noticeably
brave among brave men, was a heavy loss to the Battalion he
commanded, and whose temper he knew so well. In the thick of the
fight during a lull in the firing, when some blind shell-fire opened,
he called to the men: “D’you hear that? They’re doing that to
frighten you.” To which someone replied with simple truth: “If that’s
what they’re after, they might as well stop. They succeeded with _me_
hours ago.”

As a matter of fact, the men behaved serenely, as may be proved
by this tale. They were working their way, well under rifle-fire,
across an opening in the forest, when some of them stopped to pick
blackberries that attracted their attention. To these their sergeant,
very deliberately, said: “I shouldn’t mind them berries, lads.
There’s may be worrums in ’em.” It was a speech worthy of a hero
of Dumas, whose town Villers-Cotterêts is, by right of birth. Yet
once, during their further retirement towards Pisseleux, they were
badly disconcerted. A curious private prodded a hornets’ nest on a
branch with his bayonet, and the inhabitants came out in force. Then
there was real confusion: not restored by the sight of bald-headed
reservists frantically slapping with their caps at one hornet while
others stung them on their defenceless scalps. So they passed out of
the darkness and the greenery of the forest, which, four years later,
was to hide a great French Army, and launch it forth to turn the
tide of 1918.

Their march continued until 11 P. M. that night, when the Battalion
arrived at Betz, where the First and Second Army Corps rejoined
each other once more. No supplies were received that night nor the
following day (September 2), when the Battalion reached Esbly, where
they bathed--with soap, be it noted--in the broad and quiet Marne,
and an ox was requisitioned, potatoes were dug up from a field, and
some sort of meal served out.

The Diary here notes “Thus ended the retreat from Mons.” This is not
strictly correct. In twelve days the British Army had been driven
back 140 miles as the crow flies from Mons, and farther, of course,
by road. There was yet to be a further retirement of some fifteen
miles south of Esbly ere the general advance began, but September 3
marks, as nearly as may be, slack-water ere the ebb that followed
of the triumphant German tidal wave through Belgium almost up to
the outer forts of Paris. That advance had, at the last moment,
swerved aside from Paris towards the south-east, and in doing so had
partially exposed its right flank to the Sixth French Army. General
Joffre took instant advantage of the false step to wheel his Sixth
Army to the east, so that its line ran due north and east from
Ermenonville to Lagny; at the same time throwing forward the left of
his line. The British Force lay between Lagny and Cortecan, filling
the gap between the Sixth and Fifth French Armies, and was still an
effective weapon which the enemy supposed they had broken for good.
But our harried men realized no more than that, for the moment, there
seemed to be a pause in the steady going back. The confusion, the
dust, the heat, continued while the armies manœuvred for position;
and scouts and aerial reconnaissance reported more and more German
columns of all arms pressing down from the east and north-east.

On September 3 the 4th Brigade moved from Esbly, in the great loops
of the Marne, through Meaux to the neighbourhood of Pierre Levée,
where the Battalion fed once more on requisitioned beef, potatoes,
and apples.


THE ADVANCE TO THE AISNE

Next day (September 4), while the British Army was getting into
position in the process of changing front to the right, the 4th
Brigade had to cover a retirement of the 5th Brigade between Pierre
Levée and Le Bertrand, and the Battalion dug itself in near a farm
(Grand Loge) on the Pierre Levée-Giremoutiers road in preparation for
a rear-guard attack that did not arrive. They remained in position
with what the Diary pathetically refers to as “the machine-gun,” till
they were relieved in the evening by the Worcesters, and reached
bivouac at Le Bertrand at one o’clock on the morning of the 5th
September. That day they bivouacked near Fontenay, and picked up some
much-needed mess-tins, boots, putties and the like with which to make
good more immediate waste.

On the 6th they marched through Rozoy (where they saw an old priest
standing at the door of his church, and to him the men bared their
heads mechanically, till he, openly surprised, gave them his
blessing) to Mont Plaisir to gain touch between the First and Second
Divisions of the English Army. Major Stepney, the C.O., reported to
Headquarters 1st Brigade at 9 A. M. half a mile north-east of Rozoy.
At the same moment cavalry scouts brought news of two enemy columns,
estimated at a thousand each, approaching from the direction of
Vaudoy. Nos. 3 and 4 Companies were ordered forward to prolong the
line of the First Division, while Nos. 1 and 2 Companies “with the
machine-gun” entrenched themselves on the Mont Plaisir road.

[Illustration:

  _The RETREAT from MONS_
  1914
  _Southern Section._

  _Emery Walker Ltd. del. et sc._]

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY EMERY WALKER LTD., LONDON

In the afternoon Lieutenant the Hon. R. H. Alexander, reconnoitring
with a platoon in the direction of the village of Villeneuve, which
was to be occupied, reported a hostile battery at Le Plessis had
fired on the Battalion and killed 4 men and wounded 11. One of these,
Sergeant O’Loughlin, died later. This was the Battalion’s first
fighting since Villers-Cotterêts, and they went into action while
the bells of the quiet countryside rang for church. The battery was
put out of action by our guns in half an hour, Villeneuve occupied
without further opposition, and the Battalion bivouacked at Tonquin
on the night of the 6th September. The enemy had realised the threat
to their flank in General Joffre’s new dispositions, and under cover
of rear-guard and delaying actions were withdrawing north all along
their line.

On the 7th September the Battalion made a forced march from Tonquin
to Rebais, where there was a German column, but the advance-guard of
the Brigade was held up at St. Simeon till dark and the Battalion
had to bivouac a couple of miles outside Rebais. The German force
withdrew from Rebais on the afternoon of the 7th, and on the 8th the
Brigade’s advance continued through Rebais northward in the direction
of Boitron, which lay just across the Petit Morin River. Heavy
machine-gun fire from some thick woods along the rolling ground,
across the river, checked the advance-guard (the 3rd Coldstream) and
the two companies of the Irish Guards who supported them. The woods,
the river valley, and the village of Boitron were searched by our
guns, and on the renewal of the attack the river was crossed and
Boitron occupied, the enemy being heavily shelled as he retired. Here
the Battalion re-formed and pressed forward in a heavy rainstorm,
through a flank attack of machine-guns from woods on the left. These
they charged, while a battery of our field-guns fired point-blank
into the thickets, and captured a German machine-gun company of six
guns (which seemed to them, at the time, a vast number), 3 officers,
and 90 rank and file. Here, too, in the confusion of the fighting
they came under fire of our own artillery, an experience that was
to become familiar to them, and the C.O. ordered the companies
to assemble at Ferme le Cas Rouge, a village near by where they
bivouacked for the night. They proudly shut up in the farm-yard the
first prisoners they had ever taken; told off two servants to wait
upon a wounded major; took the parole of the two other officers and
invited them to a dinner of chicken and red wine. The Battalion,
it will be observed, knew nothing then except the observances of
ordinary civilized warfare. 2nd Lieutenant A. Fitzgerald and a draft
arrived that day.

This small affair of Boitron Wood was the Irish Guards’ share of the
immense mixed Battle of the Marne, now raging along all the front.
Its result and the capture of the machine-guns cheered them a little.

The next five days--September 9 to 13--had nothing but tedious
marching and more tedious halts and checks, due to the congestion
of traffic and the chaos in the villages that had been entered,
sacked, defiled and abandoned by the enemy. The Marne was crossed
on the 9th at Charly, where--the inhabitants said that the Germans
detailed for the job had been too drunk to effect it--a bridge had
been left ready for demolition, but intact, and by this means the
First and Second Divisions crossed the river. The weather turned wet,
with heavy showers; greatcoats had been lost or thrown aside all
along the line of retreat; billets and bivouacs made filthy by the
retreating Germans; and there was general discomfort, enlivened with
continuous cannonading from the front and the appearance of German
prisoners gathered in by our cavalry ahead. And thus, from the Marne
the Battalion came by way of Trenel, Villers-sur-Marne, Cointicourt,
Oulchy-le-Château, Courcelles and St. Mard to the high banks of the
Aisne, which they crossed by the pontoon bridge at Pont d’Arcy on the
morning of September 14 and advanced to Soupir in the hollows under
the steep wooded hills.

That day, the 2nd Grenadiers formed the advance-guard of the
Brigade, followed by the 3rd Coldstream, the Irish Guards, and the
2nd Coldstream. After they had cleared Soupir village, the force
was shelled and an attack was made by the 3rd Coldstream, the Irish
Guards in support, on a steep ridge near La Cour de Soupir farm,
which stood on the crest of the bluff above the river. The heavily
wooded country was alive with musketry and machine-gun fire, and the
distances were obscured by mist and heavy rain. The 3rd Coldstream,
attacking the farm, found themselves outflanked from a ridge on their
right, which was then attempted by three companies of the Irish
Guards. They reached to within a couple of hundred yards of a wood
cut up by rides, down which, as well as from the trenches, heavy
rifle-fire was directed. Here Captain J. N. Guthrie (No. 2 Company)
was wounded and Captain H. Hamilton Berners killed, while Lieutenant
Watson, R.A.M.C., was shot and wounded at close quarters attending
a wounded man. Here, too, the Battalion had its first experience of
the German use of the white flag; for Lieutenant J. S. FitzGerald
with No. 8 Platoon and a party of Coldstream under Lieutenant
Cotterel-Dormer found some hundred and fifty Germans sitting round
haystacks and waving white flags. They went forward to take their
surrender and were met by a heavy fire at thirty yards’ range,
which forced them to fall back. Lieutenant E. B. Greer, machine-gun
officer, now brought up his two machine-guns, but was heavily fired
at from cover, had all of one gun-team killed or wounded and, for the
while, lost one gun. He reorganized the other gun-team, and called
for volunteers from the Company nearest him to recover it. After dark
Corporal Sheridan and Private Carney of No. 3 Company and Private
Harrington, a machine-gunner of No. 1 Company, went out with him and
the gun was brought in. A further advance was made in the afternoon
to the edge of the wood in order to clear out the snipers who held it
and commanded the cultivated fields outside. Towards dusk, Captain
Lord Guernsey, who was Acting Quartermaster, reported himself to the
C.O., who posted him to No. 2 Company, then engaged in clearing out
the snipers, in place of Captain Guthrie, who had been wounded. He
went forward to assist Captain Lord Arthur Hay in command, and both
were immediately shot dead.

The Battalion bivouacked in battle-outpost formation that night
on the edge of the wood, and got into touch with the 60th Rifles
on their right and the 2nd Grenadiers on their left. Here, though
they did not know it, the advance from the Marne was at an end. Our
forces had reached the valley of the Aisne, with its bluffs on either
side and deep roads half hidden by the woods that climbed them.
The plateaux of the north of the river shaped themselves for the
trench-warfare of the years to come; and the natural strength of the
positions on the high ground was increased by numberless quarries and
caves that ran along it.


THE HALT AT SOUPIR

On the 15th September patrols reported that the enemy had fallen back
a little from his position, and at daylight two companies entrenched
themselves on the edge of the wood. Judged by present standards those
trenches were little more than shallow furrows, for we did not know
that the day of open battle was ended, and it is curious to see how
slowly our people broke themselves to the monotonous business of
trench construction and maintenance. Even after they had dug the
casual ditch which they called a trench, it cost some time and a few
lives till they understood that the works could not be approached in
the open as had been war’s custom. Their first communication-trench
was but three hundred yards long, and it struck them as a gigantic
and almost impossible “fatigue.”

The enemy had not fallen back more than a thousand yards from the
Cour de Soupir farm which they were resolute to retake if possible.
They fired on our burying-parties and shelled the trenches all
through the 16th September. Patrols were sent out at dawn and
dusk--since any one visible leaving the trenches was fired upon by
snipers--found hostile infantry in full strength in front of them,
and the Battalion had to organize its first system of trench-relief;
for the Diary of the 18th September remarks that “Nos. 1 and 4
Companies relieved 2 and 3 Companies in the trenches and were again
shelled during the day.”

Sniping on Hun lines was a novel experience to the Battalion. They
judged it strange to find a man apparently dead, with a cloth over
his face, lying in a hollow under a ridge commanding their line, who
turned out to be quite alive and unwounded. His rifle was within
short reach, and he was waiting till our patrols had passed to get to
his work. But they killed him, angrily and with astonishment.

On the morning of the 18th September Lieut.-Colonel Lord Ardee,
Grenadier Guards, arrived and took over command from Major Stepney.
The following officers--the first of the long line--also arrived as
reinforcements:

Major G. Madden; Captain Norman Orr-Ewing, Scots Guards, attached;
Captain Lord Francis Scott, Grenadier Guards, attached; Captain the
Hon. J. F. Trefusis, Lieutenants George Brooke, L. S. Coke, R. H.
Ferguson, G. M. Maitland, C. R. Harding, and P. Antrobus.

The Battalion reorganized as follows after less than four weeks’
campaign:

  Lieut.-Colonel Lord Ardee        C.O.
  Major Herbert Stepney            Senior Major.
  Capt. the Hon. J. Trefusis       Adjutant.
  Lieut. E. J. Gough               Transport Officer.
  Lieut. C. A. S. Walker           Quartermaster (acting).
  Capt. Hon. A. E. Mulholland      O.C. No. 1 Company.
  Capt. N. Orr-Ewing               O.C. No. 2 Company.
  Capt. Lord Francis Scott         O.C. No. 3 Company.
  Major G. Madden                  O.C. No. 4 Company.

The trench-war was solidifying itself; for the Diary of that same day
notes that the enemy “shelled the trenches and the two howitzer-guns
which were in position below.” Ours was an army, then, which could
count and place every gun that it owned. As many as three howitzer
batteries per division had accompanied the Expeditionary Force, and
more were being sent from home.

The night of the 19th was very wet. They were relieved by the 3rd
Coldstream, and went into billets at Soupir, “having been in the
trenches for five days.” There was an alarm in the afternoon, and
the machine-guns and 100 men of No. 1 Company were sent to help the
Coldstream in the trenches, whilst the rest of the Battalion marched
at 6 P. M. to be ready to assist the 2nd Grenadiers on the left of
Cour de Soupir farm. Only “the machine-guns,” however, came into
action, and the Battalion returned to its billets at 10 P. M.

Much the same sort of thing occurred on the 20th--a furious fusillade
from the trenches, the despatch of reinforcements up a “muddy
lane,” not yet turned into a communication-trench, to help the 3rd
Coldstream, while Nos. 2 and 4 Companies went out to reinforce the
Oxfordshire Light Infantry and to hold the road at the back of it
“in case of a retirement,” and the rest of the Battalion with the
machine-guns stayed as a reserve in Soupir market-square. But beyond
shrapnel bursting over the village and the wounding of two men by
stray machine-gun bullets, there were no special incidents. Major G.
Madden this day had to return to England, ill.

On the 21st the Battalion relieved the 2nd Grenadiers on the left
at Soupir farm at 3.30 A. M.--the safest hour, as experience was to
prove, for reliefs. Nos. 2 and 3 Companies were in trenches, and Nos.
1 and 4 about 300 yards in the rear, with the Headquarters in one of
the caves, which are a feature of the country. The word “dug-out” had
not yet been invented. The nearest approach to it is a reference in
a private letter to “a shelter-recess in the side of the trench to
protect one from shrapnel.” The Diary marks that the “usual alarms
occurred at 6.30 when the patrol went out and the enemy fired a good
deal of shrapnel without effect.” Soupir, like many French villages,
was full of carefully planted spies of singular audacity. One was
found in an officer’s room. He had appeared from a cellar, alleging
that he was an invalid, but as the Gunners’ telephone-wires near the
cellar had been cut and our movements had been reported to the enemy
with great regularity, his explanation was not accepted, nor were his
days long in that land.

Patrols, too, were elastic affairs. One of them, under Lieutenant R.
H. Ferguson, went out on the night of the 21st, came on the enemy’s
trenches half a mile out, lay down to listen to the conversation
there, were all but cut off by a wandering section of snipers, and
returned to their lines unmolested, after the lieutenant had shot the
leading pursuer with his revolver.

On the 22nd September the Battalion--both entrenched and in reserve
in the caves behind--experienced four hours’ high-explosive howitzer
fire, which “except for the effect on the nerves did very little
damage.” (They had yet to learn what continuous noise could do to
break men’s nerve.) This was followed by a heavy fusillade, varied by
star-shells, rockets, and searchlights, which lasted intermittently
throughout the night. The rocket-display was new to the men.
Searchlights, we know, they had seen before.

On the 23rd a telephone-line between Battalion Headquarters and
the advanced trenches was installed (for the first time). Nos. 2
and 3 Companies relieved Nos. 1 and 4 in the trenches, and a man
bringing back a message from No. 4 Company was killed by a sniper.
The Battalion was relieved by the 3rd Coldstream in the evening and
returned to its billets in the barns and lofts of Soupir village,
where next day (September 24) the Diary observes they spent “a quiet
morning. The men got washed and shaved, and company officers were
able to get at their companies. There are so many new officers who
do not know their men that any rest day should be made use of in
this manner.” They relieved the 3rd Coldstream again that evening,
and “digging operations to improve existing trenches and make
communication-trenches were at once begun.” (Here is the first direct
reference in the Diary to communication-trenches, as such.)

Snipers were active all through the 25th September. The trenches were
heavily shelled in the afternoon, and “one man was hit in the leg
while going to fetch water.” They returned to Soupir in the evening
and spent the 26th standing to, in anticipation of enemy attacks
which did not develop into anything more than an artillery duel, and
in digging trenches for the defence of Soupir village. This work,
however, had to be stopped owing to heavy shell-fire brought to bear
on the working-parties--presumably through information from the many
spies--and after a wearing day relieved the 3rd Coldstream in the
trenches at night. The Diary gives no hint of the tremendous strain
of those twenty-four hours’ “reliefs” from being shelled in a trench
to being shelled in a village, nor of the inadequacy of our artillery
as it strove to cope with the German guns, nor of the rasping
irritation caused by the knowledge that every disposition made was
reported almost at once to the enemy.

On September 27--a Sunday--the enemy’s bands were heard playing up
and down the trenches. Some attempt was made by a British battalion
on the right to move out a patrol covered by the fire of No. 2
Company, but the enemy shells and machine-guns smothered every
movement.

On the 28th September (their day in billets) stakes were cut out of
the woods behind Soupir, while the Pioneers collected what wire they
could lay hands on, as “the Battalion was ordered to construct wire
entanglements in front of their trenches to-night.” The entanglements
were made of two or three strands, at the most, of agricultural
wire picked up where they could find it. They heard heavy fighting
throughout the night on their right--“probably the First Division.”
Both sides by now were feeling the strain of trench-work, for which
neither had made preparations, and the result was an increasing
tension manifesting itself in wild outbursts of musketry and
artillery and camp rumour of massed attacks and breaks-through.

On the 30th September, F.-M. Lord Roberts’s birthday, a
congratulatory telegram was sent to him; and “a great quantity of
material was collected out of which huts for the men could be built.”
These were frail affairs of straw and twig, half dug in, half built
out, of the nearest banks, or placed under the lee of any available
shelter. The very fabric of them has long since been overlaid with
strata of fresh wreckage and the twig roofs and sides are rotted
black under the grass or ploughed in.

The month closes with the note that, as it was a very bright
moonlight night, the Battalion’s usual relief of the Coldstream was
“carried out up the communication-trenches.” Some men still recall
that first clumsy trench-relief.

October 1 was spent in perfecting communication-trenches and
shelters, and “the Brigadier came up in the morning and was taken
round the trenches.” Two officers were sent to Chavonne to meet the
5th Brigade--one to bring the Worcesters to the Battalion’s trenches,
the other to show the Connaught Rangers their billets in Soupir. The
3rd Coldstream marched out of Soupir and took up the line to the left
of the 2nd Grenadiers near Vailly, and next day, 2nd October, No. 1
Company of the Irish Guards dug a connecting-trench between those
two. Otherwise, for the moment, life was smooth.

It may be noted for the instruction of generations to come that
some of the Reservists grumbled at orders not to talk or smoke
in the trenches, as that drew fire; and that a newly appointed
platoon-officer, when he had admonished them officially, fell them
out and informed them unofficially that, were there any more trouble,
he would, after the C.O. had dealt with the offenders, take them on
for three rounds “boxing in public.” Peace and goodwill returned at
once.

On the 3rd October, a platoon was despatched to help the Royal
Engineers in the construction of a road across a new bridge they
had put up between Soupir and Chavonne. The Battalion relieved the
3rd Coldstream in its new position three-quarters of a mile east
of Vailly, and next day “quietly improved trenches and head-cover,”
which latter is mentioned for the first time. It was all casual
timber picked up off the country-side.

On the 5th October a patrol explored through the wood, in front of
the right trenches, but found only dead Germans to the number of
thirty and many half buried, as well as five British soldiers killed
in some lost affair of a fortnight before. Private O’Shaughnessy,
No. 1 Company, was shot dead by a sniper when on observation-post
at the end of this wood. He had only arrived that morning with a
draft of one hundred men, under Lieutenant Gore-Langton, and had
asked to be allowed to go out on this duty. In the afternoon three
shells burst on the road near Battalion Headquarters, and fatally
wounded Lieutenant G. Brooke, who was on his way to Soupir to take
over the transport from Lieutenant E. J. Gough. He was sent in to
Braisne, where he died on the 7th October. The Diary notes “he
would not have been found so soon had not the shells broken the
telephone-wire to Headquarters. A message was coming through at the
time and when communication was stopped the Signalling Sergeant
sent two men to repair the wire and they found him.” He was brought
in to the A.D.S. at Vailly-sur-Aisne by his own men, who made the
R.A.M.C. stretcher-bearers walk behind as they would allow none but
themselves to carry him. They bade him farewell before they returned
to their trenches, and went out openly weeping. When he was sent to
Braisne that evening, after being dressed, his own men again got an
ambulance across the pontoon-bridge, which had been hitherto reckoned
impassable, for his convenience. His last words to them were that
they were to “play the game” and not to revenge his death on the Hun.

On the afternoon of the 6th October, which was cold and misty, the
Germans pushed a patrol through the wood and our standing-patrol went
out and discovered one German under-officer of the 64th (Imperial
Jäger Guards) dead, and the rifle of another man.

The enemy sent out no more patrols. Men had grown to be cunning
among the timber, and noticed every tree they moved under. When the
Coldstream relieved the Battalion that night, one of our patrols
found a felled tree had been carefully placed across their homeward
path by some unknown hand--it might have been the late Jäger
under-officer--who had expected to attack the patrol while it was
climbing over the obstacle.

On the 7th the Battalion rested in Soupir all day, and on the 8th
Lieutenant G. Brooke’s body was brought in from Braisne and buried in
Soupir cemetery.

The 9th was a quiet day except for an hour’s shelling, and a good
deal of cheering from the German trenches in the evening, evidently
in honour of the fall of Antwerp. It annoyed our men for the reason
that they could not retaliate. Our guns had not a round to throw away.


THE MOVE TOWARD THE SEA

The opposing lines had been locked now for close upon a month and,
as defences elaborated themselves, all hope of breaking-through
vanished. Both sides then opened that mutually outflanking movement
towards the west which did not end till it reached the sea. Held up
along their main front, the Germans struck at the Flanders plain, the
Allies striving to meet the movement and envelop their right flank as
it extended. A British force had been sent to Antwerp; the Seventh
Division and the Third Cavalry Division had been landed at Zeebrugge
on the 7th October with the idea of helping either the Antwerp force
or co-operating with the Allied Armies as circumstances dictated.
Meantime, the main British force was being held in the trenches of
the Aisne a hundred and twenty miles away; and it seemed good to
all concerned that these two bodies of British troops should be
consolidated, both for purposes of offence, command and, by no means
least, supply, on the Flanders flank covering the Channel. There
were obvious dangers in moving so many men from high ground across a
broad river under the enemy’s eye. It could only be effected at night
with all precautions, but as the western pressure developed and was
accentuated by the fall of Antwerp, the advantage of the transfer
outweighed all risk. Our cavalry moved on the 3rd October by road
for Flanders, and a few days later the infantry began to entrain for
St. Omer. The Second Corps was the first to leave, the Third Corps
followed, and the First was the last.

Orders came to the Battalion on Sunday, October 11, to be prepared
to move at short notice, and new clothes were issued to the men, but
they did not hand over their trenches to the French till the 13th
October, when they marched to Perles in the evening and entrained on
the 14th at Fismes a little after noon, reaching Hazebrouck _via_
(the route is worth recording) Mareuil-sur-Ourcq, Ormoy, St. Denis,
outside Paris, Epluches, Creil, Amiens (10.15 P. M.), Abbeville (3.15
A. M.), Etaples, Boulogne, Calais and St. Omer, every stone of which
last six was to be as familiar to them as their own hearths for years
to come.

At 5 P. M. on the 15th the Battalion went into billets at Hazebrouck.
It was a sharp change from the soft wooded bluffs and clean chalky
hills above the Aisne, to the slow ditch-like streams and crowded
farming landscape of Flanders. At Hazebrouck they lay till the
morning of the 17th, when they marched to Boeschepe, attended church
parade on Sunday the 18th, and marched to untouched Ypres _via_ St.
Kokebeele, Reninghelst and Vlamertinghe on the 20th with the Brigade,
some divisional troops and the 41st Battery, R.F.A. The Brigade
halted at Ypres a few hours, seeing and being impressed by the beauty
of the Cloth Hall and the crowded market-place. The 2nd Coldstream
and the 2nd Battalion Grenadiers being eventually sent forward,
the remainder of the Brigade billeted in St. Jean, then described
impersonally as “a small village about one and a half kilometres east
of Ypres.” They halted at the edge of the city for dinner, and the
men got out their melodeons and danced jigs on the flawless pavé.
Much firing was heard all day, and “the 2nd Coldstream came into
action about 4 P. M. and remained in the trenches all night.”

That was the sum of information available at the moment to the
Battalion--that, and orders to “drive the enemy back wherever
met.” So they first were introduced to the stage of the bloody and
debatable land which will be known for all time as “The Salient.”

The original intention of our Army on the Flanders flank had been
offensive, but the long check on the Aisne gave the enemy time to
bring forward troops from their immense and perfectly prepared
reserves, while the fall of Antwerp--small wonder the Germans had
cheered in their trenches when the news came!--released more.
Consequently, the movement that began on the Allies’ side as an
attempt to roll up the German right flank before it could reach the
sea, ended in a desperate defence to hold back an overwhelmingly
strong enemy from sweeping forward through Belgium to Calais and the
French sea-board. Out of this defence developed that immense and
overlapping series of operations centring on Ypres, extending from
the Yser Canal in the north to La Bassée in the south, and lasting
from mid-October to the 20th November 1914, which may be ranked as
the First Battle of Ypres.

It will be remembered that the Second and Third British Army Corps
were the first to leave the Aisne trenches for the west. On the 11th
October the Second Army Corps was in position between the Aire and
Béthune and in touch with the left flank of the Tenth French Army at
La Bassée.

On the 12th of October the Third Army Corps reached St. Omer and
moved forward to Hazebrouck to get touch with the Second Army Corps
on its right, the idea being that the two corps together should wheel
on their own left and striking eastward turn the position of the
German forces that were facing the Tenth French Army. They failed
owing to the strength of the German forces on the spot, and by
October 19, after indescribably fierce fighting, the Second and Third
Army Corps had been brought to a standstill on a line, from La Bassée
through Armentières, not noticeably differing from the position which
our forces were destined to occupy for many months to come. The
attempted flank attacks had become frontal all along the line, and in
due course frontal attacks solidified into trench-warfare again.

North of Armentières the situation had settled itself in much the
same fashion, flank attacks being outflanked by the extension of the
enemy’s line, with strenuous frontal attacks of his daily increasing
forces.

The Seventh Division--the first half of the Fourth Army
Corps--reached Ypres from Dixmude on the 14th October after its
unsuccessful attempt to relieve Antwerp. As the First Army Corps had
not yet come up from the Aisne, this Division was used to cover the
British position at Ypres from the north; the infantry lying from
Zandvoorde, on the south-east, through Zonnebeke to Langemarck on
the north-west. Here again, through lack of numbers and artillery
equipment, the British position was as serious as in the south. Enemy
forces, more numerous than the British and Belgian armies, combined,
were bearing down on the British line from the eastward through
Courtrai, Iseghem, and Roulers, and over the Lys bridge at Menin.
Later on, it was discovered that these represented not less than five
new Army Corps. The Seventh Division was ordered to move upon Menin,
to seize the bridge over the river and thus check the advance of
further reinforcements. There were, of course, not enough troops for
the work, but on the 18th October the Division, the right centre of
which rested on the Ypres-Menin road, not yet lined throughout with
dead, wheeled its left (the 22nd Brigade) forward. As the advance
began, the cavalry on the left became aware of a large new German
force on the left flank of the advance, and fighting became general
all along the line of the Division.

On the 19th October the airmen reported the presence of two fresh
Army Corps on the left. No further advance being possible, the
Division was ordered to fall back to its original line, an operation
attended with heavy loss under constant attacks.

On the 20th October the pressure increased as the German Army Corps
made themselves felt against the thin line held by the Seventh
Division, which was not amply provided with heavy batteries.
Their losses were largely due to artillery fire, directed by
air-observation, that obliterated trenches, men, and machine-guns.

On the 21st October the enemy attacked the Division throughout the
day, artillery preparations being varied by mass assaults, but still
the Division endured in the face of an enemy at least four times
as strong and constantly reinforced. It is, as one writer says,
hardly conceivable that our men could have checked the enemy’s
advance for even a day longer, had it not been for the arrival at
this juncture of the First Army Corps. Reinforcements were urgently
needed at every point of the British line, but, for the moment, the
imminent danger lay to the north of Ypres, where fresh German forces,
underestimated as usual, might sweep the Belgian army aside and
enter the Channel ports in our rear. With this in mind, the British
Commander-in-Chief decided to use the First Army Corps to prolong the
British line, already, as it seemed, nearly worn through, toward the
sea, rather than to strengthen any occupied sector. He posted it,
therefore--until French reinforcements should arrive--to the north,
or left of the Seventh Division, from Zonnebeke to Bixschoote.

Our front at that date ran from Hollebeke to Bixschoote, a distance,
allowing for bends, of some sixteen miles. To protect this we had but
three depleted Infantry Divisions and two Cavalry Brigades against
opposed forces of not less than a hundred thousand. Moreover, the
ground was hampered by the flight, from Roulers and villages in
German possession, of refugees, of whom a percentage were certainly
spies, but over whom it was impossible to exercise any control. They
carried their goods in little carts drawn by dogs, and they wept and
wailed as they straggled past our men.


THE SALIENT AND THE FIRST BATTLE OF YPRES

The orders for the Guards Brigade on October 21 to “drive back the
enemy wherever met” were not without significance. All their news
in billets had been of fresh formations coming down from the north
and the east, and it was understood that the Germans counted with
confidence upon entering Calais, _via_ Ypres, in a few days.

The Brigade, less the 2nd Coldstream, “assembled in a field about
four kilometres along the Ypres-Zonnebeke Road, and after a wait
of three hours No. 4 Company of the 1st Irish Guards advanced to
the support of the 2nd Grenadiers, who had been ordered to prolong
the line to the right of the 2nd Coldstream. This company and both
the advanced battalions suffered somewhat severely from shell-fire
and occasional sniping.” Thus coldly does the Diary enter upon
what was in fact the first day of the First Battle of Ypres, in
which companies had to do the work of battalions, and battalions of
brigades, and whose only relief was a change of torn and blood-soaked
ground from one threatened sector of the line to the next.

It was not worth while to record how the people of Ypres brought hot
coffee to the Battalion as it passed through, the day before (October
20); and how, when they halted there a few hours, the men amused
their hosts by again dancing Irish jigs on the clattering pavements
while the refugees clattered past; or how it was necessary to warn
the companies that the enemy might attack behind a screen of Belgian
women and children--in which case the Battalion would have to fire
through them.

On the evening of the 21st October the Battalion was ordered up to
the support of what was left of the 22nd Brigade which had fallen
back to Zonnebeke. “It came under a heavy burst of artillery
fire and was forced to lie down (in a ploughed field) for fifteen
minutes”--at that time a novel experience. On its way a hare started
up which was captured by a man of No. 2 Company to the scandal of
discipline and the delight of all, and later sold for five shillings.
At Zonnebeke it found No. 4 Company already lining the main road on
the left of the town and took up a position in extended order on its
right, “thus establishing the line into Zonnebeke.” The casualties,
in spite of the artillery fire, are noted as only “one killed and
seven wounded,” which must have been far under the mark. The night
was lit by the flames of burning houses, by which light they hunted
for snipers in haystacks round the village, buried stray dead of a
battalion of the Seventh Division which had left them and, by order,
did a deal of futile digging-in.

The next day the 22nd Brigade retired out of Zonnebeke about a
kilometre down the main road to Ypres, the Battalion and half the
2nd Coldstream conforming to the movement. This enabled the Germans
to enter the north of Zonnebeke and post machine-guns in some of the
houses. None the less, our patrols remained in the south end of the
town and did “excellent work”; an officer’s patrol, under Lieutenant
Ferguson, capturing three mounted orderlies. One man was killed and
8 wounded in the Battalion that day.

On the 23rd October “the enemy brought up more machine-guns and
used them against us energetically all the day.” A platoon of No.
1 Company, under Lieutenant the Hon. H. Alexander, attempted an
outflanking movement through Zonnebeke, towards the church, supported
by a platoon of No. 4 Company, under Lieutenant W. C. N. Reynolds,
in the course of which the latter officer was wounded. The trenches
were shelled with shrapnel all the afternoon, and a German advance
was sprayed down with our rifle-fire. In the evening the French made
an attack through Zonnebeke helped by their .75’s and established
themselves in the town. They also, at 9 P. M., relieved the Battalion
which moved at once south-west to Zillebeke and arrived there at
2 A. M. on the morning of the 24th, when it billeted “chiefly in a
brick-yard” ready to be used afresh.

The relieving troops were a division of the Ninth French Army
Corps. They took over the line of our Second Division, while our
Second Division in turn took over part of the front of the Seventh
Division. At the same time French Territorials relieved our First
Division between Bixschoote and Langemarck, thus freeing us of all
responsibility for any ground north of the Ypres-Zonnebeke road. Our
Army on the 24th October, then, stood as follows: From the Zonnebeke
road to a point near the race-course in the historic Polygon Wood
west of Reutel was the Second Division; on its right, up to the Menin
road, lay the First Division; and from the Menin road to Zandvoorde
the Seventh Division with the 3rd Cavalry Brigade in the Zandvoorde
trenches. Our line had thus been shortened and strengthened; but the
enemy were continuously receiving reinforcements from Roulers and
Menin, and the pressure never ceased.

In the early morning of the 24th October, and before the transfer
of all the troops had been effected, the British Ypres front was
attacked throughout in force and once more the shock of the attack
fell on the remains of the Seventh Division. Reserves there were
none; each battalion stood where it was in the flood and fought on
front, flank, and rear indifferently. The Irish Guards had a few
hours’ rest in the brick-fields at Zillebeke, where, by some miracle,
it found its mail of home-letters and parcels waiting for it. Even
before it could open them it was ordered out from Zillebeke[2] along
the Ypres-Menin road to Hooge to help the 20th Brigade (Seventh
Division), which had been attacked on the morning of the 25th
October, and parties of the enemy were reported to have broken
through into Polygon Wood.

[Illustration:

  _THE YPRES SALIENT_
  _First Battalion Actions_

  _Emery Walker Ltd. del. et sc._]

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY EMERY WALKER LTD., LONDON

That attack, however, was repulsed during the day, and in the evening
the Battalion was despatched to act in support of the 5th Brigade
near Race-course (Polygon) Wood, due north of Veldhoek, where the
Battalion bivouacked for the night in a ploughed field. This was the
first time it had marched up the Menin road or seen the Château of
Hooge, of which now no trace remains, sitting stately among its lawns.

On the 25th October, after a heavy bombardment, as bombardments were
then reckoned, the whole Division was ordered at dawn to advance
against Reutel; the 2nd Grenadier Guards and the Irish Guards being
given the work of clearing out Polygon Wood, of which the enemy
held the upper half. They were advancing through the woods, and the
trenches of the Worcester Battalion there, when a big shell burst
in Lieutenant Ferguson’s platoon, No. 3 Company, killing 4 and
wounding 9 men, as far as was known. Ferguson himself, knocked down
but unwounded, went back to advise No. 2 Company coming up behind
him to deviate a little, “for the ground was a slaughter-house.”
The Battalion fought its way to a couple of hundred yards north of
Reutel and was then brought under heavy rifle-fire from concealed
trenches on a ridge. The 2nd Grenadiers on the right had, earlier,
been held up by a German trench on their left, and, as dark came
on, touch between the battalions there was lost, and the patrol
sent out to regain it only stumbled on the German trench. The left
of the Battalion lost touch by nearly a quarter of a mile with the
5th Brigade, and as the wet night closed in they found themselves
isolated in darkness and dripping autumn undergrowth, with the old
orders “to hold ground gained at all costs.” Meantime they hung
with both flanks in the air and enemy patrols on either side. The
nearest supports of any kind were the trenches of the Worcesters,
six hundred yards behind, through the woods; so the Battalion linked
up with them by means of a double front of men, back to back, strung
out tail-wise from their bivouac to the Worcesters. The manœuvre
succeeded. There was sniping all night from every side, but thanks to
the faithful “tail” the enemy could not get round the Battalion to
make sure whether it was wholly in the air. The casualties this day
were reported as 4 killed and 23 wounded.

At 4 A. M. on the 26th October, just after the night’s rain had
ceased, word came from Brigade Headquarters that the 3rd Coldstream
were to be expected on the Battalion’s right. They arrived an hour
and a half later and the Battalion attacked, again to be held up in
a salient heavily enfiladed from every angle by machine-guns, and
though No. 2 Company carried a couple of farm-houses outside the
woods, they were forced to retire from one of them and lost heavily.
An attack by the 6th Brigade in the afternoon relieved the pressure
a little, and helped the Battalion to get in touch with, at least,
its brigade. Lieutenant Shields (R.A.M.C. attached) was killed here
while attending our wounded. He had been remonstrated with only a
few minutes before for exposing himself too much, and paid as much
heed to the rebuke as did the others who succeeded him in his office.
The casualties for the day were 1 officer and 9 men killed and 42
wounded. The night was memorable inasmuch as the Battalion, which had
had no food for forty-eight hours, was allowed to eat its emergency
rations.

There was a German attack on the night of the 27th October, lasting
for less than an hour, but the advance of the 6th Brigade on the
Battalion’s left, together with the advance of the French still
farther to the left, threatening Passchendaele, kept the enemy
moderately quiet till the Battalion was relieved in the evening of
the 27th by the 3rd Coldstream, and went into bivouac just west of
Race-course Wood. It was shelled while settling down here and at
intervals throughout the night. Major Herbert Stepney was slightly
wounded in the back by a bullet when at supper in a farm-house; 2
men were killed and 3 wounded. Captain A. H. L. McCarthy, R.A.M.C.,
joined for duty, replacing Lieutenant Shields.

Next morning (October 28) the 5th Brigade was attacking and the
Battalion was ordered to support. It was heavily shelled again in
the wood and dug itself in north-west on the race-course, where it
stayed all day ready to support the Coldstream, and had a quiet
time. The C.O. (Lord Ardee) went to hospital with a bad throat;
Lieutenant Greer was wounded while serving his machine-gun, which had
been lent to the 3rd Coldstream, and a couple of men were wounded.
Drill-Sergeant A. Winspear joined the Connaught Rangers as 2nd
Lieutenant--one of the earliest of the army officers promoted from
the ranks.

The enemy at that date were so sure of success that they made no
attempt to conceal their intentions, and all our spent forces on the
Ypres front were well aware that a serious attack would be opened
on them on the 29th. Rumour said it would be superintended by the
Kaiser himself. But, so far as the Battalion was concerned, that day
was relatively quiet. The 2nd Brigade had been ordered to retake
the trenches lost by the 1st Brigade east of Gheluvelt, and the
Battalion’s duty, with the 2nd Grenadiers, was to fill up whatever
gaps might be found in a line which was mainly gaps between the left
of the 2nd and the right of the 1st Brigade near Polderhoek. It
reached the light railway from Gheluvelt to Polderhoek, discovered
that the gap there could be filled up by a platoon, communicated with
the C.O.’s of the two brigades concerned, sent back three companies
to the 4th Brigade Headquarters, left one at the disposal of the
1st Brigade, and at night withdrew. For the moment, the line could
be held with the troops on the spot, and it was no policy to use
a man more than was necessary. The casualties to the men for that
day were but 4 killed and 6 wounded, though a shell burst on the
Brigade Reserve Ammunition Column, west of Race-course Wood, and did
considerable damage.

The 30th October opened on the heaviest crisis of the long battle of
Ypres. The Battalion, to an accompaniment of “Jack Johnsons,” dug
trenches a quarter of a mile west of Race-course Wood in case the
troops at the farther end of it should be driven back; for in those
years woods were visible and gave good cover. German aeroplanes,
well aware that they had no anti-aircraft guns to fear, swooped low
over them in the morning, and men could only reply with some pitiful
rifle-fire.

In the afternoon orders came for them and the 2nd Grenadiers to stop
digging and move up to Klein Zillebeke to support the hard-pressed
Seventh Division on whose front the enemy had broken through
again. When they reached what was more or less the line, Nos. 1
and 2 Companies were sent forward to support the cavalry in their
trenches, while Nos. 3 and 4 Companies dug themselves in behind Klein
Zillebeke.[3] A gap of about a quarter of a mile was found running
from the Klein Zillebeke-Zandvoorde road north to the trenches of the
2nd Gordon Highlanders, and patrols reported the enemy in force in a
strip of wood immediately to the east of it. Whether the gap had been
blasted out by concentrated enemy-fire, or whether what the guns had
left of our cavalry had retired, was never clear. The Battalion was
told off to hold the place and to find out who was on either side of
them, while the 2nd Grenadiers continued the line southward from the
main road to the canal. Beginning at 11 P. M., they dug themselves
in till morning light. A burning farm-house blazed steadily all
night in a hollow by Zandvoorde and our patrols on the road could
see the Germans “in their spiked helmets” silhouetted against the
glare as they stormed out of the woods and massed behind the fold
of the ground ready for the morning’s attack. Two years later, our
guns would have waited on their telephones till the enemy formation
was completed and would then have removed those battalions from the
face of the earth. But we had not those guns. During the night the
Oxfordshire Light Infantry came up and occupied a farm between the
Battalion and the Gordon Highlanders and strengthened the situation
a little. Company commanders had already been officially warned that
the position was serious and that they must “hang on at all costs.”
Also that the Kaiser himself was in front of them.

On the 31st, after an attack by the French towards Hollebeke which
did not develop, the full storm broke. The Battalion, backed by
two R.F.A. guns, was shelled from seven in the morning till eleven
o’clock at night in such trenches as it had been able to construct
during the night; while machine-gun and infantry fire grew steadily
through the hours. The companies were disposed as follows: No. 4
Company immediately to the north of the main wood; then No. 3 with
No. 1 in touch with the Oxfordshire Light Infantry at a farm-house,
next to the Gordons; No. 2 was in reserve at a farm with Headquarters.

On the afternoon of the 31st October, Lord Ardee arrived from
hospital, though he was in no state to be out of it, and was greeted
by the information that the Gordons on the left, heavily shelled, had
been driven out of their trenches. The Oxford L.I. and also No. 1
Company of the Battalion which was in touch with them had to conform
to the movement. The section of R.F.A. had to retire also with the
Gordons and, after apologies, duly delivered among bursting German
shell, for “having to look after their guns,” they “limbered up and
went off as though it were the Military Tournament.” There was a
counter-attack, and eventually the enemy were driven back and the
line was re-established before night, which passed, says the Diary
“fairly quietly.” The moonlight made movement almost impossible; nor
could the men get any hot tea, their great stand-by, but rations were
distributed. The casualties among officers that day were Lieutenant
L. S. Coke killed, and buried in the garden of the farm; Captain Lord
Francis Scott, Lieutenant the Earl of Kingston, and Lieutenant R.
Ferguson wounded. There were many casualties in the front trenches,
specially among No. 3 Company, men being blown to pieces and no
trace left. The depressing thing, above all, was that we seemed to
have no guns to reply with.

Bombardment was renewed on the 1st November. The front trenches were
drenched by field-guns, at close range, with spurts of heavy stuff
at intervals; the rear by heavy artillery, while machine-gun fire
filled the intervals. One of the trenches of a platoon in No. 3
Company, under Lieutenant Maitland, was completely blown in, and only
a few men escaped. The Lieutenant remained with the survivors while
Sergeant C. Harradine, under heavy fire, took the news to the C.O.
It was hopeless to send reinforcements; the machine-gun fire would
have wiped them out moving and our artillery was not strong enough to
silence any one sector of the enemy’s fire.

In the afternoon the enemy attacked--with rifle-fire and a
close-range small piece that broke up our two machine-guns--across
some dead ground and occupied the wrecked trench, driving back the
few remains of No. 3 Company. The companies on the right and left,
Nos. 4 and 1, after heavy fighting, fell back on No. 2 Company, which
was occupying roughly prepared trenches in the rear. One platoon,
however, of No. 1 Company, under Lieutenant N. Woodroffe (he had
only left Eton a year), did not get the order to retire, and so
held on in its trench till dark and “was certainly instrumental in
checking the advance of the enemy.” The line was near breaking-point
by then, but company after company delivered what blow it could, and
fell back, shelled and machine-gunned at every step, to the fringe
of Zillebeke Wood. Here the officers, every cook, orderly, and man
who could stand, took rifle and fought; for they were all that stood
there between the enemy and the Channel Ports. (Years later, a man
remembering that fight said: “’Twas like a football scrum. Every
one was somebody, ye’ll understand. If he dropped there was no one
to take his place. Great days! An’ we not so frightened as when it
came to the fightin’ by machinery on the Somme afterwards.”)[4]
The C.O. sent the Adjutant to Brigade Headquarters to ask for help,
but the whole Staff had gone over to the 2nd Brigade Headquarters,
whose Brigadier had taken over command of the 4th Brigade as its own
Brigadier had been wounded. About this time, too, the C.O. of the
Battalion (Lord Ardee) was wounded. Eventually the 2nd Battalion
Grenadiers was sent up with some cavalry of the much-enduring 7th
Brigade, and the line of support-trenches was held. The Battalion had
had nothing to eat for thirty-six hours, so the cavalry kept the line
for a little till our men got food.

A French regiment (Territorials) on the right also took over part
of the trenches of our depleted line. Forty-four men were known to
have been killed, 205 wounded and 88--chiefly from the blown-up No.
3 Platoon--were missing. Of officers, Lieutenant K. R. Mathieson had
been killed (he had been last seen shooting a Hun who was bayoneting
our wounded); Captain Mulholland died of his wounds as soon as he
arrived in hospital at Ypres; Lieut.-Colonel Lord Ardee, Captain
Vesey, Lieutenant Gore-Langton and Lieutenant Alexander were wounded,
and Lieutenant G. M. Maitland, who had stayed with his handful in No.
3 Company’s trench, was missing. Yet the time was to come when three
hundred and fifty casualties would be regarded as no extraordinary
price to pay for ground won or held. One small draft of 40 men
arrived from home that night.

On November 2 the Battalion was reduced to three companies since in
No. 3 Company all officers were casualties and only 26 men of it
answered their names at roll-call. They were heavily shelled all that
day. They tried to put up a little wire on their front during the
night; they collected what dead they could; they received several
wounded men of the day’s fight as they crawled into our lines; they
heard one such man calling in the dark, and they heard the enemy turn
a machine-gun on him and silence him. The regular work of sending
forward and relieving the companies in the front line went on, varied
by an attack from the enemy, chiefly rifle-fire, on the night of
the 3rd November. On that date they received “a new machine-gun,”
and another draft of sixty men (under Captain E. C. S. King-Harman)
several of whom were killed or wounded that same afternoon. The
night was filled with false alarms as some of the new drafts began
to imagine crowds of Germans advancing out of the dark. This was a
popular obsession, but it led to waste of ammunition and waking up
utterly tired men elsewhere in the line.

On the 4th November there was an outburst of machine-gunning from a
farm-house, not 300 yards away. One field-gun was brought up to deal
with them, and some of the 2nd Life Guards stood by to help in event
of an attack, but the enemy contented themselves with mere punishing
fire.

On the evening of November 5 they located our one field-gun which was
still trying to cope with the enemy’s machine-guns, shelled it for an
hour vigorously, blew up the farm-house that sheltered it, but--clean
missed the gun, though it had been firing at least one round every
ten minutes. One of our wounded of the 1st November managed to crawl
into our lines. He had been three days without food or water--the
Germans, who thought he would die, refusing him both. There was heavy
shelling and about thirty casualties in the line “as far as known.”

On the 6th after an hour’s preparation with heavy-, light-, and
machine-gun fire, the enemy attacked the French troops on the
Battalion’s right, who fell back and left the flank of the Battalion
(No. 2 Company) open. The Company “in good order and fighting”
fell back by platoons to its support trenches, but this left No.
1 Company practically in the air, and at the end of the day the
greater part of them were missing. As the Germans occupied the
French trenches in succession, they opened an enfilade fire on the
Irish which did sore execution. Once again the Adjutant went to the
Brigadier to explain the situation. The Household Cavalry were sent
up at the gallop to Zillebeke where they dismounted and advanced
on foot. The 1st Life Guards on the left were detailed to retake
the Irish Guards’ trenches, while the 2nd Life Guards attacked
the position whence the French had been ousted. A hundred Irish
Guardsmen, collected on the spot, also took part in the attack, which
in an hour recovered most of the lost positions. Here Lieutenant W.
E. Hope was killed, and a little later, Lieutenant N. Woodroffe fell,
shot dead in the advance of the Household Cavalry. Two companies,
had these been available, could have held the support-trenches
after the Household Cavalry had cleared the front, but there were
no reinforcements and the unceasing pressure on the French drove
the Battalion back on a fresh line a couple of hundred yards behind
the support trenches which the cavalry held till the remains of the
Battalion had re-formed and got some hot tea from the ever-forward
cookers. In addition to Lieutenants Hope and Woodroffe killed,
Captain Lord John Hamilton and Lieutenant E. C. S. King-Harman, who
had come out with the draft on the 1st November, were missing that
day.

On November 7 the Battalion relieved the cavalry at one in the
morning, and dug and deepened their trenches on the edge of the
wood till word came to them to keep up a heavy fire on any enemy
driven out of the wood, as the 22nd Brigade were attacking on their
right. That “Brigade” now reduced to two composite battalions--the
Royal Welsh Fusiliers, with the 2nd Queens and the Warwicks with
S. Staffords--both commanded by captains, did all that was humanly
possible against the pressure, but in the end, as the Diary says,
“having failed to get the line required, withdrew under heavy
shell-fire.” Their attack was no more than one of many desperate
interludes in the desperate first battle of Ypres--a winning fight
against hopeless odds of men and material--but it diverted attention
for the moment from the Battalion’s particular section of the line
and “the enemy did not shell our trenches much.” Early in the day
Major Stepney, commanding, went out from the support trenches and
was not seen again alive. His body was found late in the evening
between the lines. The command of the Battalion now fell to Captain
N. Orr-Ewing.

Since October 31 6 officers had been killed, 7 wounded, and 3 were
missing. Of N.C.O.’s and men 64 were dead, 339 wounded, and 194
missing. The total casualties, all ranks, for one week, were 613.

The remnant were made into two shrunken companies next day (the 8th)
which was a quiet one with intermittent bursts of shelling from
French .75’s on the right, and German heavies; the enemy eighty yards
distant. Captain A. Perceval, who had been blown up twice in the past
week, and Lieutenant J. S. N. FitzGerald were sent to hospital.

On the night of the 9th November the Battalion of four platoons,
three in the firing-line and one in reserve, was relieved by the S.
W. Borderers; drew supplies and men at Brigade Headquarters, moved
back through Zillebeke and marched into bivouacs near a farm south of
the Ypres-Zonnebeke road, where they settled down with some Oxford
L.I. in deep trenches, and dug-outs which had been dug by the French.

They spent the 10th in luxury; their cookers were up and the men ate
their first hot meal for many days. Blankets also were issued, and
a draft of about two hundred men arrived under Lieutenant Hon. W.
C. Hanbury-Tracy, which brought up the strength of the re-organized
two-company Battalion to 360 men. Major Webber, “S.R.” (this is the
first time that the Diary makes mention of the Special Reserve),
arrived the day before and as Senior Officer took over from Captain
Orr-Ewing. The other officers who came with him were Captain Everard
and Lieutenant L. R. Hargreaves, both Special Reserve, with
Lieutenant St. J. R. Pigott, and, next day, 2nd Lieutenant Straker,
Machine-gun Officer, with “two new guns.” All these reinforcements
allowed the Battalion to be organized as two companies instead of
four platoons.

On the morning of the 11th November, they were moved out by way of
the Bellewaarde Lake and under cover of the woods there, in support
of the Oxfordshire L.I. who cleared the wood north of Château Hooge
and captured some thirty prisoners of the Prussian Guards. This was
the first time, to their knowledge, that they had handled that Corps.
Though heavily shelled the Battalion lost no men and spent the rest
of the day behind the O.L.I. and the Grenadiers, waiting in the
rain near the Headquarters of the First Division (Brigadier-General
FitzClarence, V.C.) to which it was for the moment attached.

It was here that one of our officers found some enemy prisoners
faithfully shepherded under the lee of a protecting haystack while
their guard (Oxford L.I.) stood out in the open under casual
shrapnel. A change was made at once.

At 9 P. M. the Battalion was told it might go back and get tea and
supplies at some cross-roads or other in the darkness behind it.
The cookers never came up and the supplies were not available till
past midnight on the 12th. As their orders were to return to 1st
Brigade Headquarters at 2 A. M. to take part in an attack on a German
trench, the men had not much sleep. The trench had been captured by
the enemy the day before, but they had abandoned it and dug another,
commanding, in the rear, whence they could deal with any attempt at
recapture on our part. The composite force of the 2nd Grenadiers,
Munster Fusiliers, Irish Guards, and Oxfordshire L.I. discovered
this much, wading through mud in the darkness before dawn, at a cost
to the Battalion of Major Webber and Lieutenant Harding and some
twelve men wounded. They were caught front and flank and scattered
among the shell-holes. General FitzClarence was killed by enemy
fire out of the dark, and eventually the troops returned to 1st
Brigade Headquarters where a company of the Grenadiers were told off
to dig trenches in a gap which had been found in the line, while
the remainder, the Irish Guards and the Munsters, were sent back to
the woods near Hooge Château which was full of fragments of broken
battalions, from Scots Guards to Zouaves.

The Battalion reached its destination at 6 A. M. of the 12th.
Three-quarters of an hour later it was ordered up to the woods on
the Gheluvelt road. They occupied “dug-outs”--the first time the
Diary mentions these as part of the scheme of things--on the north
side of the road near the end of the wood west of Veldhoek; sent
a platoon to reinforce the Scots Fusiliers who were hard-pressed,
near by; and were heavily shelled at intervals all day, besides
being sniped and machine-gunned by the enemy who commanded the main
road towards Hooge. None the less, they were fed that night without
accident. Captains Everard and Hanbury-Tracy, Lieutenant Pigott were
sent to hospital, and 2nd Lieutenant Antrobus rejoined from hospital.
This left to the Battalion--Captain Orr-Ewing, Captain the Hon. J.
Trefusis, Adjutant R. M. C. Sandhurst who had joined a day or so
before, Lieutenant L. R. Hargreaves, and 2nd Lieutenant Antrobus, who
was next day wounded in the arm by a shell. Lieutenant Walker, Acting
Quartermaster, was sick, and Captain Gough was acting as Brigade
Transport Officer. At that moment the strength of the Battalion is
reported at “about” 160 officers and men. A draft of 50 N.C.O.’s and
men arrived on the 13th November.

On November 14 they were ordered to return to 4th Brigade
Headquarters and take over trenches near Klein Zillebeke from the
S. W. Borderers who had relieved them there on the 9th. “The day
passed much as usual,” it was observed, but “the shelling was
fairly heavy and the enemy gained some ground.” Lieutenant and
Quartermaster Hickie returned from a sick leave of two months. The
Sussex Battalion relieved the Battalion in their dug-outs on the edge
of the Veldhoek woods at 11 P. M.; the Battalion then moved off and
by half-past three on the morning of the 15th had relieved the South
Wales Borderers in their old trenches. Here they received word of the
death of their Colonel, Field-Marshal Lord Roberts, from pneumonia
while on a visit to the Indian troops at the front. C.S.M. Rogers
and Pte. Murphy were selected as representatives of the Battalion
to attend the funeral service at St. Omer. The Battalion spent the
day under constant shell-fire in improving trenches, “but there was
some difficulty as snipers were busy, as they had been all day.” One
officer wrote: “Our men are very tired and the rifles are in an awful
state. It rains continuously, and it is very hard to get any sort of
rifle-oil.”

The 16th November, a day of snow and heavy firing, ending in an
attack which was suppressed by rapid fire, was grimly enlivened by
the appearance of one German deserter with two fingers shot off who
announced that he “had had enough of fighting.”

On the 17th November, Brigade Headquarters were blown in by
shell-fire, both of the Irish Guards orderlies on duty were injured,
and both of the Battalion’s “two new machine-guns” were knocked to
pieces. There was five hours’ heavy shelling from 7 A. M. till noon
when the enemy came out of their trenches to attack in force, and
were dealt with for an hour by the Battalion, the Grenadiers on its
left and the cavalry on its right. It was estimated that--thanks to
efficient fire control and good discipline--twelve hundred killed and
wounded were accounted for in front of our trenches. Our only man
killed in this attack was C.S.M. Munns who had been just recommended
for his commission. He was a born leader of men, always cheerful, and
with what seemed like a genuine love for fighting. A second attack,
not pressed home, followed at three o’clock; another out-break of
small-arm fire at half-past nine and yet another towards midnight,
and a heavy shelling of the French on our right. “Then all was
quiet,” says the easily satisfied record.

They endured one day longer, with nothing worse than a “certain
amount of heavy shelling but not so much as usual,” and on the 18th
their battered remnants came out. They were relieved by a company of
the 3rd Coldstream (Captain H. Dawson) and marched off to billets
at Potijze on the Ypres-Zonnebeke road, where the men got plenty of
food. Hard frost had followed the soaking wet and downpour of the
previous days; snow succeeded, but there were hot meals and the hope
of rest and refit at Meteren behind Bailleul, fifteen miles from
Potijze.

They reached that haven on the 21st November--eight officers and 390
men in all--“desperately tired” in a cold that froze the water in the
men’s bottles. Not a man fell out. Captain Lord Desmond FitzGerald,
recovered from his wound, arrived on the same day and took over the
Adjutancy.

The Battalion had been practically wiped out and reconstructed in
a month. They had been cramped in wet mud till they had almost
forgotten the use of their legs: their rifles, clothing, equipment,
everything except their morale and the undefeated humour with which
they had borne their burden, needed renewal or repair. They rested
and began to clean themselves of their dirt and vermin while the
C.O. and company officers went round billets and companies--to see
that the men had all they needed--as is the custom of our Army. It
was a comprehensive refit, including everything from trousers to
ground-sheets, as well as mufflers and mittens sent by H.I.H. the
Grand Duke Michael of Russia. Steady platoon and company drill, which
is restorative to men after long standing in dirt, or fighting in the
dark, marked the unbelievably still days.

On the 23rd November the Reverend Father Gwynne, the beloved R.C.
Chaplain, arrived to take up his duties; and on the 24th they were
inspected by the Commander-in-Chief, Sir John French.

On the 28th a draft of 288 N.C.O.’s and men reached them, under
command of Captain P. L. Reid with the following officers: Lieutenant
G. Gough; 2nd Lieutenants H. S. Keating, H. Marion-Crawford, Hon.
H. A. V. Harmsworth, A. C. Innes, and L. C. Lee. With this draft
the strength of the Battalion stood at 700 men and 15 officers. Of
the latter the Diary notes that nine are in the Special Reserve,
“seven of them having done no sort of soldiering before the war.”
Mercifully, men lived but one day at a time, or the Diarist
might have drawn conclusions, which would have fallen far short
of what the future was to bring, from the fact that as many as
twelve machine-gunners were kept at the base by the order of the
authorities. There was need to train machine-gunners, and even
greater need for the guns themselves. But the Battalion was not
occupied with the larger questions of the war. They had borne their
part against all odds of numbers and equipment in barring the German
road to the sea in the first month-long battle of Ypres. They knew
very little of what they had done. Not one of their number could have
given any consecutive account of what had happened, nor, in that
general-post of daily and nightly confusion whither they had gone.
All they were sure of was that such as lived were not dead (“The Lord
only knows why”) and that the enemy had not broken through. They had
no knowledge what labours still lay before them.

On the 3rd December, after an issue of new equipment and a visit
from Sir Douglas Haig, commanding the First Army Corps, they lined
the road from Meteren towards Bailleul for the visit of the King who
walked down the lines of the 4th (Guards) Brigade and, after shaking
hands with the four Commanding Officers of the Brigade, said: “I am
very proud of my Guards and am full of admiration for their bravery,
endurance, and fine spirit. I wish I could have addressed them all,
but that is impossible, so you must tell them what I say to you. You
are fighting a brave and determined enemy, but if you go on as you
have been doing and show the same fine spirit, there can be only one
end, please God, and that is victory. I wish you all good luck.”

D.S.O.’s had been awarded to Captain Orr-Ewing and Captain Lord
Francis Scott; and the Distinguished Conduct Medal to Company
Sergeant-Major Munns, who, it will be remembered, was killed in
action just after he was recommended for a commission; to Sergeant
M’Goldrick, Brigade Orderly, who was one of the orderlies injured
when the Brigade Headquarters were blown up on the 17th November;
Corporal Riordan (wounded), Private Russell (Brigade Orderly),
and Private Glynn (since wounded and missing). The King decorated
Sergeant M’Goldrick with the D.C.M. that afternoon. The others named
were, from various causes, absent. It was the first of many such
occasions where those honoured could not be present to receive their
valour’s reward.

The Diary notes the issue of cardigan waistcoats and goat-skin coats
for each man, as well as of a new American pattern boot, with a hard
toe which, it conservatively fears, “may not stand the wear of the
old ammunition-boot.” Route-marches increased in length, and the
men marched as well as they ate. Indeed, they volunteered to the
Brigadier, who came round once to see the dinners, that they had
never been so well fed. It kept them healthy, though there were the
usual criticisms from officers, N.C.O.’s. and surviving veterans of
the Regular Army, on the quality of the new drafts, some of whom, it
seems, suffered from bad teeth and had to be sent away for renewals
and refits. As a much-tried sergeant remarked: “A man with a sore
tooth is a nuisance an’ a danger to the whole British Army.”

On the 9th December Sir Douglas Haig came over to present the
Médaille Militaire, on behalf of the French Government, to certain
officers, N.C.O.’s, and men of the Guards Brigade. Drill-Sergeant
Rodgers of the Battalion was among the recipients. Captain Orr-Ewing
was ordered to rejoin the 1st Battalion of the Scots Guards (his own
battalion), to the regret of the Battalion whose lot he had shared
since September--the most capable of officers as the most popular of
comrades.

A party from the Brigade was sent to Headquarters of the 11th
Engineering Company “to be taught how to throw bombs made out of
jam-pots, which apparently are used against the enemy at close
quarters in the present trench-warfare.” There were at least
half-a-dozen more or less dangerous varieties of these hand-made
bombs in use, before standard patterns were evolved and bombing took
its place as a regular aid to warfare. The “jam-pot” bomb died early
but not before it had caused a sufficiency of trouble to its users.
The others will be mentioned in due course.

“Aeroplane duty” was another invention of those early days. A company
was told off daily to look out for aeroplanes and, if possible, to
bring them down--presumably by rifle-fire. The war was still very
young.

F.-M. Earl Kitchener’s appointment to Colonel of the Battalion in
succession to F.-M. Earl Roberts was marked on the 12th in the
following telegram from Earl Kitchener:

  His Majesty the King, having been graciously pleased to appoint
  me to be Colonel of the Irish Guards, I desire to take the first
  opportunity of expressing to you and through you to all ranks how
  proud I am to be associated with so gallant a regiment. My warmest
  greetings and best wishes to you all!

The C.O. replied:

  All ranks, 1st Battalion Irish Guards, greatly appreciate the
  honour conferred on them by His Majesty the King, and are proud to
  have such a distinguished soldier as Colonel of the Regiment.

On the 13th December a further draft of 100 men and three officers
arrived under Captain Mylne; the other officers being Lieutenant
Antrobus who was wounded exactly a month before, and Lieutenant
Hubbard. This brought the Battalion’s strength to 800 with the
following officers: Major the Hon. J. Trefusis, C.O.; Captain Lord
Desmond FitzGerald, Adjutant; Lieutenant C. A. S. Walker, Transport
Officer; 2nd Lieutenant L. Straker, Machine-gun Officer; Captain
A. H. L. McCarthy, Medical Officer; Captain Rev. Father Gwynne,
Chaplain; Lieutenant H. Hickie, Quartermaster. No. 1 Company, Captain
E. J. Gough, Lieutenant L. Hargreaves, 2nd Lieutenant A. C. Innes.
No. 2 Company, Captain E. Mylne, 2nd Lieutenant H. S. Keating, 2nd
Lieutenant F. H. Witts. No. 3 Company, Captain P. L. Reid, 2nd
Lieutenant P. H. Antrobus, 2nd Lieutenant Hon. H. V. Harmsworth, 2nd
Lieutenant H. Marion-Crawford. No. 4 Company, Lieutenant G. Gough,
Lieutenant G. Hubbard, 2nd Lieutenant Lee.

Lieutenant C. A. S. Walker had to go to hospital with bronchitis and
Lieutenant Antrobus took over from him.

Major Arbuthnot (Scots Guards) arrived on the 14th December with
Queen Alexandra’s presents to the Battalion which were duly issued to
selected officers, N.C.O.’s, and men, but at the time, the Battalion
was under two hours’ notice to move either to support an attack then
being delivered by the Third Division upon the wood at Wytschaete,
or “for any other purpose.” The attack was not a success except in
so far as it pinned the enemy forces to one place, but the Battalion
was not called upon to help. It lived under “short notice” for a week
which naturally interfered with extended route-marches or training.
Companies were sent out one by one to dig in the water-logged soil
and to extemporise means of keeping their feet out of the water by
“blocks of wood made in the form of a platform at the bottom of the
trenches.” Thus laboriously is described the genesis of what was
later to grow into thousands of miles of duck-board, plain or wired.

Meantime, between the 20th and 22nd of December the fierce and
unsatisfactory battle of Cuinchy, the burden of which fell heavily
on our devoted Indian troops, had been fought out on a front of
half-a-dozen miles from south of the Béthune Canal to Festubert.
Nothing had been gained except the all-important issue--that the
enemy did not break through. There was a long casualty-list as
casualties were then counted, and the Indian Brigades were withdrawn
from their wrecked and sodden trenches for a little rest. The Guards
Brigade was ordered to relieve them, and on the 22nd marched out
from Meteren. The Herts Territorial Battalion (to be honourably and
affectionately known later as “The Herts Guards”) led that first
march, followed by the 2nd Coldstream, 1st Battalion Irish Guards,
the 3rd Coldstream, and the 2nd Grenadiers. They billeted at Béthune
where, on the 23rd December, the 2nd Coldstream in support, they
took over their share of the Indian trenches near Le Touret between
Essars and Richebourg L’Avoué, and on Christmas Eve after tea and the
distribution of the Christmas puddings from England, the Battalion,
with the Hertfordshires relieved the 4th Dogras, 6th Jats, and 9th
Gurkhas. It is recorded that the Gurkha, being a somewhat shorter man
than the average Guardsman, the long Irish had to dig their trenches
about two feet deeper, and they wondered loudly what sort of persons
these “little dark fellas” could be.

The Christmas truce of 1914 reached the Battalion in severely
modified form. They lay among a network of trenches, already many
times fought over, with communications that led directly into the
enemy’s lines a couple of hundred yards away. So they spent Christmas
Day, under occasional bombardment of heavy artillery, in exploring
and establishing themselves as well as they might among these wet and
dreary works. In this duty Lieutenant G. P. Gough and Lieutenant F.
H. Witts and six men were wounded.

Earl Kitchener, their Colonel, sent them Christmas wishes and the
King’s and Queen’s Christmas cards were distributed. Their comfort
was that Christmas night was frosty so that the men kept dry at least.

Boxing Day was quiet, too, and only four men were wounded as they
dug in the hard ground to improve their communications with the
2nd Coldstream on their left. Then the frost broke in rain, the
clay stuck to the spade, the trenches began to fill and a deserter
brought news of an impending attack which turned out to be nothing
more serious than a bombing affair which was duly “attended to.” Some
of our own shells bursting short killed one man and wounded six.
Princess Mary’s gifts of pipes, tobacco, and Christmas cards were
distributed to the men and duly appreciated.

The impossibility of keeping anything free from mud forced them to
reduce their firing-line to the least possible numbers, while those
in support, or billets, made shift to clean rifles and accoutrements.
The days went forward in rain and wet, with digging where water
allowed, and a regular daily toll of a few men killed and wounded.

On the 30th December Captain Eric Gough was killed by a stray bullet
while commanding his Company (No. 1) and was buried next day in a
cemetery a few miles along the Béthune-Richebourg road. He had been
Transport Officer since the Battalion left London in August, but
had commanded a company since the 21st November, and was an immense
loss to the Battalion to which he was devoted. Lieutenant Sir G.
Burke and 2nd Lieutenant J. M. Stewart came from England on the same
day and were posted to No. 1 Company now commanded by Lieutenant L.
Hargreaves.

The Diary ends the year with a recapitulation more impressive in its
restraint than any multitude of words:

  The country round this part is very low-lying, intersected with
  ditches with pollarded willows growing on their banks. No sooner
  is a trench dug than it fills with water.... The soil is clay, and
  so keeps the water from draining away even if that were possible.
  In order to keep the men at all dry, they have to stand on planks
  rested on logs in the trenches, and in the less wet places bundles
  of straw and short fascines are put down. Pumping has been tried,
  but not with much success. The weather continues wet, and there
  does not seem to be any likelihood of a change. Consequently, we
  may expect some fresh discomforts daily.




1915

LA BASSÉE TO LAVENTIE


They were not disappointed. New Year’s Day was marked by the flooding
out of a section of forward trenches, and by experiments with a
trench-mortar, from which 2nd Lieutenant Keating and some Garrison
gunners threw three bombs at an enemy digging-party a couple of
hundred yards away. This is the first reference to our use of
trench-mortars in the young campaign. The enemy retaliated next day
by bombing from their real trench-mortars, at a distance of seven
hundred yards, the small farm-house where Battalion Headquarters
lay. The bombs could be seen “coming at a very steep angle, but the
house was only once hit.” Daylight showed the work of the Irish
trench-mortar to have been so good--it had blown a gap in the German
trench--that they continued it and inflicted and observed much damage.

They were relieved on the 3rd January by the King’s Royal Rifles
and got to billets near Vieille Chapelle late that night. A London
Gazette announced that the Distinguished Conduct Medal had been
awarded No. 2535 Sergeant C. Harradine; No. 1664 Corporal C. Moran;
No. 4015 Private W. Moore (since killed in action); No. 2853
Lance-Corporal W. Delaney. Also “the new decoration called the
Military Cross” had been awarded to Lieutenant the Hon. H. W. Gough.

The Battalion, as a whole, had its reward for the past ten days
when the Brigadier expressed his approval of the work of the Guards
Brigade “and especially that of the Irish Guards.”

Cleaning and refit, classes in bomb-throwing (both by hand and from
rifles) under the Engineers and an elementary machine-gun class
under 2nd Lieutenant Straker, filled in the week; but the most
appreciated boon at Vieille Chapelle was some huge tubs in which the
men could be boiled clean. Father Gwynne held service in the roofless
shell-wrecked church, long since wiped out.

They took over trenches from the Worcesters on the 8th with a cold
knowledge of what awaited them; for the Diary notes, the day before:
“Another wet day, which will probably completely fill trenches on
the left of the new line with water.” But it did not fill them more
than two feet deep, though the whole line was afloat, and in the
communication-trenches seven men got stuck in the mud; one of them
was not extricated for six hours. The relief took six and a half
hours in pouring rain, with one man killed and two wounded. The
front line of the Guards Brigade was held by the 3rd Coldstream on
the right, the 2nd Coldstream in support; one Company of the 2nd
Grenadiers in the centre, and the rest of the Battalion in support;
the Irish Guards on the left, the Herts Territorials in support. The
Grenadiers relieved their front company every twenty-four hours,
the others every forty-eight. This meant that Battalion C.O.’s had
to spend most of their time in the front line studying what was, in
effect, the navigation of canals.

On the 9th January, for example, the water averaged three feet in
the trenches and, as that average rose, it was decided to leave
a few strong posts in comparatively dry positions and withdraw
the others along the Rue du Bois into the destroyed village of
Richebourg L’Avoué. Luckily, the enemy, not two hundred yards away,
had his own troubles to attend to and, despite his lavish flares and
musketry-fire, our men were extricated, bodily in some instances,
with but 3 killed and 2 wounded.

On the 10th January the Herts Regiment relieved them, and the whole
Battalion billeted at Richebourg St. Vaast. Casualties from small-arm
fire had been increasing owing to the sodden state of the parapets;
but the Battalion retaliated a little from one “telescopic-sighted
rifle” sent up by Lieutenant the Earl of Kingston, with which
Drill-Sergeant Bracken “certainly” accounted for 3 killed and 4
wounded of the enemy. The Diary, mercifully blind to the dreadful
years to come, thinks, “There should be many of these rifles used as
long as the army is sitting in trenches.” Many of them were so used:
this, the father of them all, now hangs in the Regimental Mess.

Then trench-feet and rheumatism developed, and in forty-eight hours
fifty men had to be sent to hospital for one form or other of these
complaints.

A draft of a hundred fresh men arrived between the 11th and 12th of
January with six officers: Captain P. S. Long-Innes, 2nd Lieutenants
F. F. Graham, J. R. Ralli, R. B. H. Kemp, D. W. Gunston (Derek) and
J. T. Robyns. Economy in officers and men was not yet possible; for
when an officer was not in the front line he had more than all he
could do to look after what comforts were obtainable for the men.
Yet concessions were made to human weakness; for when the Battalion
returned to its trenches on the 12th an order was received and, to
some extent, obeyed that “men were not to stand in the water for
_more than twelve hours at a time_.” This called for continuous
reliefs of the platoons, as it took a man most of his rest in
billets to scrape himself moderately clean. To save the labour of
portage through the mud, each man was given two days’ supplies
when he went into the trenches, plus some dry tea and a couple of
tins of maconochie to heat up over the braziers. The idea worked
satisfactorily; for the days of the merciless air-patrols had yet
to come; and the braziers flared naked to heaven while the Irish
“drummed up,” which is to say, stewed their tea or rations on them.

The hopeless work of improving positions in soil no stiffer than
porridge was resumed, and the “telescopic-sighted rifle,” in the
hands of Sergeant-Major Kirk and Drill-Sergeant Bracken, who were
later congratulated by the G.O.C. Second Division, continued its
discreet and guarded labours among the enemy. Only 1 man was killed
and 1 wounded on the 13th January, and the night of that easy day
passed off quietly, “the enemy occupying himself chiefly with singing
songs or playing on mouth-organs.” Here and elsewhere he was given
to spasms of music for no ascertainable reason, which the Irish, who
do not naturally burst into song, rather resented. Between morceaux
he sent up many coloured flares, while our working-parties silently
completed and christened by the name of “Gibraltar” a post to command
a flooded gap in the oozy line.

They were relieved on the 15th January by the Highland Light Infantry
of the 3rd Brigade (Lahore Division) which was taking over the line
held by the 4th (Guards) Brigade. The Battalion went back to Brigade
reserve billets at Locon.[5]

Their last week in the trenches had cost them 82 casualties including
sick, but it is worth noting that, at this time, Captain McCarthy,
the Medical Officer, by issuing mustard mixed with lard for the
men to rub on their feet, had in three days got the better of the
epidemic of “trench” or, as they were then called, “swollen” feet.

It was while in reserve that 2nd Lieut. Keating, Bombing Instructor
and in charge of the trench-mortars, lost his life and 13 men were
wounded owing to the premature explosion of an old-type fused bomb
with which he was instructing a class. Second Lieutenant Keating was
buried next day in the cemetery near Le Touret, where many Guardsmen
were already laid, and his epitaph may worthily stand as it was
written--“A very capable officer, always ready to undertake any task
however difficult or dangerous.”

After a few days the Battalion went into Corps Reserve and spent a
week in being “smartened up” behind the line with steady drill,
rifle exercises, route-marching and kit inspection, on rainy days,
lest life in the caked filth of the trenches should lead any one
to forget the standard of the Brigade of Guards which under no
circumstance allows any excuse.

Their work was interrupted by another “Kaiser-battle,” obediently
planned to celebrate the All Highest’s birthday. It began on the
25th January with a demonstration along the whole flat front from
Festubert to Vermelles. Béthune was also shelled from an armoured
train run out of La Bassée, and a heavy attack was launched by
Prussian infantry on a salient of our line, held by the 1st Infantry
Brigade, where it joined the French line among the tangle of railway
tracks and brick-fields near Cuinchy. Owing to the mud, the salient
was lightly manned by half a battalion of the Scots Guards and half
a battalion of the Coldstream. Their trenches were wiped out by the
artillery attack and their line fell back, perhaps half a mile, to
a partially prepared position among the brick-fields and railway
lines between the Aire-La Bassée Canal and the La Bassée-Béthune
road. Here fighting continued with reinforcements and counter-attacks
knee-deep in mud till the enemy were checked and a none too stable
defence made good between a mess of German communication-trenches and
a keep or redoubt held by the British among the huge brick-stacks
by the railway. So far as the Battalion was concerned, this phase
of the affair seems to have led to no more than two or three days’
standing-to in readiness to support with the rest of the Brigade, and
taking what odd shells fell to their share.

No institutions are more self-centred than a battalion in the face
of war. “Steady drill,” and company kit inspections were carried on
in the lulls of the waiting, and their main preoccupation was how
much water might be expected in the new trenches when their turn
came to occupy them. The Germans were devoting some of their heavy
artillery to shelling the lock of the Aire-La Bassée Canal at Pont
Fixe, between Givenchy and Cuinchy, in the hope of bursting it and
flooding the country. They spent more than a hundred eight-inch
howitzer shells on that endeavour in one day, and later--long after
the lock had been thoroughly protected with sandbags--used to give
it stated doses of shell at regular intervals. Similarly, they would
bombard one special spot on the line near Béthune because once in ’14
an armoured train of ours had fired thence at them.

The Battalion had just been reinforced by a draft of 107 men and
4 officers--Captain Eric Greer, Lieutenant Blacker-Douglass, 2nd
Lieutenant R. G. C. Yerburgh, and 2nd Lieutenant S. G. Tallents.
They were under orders to move up towards the fighting among the
brick-fields which had opened on the 25th, and had not ceased since.
Unofficial reports described the trenches they were to take over
as “not very wet but otherwise damnable,” and on the 30th January
the Battalion definitely moved from Locon, with the 2nd Coldstream,
_via_ Béthune to Cuinchy. Here the Coldstream took over from the
2nd Brigade the whole line of a thousand yards of trench occupied
by them; the Irish furnishing supports. The rest of the Brigade,
that is to say, the Herts Territorials, the Grenadiers, and the 3rd
Coldstream were at Annequin, Beuvry, and Béthune.

The companies were disposed between the La Bassée-Béthune road
and the railway, beside the Aire-La Bassée Canal. The centre of
their line consisted of a collection of huge dull plum-coloured
brick-stacks, mottled with black, which might have been originally
thirty feet high. Five of these were held by our people and the
others by the enemy--the whole connected and interlocked by saps and
communication-trenches new and old, without key or finality. Neither
side could live in comfort at such close quarters until they had
strengthened their lines either by local attacks, bombing raids or
systematised artillery work. “The whole position,” an officer remarks
professionally, “is most interesting and requires careful handling
and a considerable amount of ingenuity.”

[Illustration:

  _FIRST BATTALION_
  _Actions & Billets._

  _Emery Walker Ltd. del. et sc._]

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY EMERY WALKER LTD., LONDON

Except for railway embankments and culverts, the country about was so
flat that a bullet once started had no reason to stop. The men were
billeted in solid-built Flemish houses with bullet-proof partitions,
and therefore, unless noticeably shelled, were inclined to walk about
in front of the houses in the daylight, till they were sternly set
to work to clean their billets of months of accumulations of refuse
and to bury neglected carcases. War and all connected with it was
infinitely stale already, but houses and the ruins of them had not
yet been wholly wiped out in that sector.

They were installed by the last day of the month with no greater
inconvenience than drifts of stray bullets over the support trenches,
and unsystematic shelling of Battalion Headquarters two or three
hundred yards in the rear, and some desultory bombing in the
complicated front line.

Early in the morning of the 1st February a post held by the
Coldstream in a hollow near the embankment, just west of the Railway
Triangle--a spot unholy beyond most, even in this sector--was bombed
and rushed by the enemy through an old communication-trench. No. 4
Company Irish Guards was ordered to help the Coldstream’s attack. The
men were led by Lieutenant Blacker-Douglass who had but rejoined on
the 25th January. He was knocked over by a bomb within a few yards of
the German barricade to the trench, picked himself up and went on,
only to be shot through the head a moment later. Lieutenant Lee of
the same Company was shot through the heart; the Company Commander,
Captain Long-Innes, and 2nd Lieutenant Blom were wounded, and the
command devolved on C.Q.M.S. Carton, who, in spite of a verbal order
to retire “which he did not believe,” held on till the morning in the
trench under such cover of shell-holes and hasty barricades as could
be found or put up. The Germans were too well posted to be moved
by bomb or rifle, so, when daylight showed the situation, our big
guns were called upon to shell for ten minutes, with shrapnel, the
hollow where they lay. The spectacle was sickening, but the results
were satisfactory. Then a second attack of some fifty Coldstream and
thirty Irish Guards of No. 1 Company under Lieutenants Graham and
Innes went forward, hung for a moment on the fringe of their own
shrapnel--for barrages were new things--and swept up the trench. It
was here that Lance-Corporal O’Leary, Lieutenant Innes’s orderly,
won his V.C. He rushed up along the railway embankment above the
trenches, shot down 5 Germans behind their first barricade in
the trench, then 3 more trying to work a machine-gun at the next
barricade fifty yards farther along the trench, and took a couple
of prisoners. Eye-witnesses report that he did his work quite
leisurely and wandered out into the open, visible for any distance
around, intent upon killing another German to whom he had taken a
dislike. Meantime, Graham, badly wounded in the head, and Innes,
together with some Coldstream, had worked their way into the post and
found it deserted. Our guns and our attack had accounted for about
30 dead, but had left 32 wounded and unwounded prisoners, all of
whom, with one exception, wept aloud. The hollow was full of mixed
dead--Coldstream, Irish, and German.

The men who remained of No. 4 Company did not settle down to
the work of consolidating their position till they had found
Blacker-Douglass’s body. At least a couple of his company had been
wounded in the first attack while trying to bring it away. Lee’s body
was recovered not far off.

A quarter of an hour after the post had fallen, the Engineers were
up with unlimited sand-bags and helped the men who worked as they
ate among the piled horrors around them, while everything was made
ready for the expected German counter-attack. It did not come. Not
only had the post been abandoned, but also a couple of trenches
running out of it to the southward. These were duly barricaded in
case the enemy were minded to work back along them at dusk. But for
the rest of the day they preferred to shell; killing 2 and wounding
5 men of the two companies which were relieved by a company of the
3rd Coldstream and one of the 3rd Grenadiers. Our men returned to
billets “very tired and hungry, but very pleased with themselves.”
That day’s work had cost us 2 officers and 8 men killed; 3 officers
and 24 men wounded, and 2 men missing. In return, two machine-guns,
8 whole and 24 wounded prisoners had been taken, the post recovered
and, perhaps, sixty yards of additional trench with it. Such was the
price paid in those years for maintaining even a foothold against the
massed pressure of the enemy. It is distinctly noted in the Diary
that two complete machine-guns were added to the defence of the
post after it had been recaptured. Machine-guns were then valuable
articles of barter, for when the French who were their neighbours
wished to borrow one such article “for moral and material support,”
a Brigadier-General’s permission had to be obtained.

This experience had shown it was better for each battalion in the
line to provide its own supports, and they reorganized on the 2nd
February on this basis; the 2nd and 3rd Coldstream Guards taking over
the left half of the line up to within fifty yards of the Keep, while
for their right, to the main La Bassée road, the 2nd Grenadiers and
the Irish Guards were responsible--each with two companies in the
fire trench and two in support, and all on forty-eight hours’ relief.

The enemy continued to shell the captured position, killing 2 and
wounding 9 men that day, but no counter-attack developed and a few
days later it was decided to straighten out the front then held
by the 4th (Guards) Brigade. The fighting on the 25th had left it
running irregularly through the big brick-yard, before mentioned. Of
the dozen or more solid stacks of brick, four or five connected by
a parapet of loose bricks and known as the Keep, were in our hands.
The other eight, irregularly spaced, made a most awkward wedge into
our line. They were backed by a labyrinth of German trench-work, and,
being shell-proof, supports could be massed behind them in perfect
safety. The nearest were within bombing distance of the Keep, and, in
those days, the Germans had more and better bombs than we. On every
account, then, the wedge had to be cleared, the stacks and their
connecting trenches overrun and the line advanced a hundred and fifty
yards or so to get a better field of fire. As a preliminary, a small
but necessary piece of German trench on the flanks of the Keep was
captured by the Irish on the 5th February with a loss of but 2 killed
and none wounded.

At 2 P. M. on the 6th of February the stacks were heavily bombarded
for a quarter of an hour--a large allowance. Even “Mother,” a
neighbouring 9.2, probably of naval extraction, took part in it,
and some French artillery ringed the approaches on the German side
with screens of black melenite fumes, while No. 2 Company from
the front trenches swept the German parapet facing them with five
minutes of that old “rapid fire” which the Germans in the Salient
and elsewhere had so often mistaken for machine-gun work. Then two
assaulting parties of thirty men each from Nos. 3 and 1 Companies,
under 2nd Lieutenant T. Musgrave and J. Ralli, opened the attack on
five of the eight stacks. The other three were fairly dealt with on
the same lines by the 3rd Coldstream. As there was no wire left on
the trench before our stacks, our party got there almost at once,
but Musgrave, ahead of his men, was shot by a group of five Germans
who showed fight behind a few fatal unbroken strands in the rear.
They were all killed a moment later when the men came up. Then the
supporting parties under Lieutenant Innes were slipped, together
with the Engineers under Major Fowkes, R.E., and the combined attack
swept on through the brick-stacks, in and out of the trenches and
around and behind them, where the Germans were shot and bayoneted as
found, till--fighting, digging, cursing and sand-bagging--our men had
hacked their way some seventy yards beyond their objective and dug
in under a shelf of raw ground about three feet high, probably the
lip of an old clay-pit. Our guns had lifted and were choking off all
attempts at possible counter-attacks, but the German supports seem
to have evaporated in the direction of La Bassée. There was a ridge
in front of the captured position whence a few bullets were still
dropping, but the back of the defence had been broken and, as firing
diminished, first one and then two out of every three men were set
digging in and filling sand-bags. The fortunes of the little campaign
had gone smoothly, and when it was necessary, in the rough and tumble
of the trench-work, to bring up reinforcements or more shovels and
ammunition for the digging-parties, the indefatigable and brotherly
Herts Territorials were drawn upon. The Coldstream had carried their
share of the front and lay in line on our left, and at dusk, while
the Engineers were putting up more wire, under rifle-fire at 150
yards’ range, the position was secure.

Our casualties, thanks to the bombardment and the swiftness of the
attack, were only 1 officer and 6 men killed and 25 wounded. Father
Gwynne, the Chaplain, was severely wounded by a piece of shrapnel
while watching the attack “from an observation-post,” which, as the
Father understood it, meant as far forward as possible, in order
that he might be ready to give comfort to the dying. The Coldstream
gathered in twenty-eight prisoners, the Irish none, but among their
spoils is entered “one Iron Cross” won rather picturesquely. At the
opening of the rush the Germans made a close-range bombing-raid on
one of the corners of the Keep and at last pitched a bomb on to the
top of a sand-bag redoubt. This so annoyed one of our bomb-throwers,
a giant of the name of Hennigan, of No. 1 Company, that he picked up
a trench-mortar bomb (no trinket) which lay convenient, cut down the
fuse for short range and threw it at a spot where he had caught a
glimpse of a German officer. The bomb burst almost before it reached
the ground, and must have made a direct hit; for nothing upon the
officer was recognisable later save the Iron Cross, which in due time
went to the Regimental Orderly Room. Hennigan was awarded the D.C.M.;
for his bomb also blew in and blocked up the communication-trench
through which the bombers came--a matter which he regarded as a
side-issue compared to his “splendid bowlin’.”

The companies were relieved in the evening by a company of
Grenadiers, and as they wandered back through the new-taken trenches
in the winter dusk, lost their way among all manner of horrors.
One officer wrote: “I fell over and became involved in a kind of
wrestling-match with a shapeless Thing that turned out to be a dead
man without a head ... and so back to Beuvry, very tired and sad for
the death of Tommy” (Musgrave).

There were other casualties that moved laughter under the ribs of
death. A man reported after the action that his teeth were “all broke
on him.” His Company Officer naturally expressed sympathy but some
surprise at not seeing a bullet-hole through both cheeks. “I took
them out and put them in my pocket for the charge, Sorr, and they
all broke on me,” was the reply. “Well, go to the doctor and see if
he can get you a new set.” “I’ve been to him, Sorr, and it’s little
sympathy I got. He just gave me a pill and chased me away, Sorr.”

A weird attempt was made at daybreak on the 7th February by a forlorn
hope of some fifty Germans to charge the newly installed line at a
point where the Coldstream and 2nd Grenadiers joined. They dashed
out across the ground from behind a stack, the officer waving his
sword, and were all killed or wounded on or close up to our wire. Men
said there seemed no meaning or reason in the affair, unless it was
a suicide-party of Germans who had run from the attack of the day
before and had been ordered thus to die. One of their wounded lay out
all day, and when the Irish were taking over the relief on the 8th
some Germans shouted loudly from their trenches and one stood up
and pointed to the wounded man. Said the Grenadiers who were being
relieved: “Come and get him!” A couple of German stretcher-bearers
came out and bore their comrade away, not thirty yards from our
trench, while our men held their fire.

In the same relief it fell to the Irish to examine the body of a
single German who had crept up and of a sudden peered into our
front-line trench, where a Grenadier promptly shot him. He dropped on
the edge of the parapet and lay “like a man praying.” Since he had
no rifle, it was assumed he was a bomber; but after dark they found
he was wholly unarmed. At almost the same hour of the previous night
another German came to precisely the same end in the same posture
on the right flank of the line. Whether these two were deserters or
scouts who would pretend to be deserters, if captured, was never
settled. The trenches were full of such mysteries. Strange trades,
too, were driven there. A man, now gone to Valhalla, for he was
utterly brave, did not approve of letting dead Germans lie unvisited
before the lines. He would mark the body down in the course of his
day’s work, thrust a stick in the parados to give him his direction,
and at night, or preferably when the morning fog lay heavy on the
landscape, would slip across to his quarry and return with his
pockets filled with loot. Many officers had seen C----’s stick at
the back of the trench. Some living may like to learn now why it was
there.[6]

A draft of one hundred men, making good the week’s losses, came in
on the 8th February under Captain G. E. Young, Lieutenants T. Allen
and C. Pease, and 2nd Lieutenant V. W. D. Fox. Among them were many
wounded who had returned. They fell to at once on the strengthening
and cleaning up of the new line which lay less than a hundred yards
from the enemy. It supported the French line where that joined on
to ours, and the officers would visit together through a tunnel
under the roadway. Of this forlorn part of the world there is a tale
that stands best as it was written by one of the officers of the
Battalion: “And while we were barricading with sand-bags where the
old trench joined the road, a dead Coldstream lying against a tree
watched us with dull unobservant eyes.... While we were trudging
along the _pavé_, mortally weary (after relief), said the Sergeant
to me: ‘Did you hear what happened last night? You saw that dead
man by the tree, Sir? Well, the covering-party they lay all round
him. One of them tapped him on the shoulder an’ asked him if he were
asleep. And presently, the C.S.M. that came down with the relief, he
whispered to the Corporal, “How many men have ye got out, Corporal?”
“Five, Sir,” says the Corporal. “I can see six meself,” says the
C.S.M. “Five belong to me,” says the Corporal. “Count ’em, lad,”
says the C.S.M. “Five came out with me,” says the Corporal, “and the
sixth, faith, ’tis cold he is with watching us every night this six
weeks.”’”

For a while the days and nights were peaceful, as peace was counted
round the brick-stacks. The unspeakably foul German trenches were
supplemented with new ones, communication-trenches multiplied and
marked with proper sign-boards, and such historic main-arteries
as the “Old Kent Road” trench paved with bricks from the stacks.
By night the front line sat and shivered round braziers in the
freezing dark while bits of new-made trench fell around them, and
listening-posts at the head of old saps and barricaded alleys
reported imaginary night-attacks. When they worked on a captured
trench they were like as not to find it bottomed, or worse still,
revetted, with an enemy corpse, which the sliding mud would deliver
hideously into the arms of the party. On such occasions the sensitive
would be sick, while the more hardened warmed and ate their food
unperturbed amid all the offal. But there were compensations.

On the 11th February, for example, it is noted that the men had baked
meat and suet pudding “for the first time since the war began”;
on the 13th not one man was even wounded through the whole day
and night; while on the 15th more than half the Battalion had hot
baths “for the first time since January.” The diaries record these
facts as of equal importance with a small advance by the French on
their right, who captured a trench but fell into a nest of angry
machine-guns and had to retire. The Battalion’s share in the work was
but to assist in keeping the enemy’s heads down; in return for which
the Germans shelled them an hour, killing 1 and wounding 5. Our men
persisted in under-cutting the sides of the trench to make dug-outs,
in the belief that unsupported caves of earth were safe against high
explosives. Timbers and framing, indeed material of any kind, were
still scarce, and doors and boards from wrecked houses were used in
erecting parapets. Sand-bags were made out of old petticoats and
pyjamas, and the farmers’ fences supplied an indifferent sort of
wire. Sand-bags, wires, and stakes did not arrive at the front in
appreciable quantities till the spring of 1915, and telephones about
the same date. There was no abundance of any of these things till
late in 1915; for the country had not made any preparation for war
till war began, and the price of this was the lives of men.

The simplicity of our battery-work is shown by the joyous statement
that “we now have a Gunner officer to live with us in our
headquarters in the trenches and a telephone to the battery so that
fire can be brought to bear quickly on any part of our front as
necessity arises.” At times there would be an error in the signals,
whereby the Battalion coming up from billets to the trenches through
the dark would be urged to make haste because their section was being
attacked, and after a breathless arrival would find the artillery
busied on some small affair away on a flank.

Characteristically enough, the Germans when bombarded, as they
were with effect by the French, would retaliate by shelling our
lines. The shells worried the Irish less than the fact that three
of their officers--Major the Earl of Rosse, Lieutenant Rankin, and
2nd Lieutenant D. Parsons, who arrived at 2 A. M. with a draft from
home, were found to be temporarily attached to the Scots Guards.
At that time the Battalion was 25 officers and 900 men strong, and
the wastage from snipers and shells, both in the trench and while
relieving, was not more than six daily.

There were reports that the enemy was now mining under the
brick-stacks, so a mining company was formed, and an officer
experimented successfully in firing rifle-grenades point-blank from
the rifle, instead of parabolically which allowed the enemy time to
see them descending. This was for the benefit of a few persistent
snipers seventy yards away who were effectively moved and their
dug-out set ablaze by the new form of attack.

Towards the end of the month our men had finished their
trench-cleanings and brickings-up, had buried all dead that could
be got at, and word went round that, if the situation on the 25th
February could be considered “healthy” the Prince of Wales would
visit them. The Germans, perhaps on information received (for the
back-areas were thronged with spies), chose that day to be very
active with a small gun, and as a fresh trench linking up with the
French on the La Bassée road had been made and was visible against
some new-fallen snow, they shelled that too. For this reason the
Prince was not taken quite up to the front line, at which “he was
rather annoyed.” The precaution was reasonable enough. A few minutes
after he had left a sector judged “comparatively safe” 2nd Lieutenant
T. Allen was killed by a shell pitching on the parapet there. Three
privates were also killed and 4 wounded by shell or bomb on that
“healthy” day. The same gun which had been giving trouble during
the Prince’s visit was thought to be located by flash somewhere on
the north side of the La Bassée road and siege-howitzers kept it
subdued till the evening of the 25th, when, with the usual German
scrupulosity, it began to shell the main road, by which reliefs came,
at ten-minute intervals for three hours, but with no casualties as
far as the Irish were concerned. One shell, duly noted, arrived
near Brigade Headquarters and a battery of ours was asked to abate
the nuisance. It is curious that only a few hours later the Germans
were shelling a French battery not far from Béthune with ten-inch
stuff which, if expended on the main road, would have disorganised
our reliefs very completely. This was on the eve of going into Corps
Reserve at Béthune, where the Battalion took over the Collège de
Jeunes Filles from the Worcesters, the best billets since the war
began, but, alas! furnished “with a large square where drill can take
place.”

The month’s losses had been 4 officers and 34 men killed, 5 officers
and 85 men wounded, or 128 men in all.

At Béthune they enjoyed nine days’ rest, with “steady drill and
route-marches,” concerts in the local theatre, inter-regimental
boxing with the 2nd Grenadiers, and a Divisional football competition
for a cup presented by the Bishop of Khartum. Here they defeated the
6th Field Ambulance and lost by two goals to nil to the Oxford and
Bucks L.I. Major Trefusis, C.O., Captain Mylne and 2nd Lieutenant
H. Marion-Crawford went home for a week’s leave--for that wonderful
experience of “first leave” was now available--while Major the Earl
of Rosse, who had been recovered from the Scots Guards, took over
command.


NEUVE CHAPELLE

By the 9th March every one had returned and with them a draft of a
hundred men under Lieutenant C. Wynter, 2nd Lieutenant T. E. Nugent
and 2nd Lieutenant Hon. W. S. P. Alexander, just in time to take
their share in the operations before Neuve Chapelle.

This village, which lay four miles under the Aubers Ridge, at the
entrance to the open country round Lille and Tourcoing, had been in
German hands since Smith-Dorrien’s Corps were turned out of it on
October 26th and 27th of the year before. Assuming that our troops
could break through at that point, that no reinforcements could be
brought up by the Germans over all their well-considered lines of
communication, that the Aubers Ridge could be surrounded and held,
that cavalry could follow up infantry armed with machine-guns across
trenches and through country studded with fortified posts, it was
considered, in some quarters, that an attack might be driven through
even to Lille itself.

Our armies, penned for months in the trenches, had suffered heavy
wastage, though they were being built up from behind with men,
material and guns on a scale which, by all past standards, was
enormous. The enemy, with infinitely larger resources, had meantime
strengthened and restrengthened himself behind belt upon belt of
barbed wire with uncounted machine-gun posts and an artillery of
high explosives to which the world then held no equal. His hand was
heavy, too, in offence, and the French armies to the eastward felt it
as soon as the spring opened. To ease that pressure, to release our
troops from the burden of mere wasteful waiting, and to break, as far
as might be, the edge of the enemy at the outset of the ’15 campaign,
were presumably objects of the battle only second to the somewhat
ambitious project of entering Lille.

Neuve Chapelle proved in large what the men in the trenches had
learned in little throughout the winter--that unless artillery
utterly root out barbed-wire trenches, machine-gun posts, and
fortified houses, no valour of attacking infantry can pierce a modern
defensive line. More than three hundred guns--say 5 per cent. of
the number that our armies had in the last years of the war--opened
upon Neuve Chapelle and its defences at 7.30 on the morning of March
10 for half an hour “in a bombardment without parallel!” Where the
fire fell it wiped out everything above the sodden, muddy ground,
so utterly breaking the defence that for a while the attack of
Rawlinson’s Fourth Army Corps went forward with hardly a check
across shapeless overturned wreckage of men and things. Then, at one
point after another, along the whole bare front, battalions found
themselves hung up before, or trapped between, breadths of uncut wire
that covered nests of machine-guns, and were withered up before any
artillery could be warned to their help. This was the fate of the
6th Brigade, whose part in the work on that sector was to capture
two lines of trenches in front of Givenchy. Three battalions of
the 4th (Guards) Brigade--the 2nd Grenadiers, 1st Irish and 2nd
Coldstream--were attached to it as Divisional Reserve, and the
remaining two battalions of the brigade--the 3rd Coldstream Guards
and the Herts Regiment under Colonel Matheson--as Corps Reserve.

The Battalion left billets near Béthune in the early dawn of the 10th
March and moved to a wood just north of the Aire-La Bassée Canal,
where it remained till midnight, when it went forward to take over
some trenches held by the King’s Liverpool and South Staffords (6th
Brigade) whose attack had failed. Our guns had only succeeded in
blowing an inadequate hole or two in the enemy’s wire which at many
places was reported as ten yards deep, and the assaulting battalions
had, as usual, been halted there and cut down. The only consolation
for the heavy losses in men and officers was the news that the attack
farther north had gone well and that a thousand Germans had been
captured.

A fresh attack was ordered on the morning of the 11th, but the
bombardment was delayed by fog and did so little damage to the
wire that by afternoon the idea was abandoned, and in the evening
the 4th (Guards) Brigade took over the line that had been held by
the 6th Brigade. They were filthy trenches; their parapets were
not bullet-proof, and the houses behind them blown to pieces;
Headquarters Mess lived in one cellar, the C.O. of the Battalion
slept in another, and the communication-trenches were far too
shallow. Part of our front had to be evacuated while our bombardment
was going on as it was too close to the enemy for safe shelling.
The failure of the 6th Brigade’s attack in this quarter reduced the
next day’s operation to a holding affair of rifle and heavy-gun
fire, delayed and hampered by the morning fog, and on the 13th March
the Battalion went into billets at Le Préol. The battle round Neuve
Chapelle itself, they were told, had yielded more prisoners; but
heavy German reinforcements were being moved up.

Late that night a draft of eighty N.C.O.’s, and men arrived under
Lieutenant J. S. N. FitzGerald, among them the first detachment of
specially enlisted (late) R.I. Constabulary--large drilled men--who
were to play so solid a part in the history and the glory of the
Battalion. The strength of the Battalion at that moment was 1080 with
some 26 officers--much greater than it had been at any time during
the War. They were all turned into the endless work of cleaning out
and draining foul trenches, and the dog’s life of holding them under
regular and irregular bombardments.

It was safer to relieve by daylight rather than by night, as darkness
brought bursts of sudden rifle and machine-gun fire, despatched at a
venture from behind the five-deep line of German _chevaux-de-frise_
not seventy yards away. Tempting openings, too, were left in the wire
to invite attack, but the bait was not taken. Neuve Chapelle had been
a failure except in so far as it had shown the enemy that winter had
not dulled any of our arms, and it was recognized we must continue
to sit still till men and material should accumulate behind us. The
documents and diaries of those weeks admit this with the unshaken
cheerfulness of the race. Yet, even so, the actual and potential
strength of the enemy was not realised.

Very slowly, and always with the thought at the back of the mind
that the deadlock might break at any moment, the Army set itself,
battalion by battalion, to learn the war it was waging.

On the 15th of March 2nd Lieutenant H. Marion-Crawford was appointed
Brigade Bombing Officer to the Guards Brigade with sixty men under
him attached to the Irish Guards. The “jam-pot” grenade of 1914
was practically obsolete by now; the “stick” hand-grenade of the
hair-brush type and the grenade fired from the rifle had succeeded it
and were appearing on the front in appreciable quantities. The Mills
bomb, which superseded all others both for hand and rifle, was not
born till the autumn of 1915 and was not lavishly supplied till the
opening of the next year.

On the 16th March, or five days after their share of the battle of
Neuve Chapelle had ended, and they lay in the trenches, a moaning
was heard in the darkness of No Man’s Land and a corporal sent out
to report. He came back saying that he had got into a trench some
thirty yards from the front line where he had seen a lighted candle
and heard what he believed to be Germans talking. Another patrol was
despatched and at last came back with a wounded man of the King’s
Liverpools, who had been lying out since the 10th. He said he had
been wounded in the assault, captured as he was trying to crawl back,
stripped of boots, equipment and rations, but left with a blanket,
and the enemy apparently visited him every night as they patrolled
the trench. An attempt was made to capture that patrol, but in the
darkness the trench was missed altogether.

The enemy celebrated the day before St. Patrick’s Day and the day
itself, March 17, by several hours of brisk shelling of Givenchy,
timed to catch the evening reliefs, but luckily without casualties.
Queen Alexandra sent the Battalion their shamrock; telegrams wishing
them good luck were duly received from Lord Kitchener, Colonel of the
Battalion, Brigadier-General Nugent, and a letter from Sir Charles
Monro commanding the First Army Corps. Father Gwynne held an open-air
service in the early morning, and every man was given a hot bath at
Béthune. More important still, every man who wanted it had free beer
with his dinner, and in those days beer was beer indeed.

The end of the month was filled with constructive work and the
linking up and strengthening of trenches, and the burial, where
possible, of “the very old dead”--twenty-nine of them in one day--and
always unrelaxing watch and ward against the enemy. At times he
puzzled them, as when one evening he threw bombs just over his own
parapet till it seemed that he must be busy blowing holes in his
own deep wire. But it turned out at last to be some new pattern of
bomb with which he was methodically experimenting. Later came a few
aeroplanes, the first seen in some weeks. It may have been no more
than a coincidence that the first planes came over on the day that
the Prince of Wales was paying the Battalion another visit. But it
was the continuous rifle-fire at night that accounted for most of the
casualties in the trenches and during reliefs. Second Lieutenant T.
Nugent was wounded in the back of the neck on the 24th by an unaimed
bullet, and almost each day had its count of casualties.

The Battalion took life with philosophic calm. Food and rest are the
paramount considerations of men in war. The former was certain and
abundant; the latter scanty and broken. So the Commanding Officer
made no comment when, one night going round the line, he found a man
deeply asleep with his feet projecting into the fairway and, written
on a paper on his chest, the legend:

      Sleep is sweet; undisturbed it is divine,
      So lift up your feet and do not tread on mine.

A certain amount of change and interest was given by the appearance
on the scene of the Post Office Territorials (8th City of London),
commanded by Colonel J. Harvey, an ex-Irish Guardsman, and a platoon
of that regiment was attached to the Battalion for instructional
purposes. Later, three, and at last seven platoons, were placed at
the disposal of the Irish Guards, whose C.O. “found them work to do.”
They “made themselves quite useful” but “wanted more practice in
digging”--an experience never begrudged them by the generous Irish.


TRENCH-WORK AFTER NEUVE CHAPELLE

Thanks to Neuve Chapelle, a breathing-space had been won during
which Territorial troops were taking their place in the front line
and such supplies as times afforded were coming up. The Diary
records many visits of Colonels, Brigadiers, and Inspectors of the
Territorial Forces to this section, which, when it had been brought
up to the Guards’ standard, was considered a model for instruction.
The month closed with bright moonlight and the mounting of two motor
machine-guns, one south of Duck’s Bill and the other in Oxford
Street, for protection against aeroplanes.

April opened with the death of 2nd Lieutenant J. M. Stewart, killed
before dawn while looking over the parapet of the trench at Duck’s
Bill, and buried at noon in the cemetery near “Windy Corner.” He was
one of the best of the younger officers of these days and had proved
himself on many occasions. The lull after Neuve Chapelle continued,
the Battalion relieving the Grenadiers every other day at 6 P. M.
with almost the regularity of a civilian department. When it was
fine, aeroplanes, taking no notice of the anti-aircraft artillery,
ranged over them in search of certain heavy naval guns that had been
reaching into enemy back-areas.

There was very little bomb-dropping on infantry, and the monotony
of rifle-fire and occasional hand-bombing was only broken when
our artillery, with a few shells to spare, fired into the enemy’s
second line near Couteleux, where the Germans, behind heavy wire,
were singing and “making much noise.” The effort drew a return fire
of high explosives and a shell wounded 8 and killed 1 man of No. 3
Company. Our gunners said that they had killed many more than nine
Germans, but sporadic outbursts of this kind were not well seen in
the front line, which has to abide the result. As one officer wrote:
“I am all for determined bombardment but do not appreciate minor
ones, though I quite see it makes the enemy use his ammunition.” The
2nd London Territorial Artillery registered their guns also, for the
first time, on April 12, and a platoon of the 15th County of London
with its machine-gun was attached to the Battalion for instruction.

It is no sort of discredit to the Territorials that at first they did
not know what to expect in this war, and reading between the lines
one sees how thoroughly and patiently the Regulars performed their
extra duties of schoolmasters, guides, philosophers, and friends
to battalions whose most extended training had never dreamed of an
ordered existence, half underground, where all things but death were
invisible, and even the transport and tendance of the wounded was a
mystery of pain and confusion worked out among labyrinths of open
drains.

Among the distinguished visitors to be shown the trenches was
Lieut.-Colonel R. S. de Haviland of the Eton O.T.C.--a man of many
friends in that company. The come-and-go of visitors cheered and
interested the men in the front trenches, since their presence even
for a little proved that, somewhere in the world, life continued on
not inconceivable lines. They jested naturally enough at those who
looked on for a day or two at their hardships and went away, but
the hardships were lightened a little by the very jest. Even while
the Commandant of the Eton O.T.C. was with them the Battalion was
energetically devising means to drain out an unspeakable accumulation
of stagnant water down hill from a mine near the Shrine under the
White House barricade (the White House was scarcely more than a name
even then) into some German trenches at the foot of the slope. This
work necessitated clearing a ditch by the roadside in which were
found four German corpses, “besides pieces of other human beings,”
which were buried, and in due course the whole flood of abomination
was decanted on the enemy. “As it was very horrible, I don’t suppose
they will like it,” writes one of the officers chiefly concerned.

On the same day, April 16, while 2nd Lieutenant H. Marion-Crawford,
who it will be remembered was Brigade Bombing Instructor, was
schooling some men of the 3rd Coldstream with live grenades one
exploded and killed him instantaneously. He had shown the greatest
ability in organizing the bombing work and his loss at that time,
where bombers were being more and more leaned upon, was very
seriously felt. He was buried four hours after his death in the
cemetery near Givenchy.

On the 17th the Battalion went back to the Collège des Jeunes Filles
at Béthune for a four days’ rest while its place in the trenches
was taken by a couple of Territorial Battalions--the Post Office
Rifles and the 15th County of London. While it was route-marched,
and instructed, and washed and steadily drilled, the battle for Hill
60 was being fought with mines and hand-grenades, hand-mortars,
and the first gas-shells, a score of miles to the north, where it
was made known to the Germans how, man for man, their fresh and
fully-trained troops could not overcome ours. The demonstration cost
some three thousand casualties on our side, and, it may be presumed,
strengthened the enemy’s intention to use gas on a larger scale in
the future. But no echo of the little affair interfered with the work
at Givenchy. The question was how the new Territorial battalions
would hold their trenches, and one sees in all the documents a
justified pride in their teachings when the Battalion went up to the
front again on the 22nd and found the Territorials were keen and had
kept their trenches clean. For the Guards teach, not unsuccessfully,
that unless a man is clean he cannot be the best sort of soldier.

On the night of the 22nd April the sector was held by the 15th
County of London, the Irish Guards and the Post Office Rifles, the
remainder of the Guards Brigade being in rest. To the normal strain
of a watching front line in foul weather was added a fresh burden. A
few days before, the enemy had blown a mine in an orchard about fifty
yards short of our trenches. It did no damage at the time, but the
R.E. Mining Officer, Lieutenant Barclay, in counter-mining towards
the crater it had made, saw, through the wall of his mine, Germans
engaged in turning the crater into an advanced-post. Trench-mortars
were fired at once to discourage them. Then came reports of
underground workings heard in other directions and, notably, close
to the parapet of a trench near the White House. This was on the
evening of the 24th. Hardly had orders been given to clear the White
House trench, when the ground at the junction of Lieutenant Barclay’s
countermine and the German crater went up and the Lieutenant was
killed. At the same time an explosion occurred near the White House.
Two privates of the Irish Guards (2845 J. Mansfield and 3975 M.
Brine) volunteered to enter our mine and see what had happened.
They recovered Lieutenant Barclay’s body at great risk from the
asphyxiating gases, and both men were recommended for the D.C.M. The
explosion near the White House was, after inspection, put down as the
work of a heavy shell, not a mine; but listening parties reported
more underground noises and another section of trench was evacuated
accordingly. To prevent the Germans consolidating themselves further
in the crater which connected with Lieutenant Barclay’s mine, our
4.5 howitzers bombarded it on the 25th, and it was decided to
blow our end of the mine as soon as possible to prevent the enemy
working up it. This was difficult, for the galleries were full of
foul gas--whether leaking from some adjacent coal-pit or laid on by
the enemy was uncertain. The R.E. officer who went down to lay the
charges was asphyxiated and several of his men were injured.

Not till the 29th of April were the difficulties overcome; by which
time the enemy had driven a fresh shaft into it. After the explosion,
a field-battery (17th R.F.A.) and the 47th Howitzer Battery fired a
salvo at the German trenches. “There was a little rifle-fire, but
soon all was quiet.” Mining, like aerial and bombing work, was still
in its infancy, and the information supplied by the Intelligence was
said to be belated and inadequate.

An interesting point is the unshaken serenity with which the men
took the new developments. They were far too annoyed at being
shifted about and losing their rest to consider too curiously the
underlying causes of evil. They left the 3rd Coldstream to deal with
the situation and went into billets in Le Préol, and the next day
(April 26) into Béthune for their hot baths. A draft of 3 officers
(Captain T. M. D. Bailie and 2nd Lieutenants A. W. L. Paget and R.
S. G. Paget) with 136 N.C.O.’s and men reached them on the 27th,
when there was just time to give them a hot meal and send them at
once to the trenches in the bright moonlight under “a certain amount
of rifle-fire and intermittent shelling from small guns which did
not do much damage.” An enemy field-gun, long known as an unlocated
pest, spent the morning busily enfilading the trenches, in spite of
the assurances of our artillery that they had found and knocked it
out several times. Appeal was made to an R.A. Brigadier who, after
examining the ground, left the Battalion under the impression that
“it was likely a gun would be brought up early to-morrow.” Nothing
more is heard of the hope: but guns were scarce at that time.

There were other preoccupations for those in command. The second
battle of Ypres, that month’s miracle of naked endurance against the
long-planned and coldly thought-out horror of gas, had begun near
Langemarck with the choking-out of the French and Canadian troops,
and had continued day after day with the sacrifice of battalions
and brigades, Regulars and Territorials swallowed up in the low
grey-yellow gas banks that threatened Ypres from Langemarck to Hill
60, or beaten to pulp by heavy explosives and the remnant riddled
anew by machine-guns. Once again England was making good with her
best flesh and blood for the material and the training she had
deliberately refused to provide while yet peace held. The men who
came out of that furnace alive say that no after experience of all
the War approached it for sheer concentrated, as well as prolonged,
terror, confusion, and a growing sense of hopelessness among growing
agonies. If a world, at that time unbroken to German methods, stood
aghast at the limited revelations allowed by the press censorship
reports, those who had seen a man, or worse, a child, dying from
gas may conceive with what emotions men exposed to the new torment
regarded it, what kind of reports leaked out from clearing-stations
and hospitals, and what work therefore was laid upon officers to
maintain an even and unaffected temper in the battalions in waiting.
The records, of course, do not mention these details, nor, indeed,
do they record when gas-protectors (for masks, helmets, and boxes
were not evolved till much later) were first issued to the troops on
the Givenchy sector. But private letters of the 25th April, at the
time the German mine in the orchard occupied their attention, remark,
“we have all been issued out with an antidote to the latest German
villainy ... _i.e._ of asphyxiating gases.... What they will end by
doing one can hardly imagine. The only thing is to be prepared for
anything.”

The first “masks” were little more than mufflers or strips of cloth
dipped in lime water. A weather-cock was rigged up near Headquarters
dug-outs, and when the wind blew from the Germans these were got
ready. False alarms of gas, due to strange stenches given off by
various explosives, or the appearance of a mist over the German
line, were not uncommon, and on each occasion, it appeared that
the C.O. had to turn out, sniff, and personally pass judgment on
the case. The men had their instructions what to do in case of
emergency, concluding with the simple order, perhaps the result of
experience at Ypres, “in event of the first line being overcome, the
second immediately charge through the gas and occupy the front-line
trenches.”

But to return to the routine:

The casualties for the month of April were 2 officers and 8 men
killed and 1 officer and 42 men wounded. The strength of the
Battalion stood at 28 officers and 1133 men, higher than it had ever
been before.

The following is the distribution of officers and N.C.O.’s at that
time, a little less than three weeks before the battle of Festubert.


_Headquarters_

  Major the Hon. J. F. Trefusis      Commanding Officer.
  Major the Earl of Rosse            Second in Command.
  Capt. Lord Desmond FitzGerald      Adjutant.
  Lieut. P. H. Antrobus              Transport Officer.
  Lieut. L. S. Straker               Machine-gun Officer.
  Capt. A. H. L. M’Carthy            Medical Officer.
  Lieut. H. Hickie                   Quartermaster.
  The Rev. John Gwynne (S.J.)        Chaplain.


_No. 1 Company_

  Capt. J. N. Guthrie.
  Lieut. R. G. C. Yerburgh.
  2nd Lieut. V. W. D. Fox.
  2nd Lieut. Hon. W. S. P. Alexander.
  No. 2535 C.S.M. Harradine.
  No. 3726 C.Q.M.S. P. M’Goldrick.


_No. 2 Company_

  Capt. E. G. Mylne.
  Lieut. Sir G. Burke, Bart.
  2nd Lieut. R. B. H. Kemp.
  2nd Lieut. S. G. Tallents.
  No. 3949 C.S.M. D. Moyles.
  No. 2703 C.Q.M.S. J. G. Lowry.


_No. 3 Company_

  Major P. L. Reid.
  2nd Lieut. J. R. Ralli.
  2nd Lieut. C. Pease.
  2nd Lieut. E. W. Campbell.
  2nd Lieut. C. de Persse (attached 7th Dragoon Guards).
  No. 2112 C.S.M. H. M’Veigh.
  No. 3972 C.Q.M.S. R. Grady.


_No. 4. Company_

  Capt. G. E. S. Young.
  Lieut. J. S. N. FitzGerald.
  Lieut. C. D. Wynter.
  2nd Lieut. D. C. Parsons.
  No. 2384 C.S.M. T. Curry.
  No. 3132 C.Q.M.S. H. Carton.

The first ten days of May passed quietly. Mines, for the moment, gave
no further anxiety, bombing and bombardments were light, reliefs
were happily effected, and but 1 man was killed and 1 wounded. Two
officers, Lieutenant H. A. Boyse and 2nd Lieutenant R. H. W. Heard,
joined on the 2nd.


THE BATTLE OF FESTUBERT

It was judged expedient while the second battle of Ypres was in full
heat that the Germans should, if possible, be kept from sending any
help to their front near Arras, in Artois, which at the time was
under strong pressure from the French thrusting towards Lens. To this
end, our First Army was ordered to attack the German Seventh Corps
over the flat ground between Laventie and Richebourg on a front of
some ten miles. The affair opened very early on the morning of the
9th May with a bombardment, imposing in itself by the standards of
the day, but, as before, insufficient to break the wire or crush
enough of the machine-gun nests. The Germans seem to have had full
information of its coming, and dealt with it severely. The whole
attack from north to south--Indian, Scottish, Territorials, and the
rest--was caught and broken as it rolled against the well-wired
German trenches.

The Battalion, whose part, then, was to maintain the right of our
Army where it joined the French, heard the French guns open on the
night of the 8th May, and by dawn the English gun-fire was in full
swing to the north--one continuous roar broken by the deep grunt of
our howitzer-shells bursting; for these were so few that we could
pick them up by ear. The Guards had no concern with these matters
till the trouble should thicken. Their business was to stand ready
for any counter-attack and keep up bursts of rapid fire at intervals
while they waited for what little news came to hand. It was uniformly
bad, except that the French in the south seemed to be making some
headway, and so far as aeroplanes and artillery observers could make
out, there was no concentration of troops immediately in front of
them. The Germans were too busy with the immediate English front
to extend their commitments to the southward, and the next two days
were, for the Battalion in their trenches, the quietest that they had
known for some time. Then came orders to hand over to the 1st Scots
Guards and rejoin the Second Division near Le Touret in readiness
to carry on the attack which had broken down on the 9th. They
bivouacked in the open, and the weather turned cold and wet, but the
men, relieved from the trenches and assured of a change of work, sat
it out “singing songs and playing games in the wet!” They had been
forbidden to light fires, lest they should accidentally use the local
farmers’ tobacco-drying poles or hedge-stuff. And while they waited
under their mackintosh sheets the armies waited on the weather. A
fresh attack was to be launched from Richebourg by the Rue du Bois,
and southward as far as Festubert, but, this time, by night not by
day, and after longer artillery preparation. The 5th and 6th Brigades
were to open it, with the 4th (Guards) Brigade in support. It began
at 11.30 on the 15th, when, at huge cost, something like half a mile
in breadth and a quarter of a mile in depth of trenches was screwed
out of the Germans by the morning of Sunday the 16th. The Battalion
was moved from bivouac in the dawn of that day to support the 5th
Brigade which had not gone so far forward as the 6th, and spent
the day in trenches at Rue du Bois under incessant mixed artillery
fire, which killed 1 man and wounded an officer and 28 men--the
whole without being able to inflict any damage on the enemy. Indeed,
the survivors of the battle here agreed that they saw no German
dead other than some corpses left over from previous attacks. They
returned to bivouac in wet and mist, and on the afternoon of the 17th
were, with the 2nd Grenadiers, ordered to occupy the line then held
by the 21st Brigade, and to push forward and dig in near a farm (Cour
l’Avoine) bristling with machine-guns across a stretch of dead flat,
muddy ground, pitted with water-logged shell-holes. The left was to
keep touch with the 6th Brigade and the right with the Grenadiers,
the whole line facing north-east from Quinque Rue.

They extended in the dusk. The left flanking company, No. 4, found no
sign of the 6th Brigade, but received a message from the 5th King’s
Battalion that their brigade orders were that the right of that
battalion should get into touch with the Irish but would not be up
till late; so one machine-gun was sent to strengthen that company’s
flank. No. 2 Company, on the right flank, had reached its objective
and dug itself in under bursts of raking machine-gun and rifle-fire
directed against the dykes and bridges, which unfortunately wounded
both Captain Mylne and Lieutenant Kemp, and the company command
devolved on 2nd Lieutenant S. G. Tallents. The left flank, meantime,
was in the air without tools or sandbags, but luckily the night was
wet and it was allowed to dig itself in unmolested. The casualties
for the day were only 2 officers wounded, 3 men killed, and 5 wounded.

The 18th dawned in wreaths of driving rain and mist that wrapped
the flats. The preliminary bombardment of farm Cour l’Avoine was
postponed for lack of good light, and in that lull a Brigadier
whose men had already attacked the farm unsuccessfully came
across the trenches to the Battalion and gave his experiences and
recommendations. The weather made one low cluster of devastated
buildings seen across the levels look remarkably like any other; and
it seems pure luck that the attack, as originally intended, was not
launched against the wrong objective. From noon on, the enemy began
to shell the Battalion severely in its shallow trenches, and there
were forty casualties while they lay awaiting orders. The attack
began at 4.30 P. M. Cour l’Avoine was then so bombarded by heavy
shell-fire that, as usual, it seemed that nothing in or around it
could live. But as soon as the attacking companies rose and showed
over the ground-line, the hail of machine-gun fire re-opened, and
for the next three hours, the Irish suffered in the open and among
the shell-holes, beaten down, as the other battalions had been
before them, round the piled wreckage of Cour l’Avoine farm. In one
trench, abandoned by the enemy, they fell into a neat German trap.
Its parapet facing towards the British was bullet-proof enough,
but the parados, though proof against the casual splinters of our
shrapnel, which had no back-blast, had been pared thin enough to
pass all bullets. Consequently, when the trench was occupied,
accurately ranged machine-guns opened on the parados, and riddled
the men to such an extent that one company had to get out and take
refuge behind what had been the parapet. The greatest distance gained
in all was about three hundred yards, and this with their left
flank still in the air and protected by the one machine-gun which
Lieutenant Straker, the unflinching enthusiast of the weapon, had
brought into a communication-trench. At last they dug in where they
were; the next brigade on the left linked up to the one machine-gun
communication-trench, and with their old friends the Herts Battalion
and the East Anglian Field Company, with whom they had tested mines
together, they began to consolidate. The C.O. writes: “I tried to
find out what officers I had left. Out of twenty-eight there were
twelve, but four of these had been left behind with the transport a
day or two before.” Of the eight who had come through the affair on
their feet, only two were absolutely untouched. Here is the list:
Captain J. N. Guthrie and 2nd Lieutenant V. W. D. Fox, killed by
shell-fire, while leading their company--No. 1--to reinforce the
line; 11 officers were wounded, Major the Earl of Rosse very severely
in the head by a piece of shell; Major Reid, concussion from the
explosion of a shell; Captain G. E. S. Young, hand; Lieutenant H.
T. A. H. Boyse, head; 2nd Lieutenant S. G. Tallents, thigh; 2nd
Lieutenant J. R. Ralli, stomach; 2nd Lieutenant E. W. Campbell, head;
2nd Lieutenant Hon. W. S. P. Alexander, neck; 2nd Lieutenant R. S. G.
Paget, arm; 2nd Lieutenant J. K. Greer, leg and hand; 2nd Lieutenant
C. de Persse, head. Twenty-two men were killed, 284 wounded, and 86
missing. The Battalion came through it all, defeated, held down at
long range, but equable in temper and morale.

Small wonder that in the cheerless dawn of the 19th their Brigadier
came and “made some complimentary remarks to the men who were
standing about.”

The four officers who had been left behind were then ordered up to
fill the gaps, and in that dawn the company commands stood: No. 1,
Lieut. R. G. C. Yerburgh; 2nd Lieut. R. H. W. Heard. No. 2, Lieut.
Sir Gerald Burke; 2nd Lieut. A. W. L. Paget. No. 3, Capt. T. M. D.
Bailie. No. 4, Lieut. J. S. N. FitzGerald; Lieut. C. D. Wynter.

Almost at once shelling opened again, and Lieutenants Burke and Paget
were wounded and 10 men killed or wounded by three high explosives
bursting right over the line. It was sheer luck that, though
shelled at intervals for the rest of the day, there were very few
further casualties, and the Battalion returned “in small parties”
to their bivouacs near Le Touret, where a hot meal, great-coats and
a rum-ration awaited them. They were wet, tired, chilled, and caked
with dirt, and cheerful; but next day, when they paraded before going
into rest while they waited for reinforcements, there was hardly a
speck of mud to be seen on them. Rest-billets at Lapugnoy, some seven
or eight miles back, were out of range but not out of hearing of
the guns, in a valley between delightful beech-woods carpeted with
blue-bells. Here they lay off and rejoiced in the novel sight of
unscathed trees and actual hills.


FROM FESTUBERT TO LOOS

On the 24th May General Horne came to inspect and complimented them.
His compliments are nowhere recorded, but it was remarked with
satisfaction at his parade that the men “stood very steady and moved
their arms well considering that they have not had much practice in
steady drill lately.” They had merely practised unbroken discipline
among the dead and the dying in a hopeless fight.

A draft of 126 men, under Lieutenant A. F. Gordon, arrived, and
Lieutenant R. Rankin, who had been attached to the 1st Scots Guards
since February, joined them at Lapugnoy, and the Rev. S. Knapp, R.C.
Chaplain from the 25th Brigade, took temporary charge of spiritual
affairs while their own Father Gwynne, who never spared himself, was
trying electric treatment in Paris for lumbago, induced, as every one
knew, by unsparing exposure.

On the 25th May they moved from Lapugnoy _via_ Chocques to Oblinghem,
some five miles to the north-east, a village of many and varied
smells, close to an aerodrome where they lay at a moment’s notice,
which meant that no one could take off his boots. A new type of
gas-mask was issued here, and the men drilled in the use of it.
Captain A. H. L. McCarthy, the medical officer who had been with them
since October 25, accidentally broke his arm, and his duties were
taken over by Lieutenant L. W. Bain, R.A.M.C.

On the 28th May a draft of 214 N.C.O.’s, and men under Lieutenant L.
R. Hargreaves, 2nd Lieutenants N. F. Durant and L. C. Whitefoord,
arrived, and the next day (29th) twelve more officers came in from
England: Major G. H. C. Madden; Captain V. C. J. Blake; Captain
M. V. Gore-Langton; 2nd Lieutenant J. T. Robyns; 2nd Lieutenant
K. E. Dormer; 2nd Lieutenant Hon. H. B. O’Brien; 2nd Lieutenant
R. J. P. Rodakowski; 2nd Lieutenant K. W. Hogg; 2nd Lieutenant J.
Grayling-Major; 2nd Lieutenant F. H. Witts; 2nd Lieutenant W. B.
Stevens; 2nd Lieutenant P. H. J. Close; bringing the Battalion up to
28 officers and 958 other ranks.

Headquarters and Companies then stood as follows:


_Headquarters_

  Major the Hon. J. F. Trefusis      Commanding Officer.
  Major G. H. Madden                 Second in Command.
  Capt. Lord Desmond FitzGerald      Adjutant.
  Lieut. P. H. Antrobus              Transport Officer.
  2nd Lieut. L. S. Straker           Machine-gun Officer.
  The Rev. S. Knapp                  Chaplain.
  Lieut. L. W. Bain                  Medical Officer.
  Lieut. H. Hickie                   Quartermaster.


_No. 1 Company_

  Capt. M. V. Gore-Langton.
  Lieut. R. C. G. Yerburgh.
  2nd Lieut. F. H. Witts.
  2nd Lieut. R. H. W. Heard.
  2nd Lieut. J. Grayling-Major.


_No. 2 Company_

  Capt. T. W. D. Bailie.
  Lieut. R. Rankin.
  2nd Lieut. W. B. Stevens.
  2nd Lieut. K. E. Dormer.
  2nd Lieut. L. C. Whitefoord.
  2nd Lieut. Hon. H. B. O’Brien.


_No. 3 Company_

  Capt. V. C. J. Blake.
  Lieut. C. D. Wynter.
  2nd Lieut. J. T. Robyns.
  2nd Lieut. N. F. Durant.
  2nd Lieut. K. W. Hogg.


_No. 4 Company_

  Lieut. J. S. N. FitzGerald.
  Lieut. L. R. Hargreaves.
  2nd Lieut. A. F. L. Gordon.
  2nd Lieut. P. H. J. Close.
  2nd Lieut. R. J. P. Rodakowski.

There is no hint of the desperate hard work of the 2nd, reserve,
Battalion at Warley, which made possible the supply at such short
notice of so many officers of such quality. These inner workings of
a regiment are known only to those who have borne the burden.

On the 31st May the 4th (Guards) Brigade was shifted from Oblinghem
to billets near the most unpleasing village of Nœux-les-Mines,
farther south than they had ever been before, as Divisional Reserve
to a couple of brigades of the 2nd Division in trenches recently
taken over from the French. The Brigade moved off in two columns,
through Béthune down the main road to Arras, where they were seen by
the Germans and shelled both _en route_ and as they were billeting,
but, as chance chose, without accident. The billets were good,
though, like most in the early days, they needed cleansing, and
a rumour went about that the trenches to which the Battalion was
assigned were peculiarly foul, in very bad shape and would probably
need re-making throughout.

Bombing classes with a new and an “absolutely safe” bomb (Mills),
the routine of company drills and exercise, sports and an Eton
dinner on the 4th June, filled the warm, peaceful days till it left
Nœux-les-Mines for Sailly-Labourse. This was not the sector they had
expected, but one farther to the north and nearer Cuinchy. Their
trenches were an unsatisfactory line with insufficient traverses,
not too many dug-outs, and inadequate parapets facing fields of
fast-growing corn, which marked the German front two hundred yards
away. They were reached from Cambrin through a mile and a half of
communication-trenches, up which every drop of water had to be
carried in tins. A recent draft of fifty had increased the Battalion
to over a thousand men, and, apparently by way of breaking in the
new hands, it was suggested that the Battalion should dig a complete
new line of trenches. They compromised, however, by improving the
existing one, which they shared with the 2nd Grenadiers, changing
over on the 12th June to a stretch of fifteen hundred yards, held by
the 2nd Coldstream. This necessitated three companies instead of two
in the front line and the fourth in support.

The enemy here confined themselves to shelling timed to catch
reliefs, but rarely heavy enough to interfere with working-parties
digging or wiring in the tough chalk. On one occasion a selection
of coloured lights, red, green, and white, had been sent up for
the battalions to test. They chose a night when the enemy was
experimenting on a collection of lights of his own, but soon
discovered that rocket-lights were inadvisable, as their fiery tails
gave away positions and drew fire. This disadvantage might have
been found out in England by the makers instead of at 1 A. M. by a
wearied Commanding Officer, whose duty was to link up and strengthen
his trenches, keep an eye on the baffling breadths of corn in front
of him, send reconnoitring parties out on all possible occasions,
procure wire and Engineers to set it up, and at the same time keep
all men and material in readiness for any possible attack that might
develop on the heels of the bombardments that came and went like the
summer thunder-storms along the tense line.

Sometimes they watched our own shells bursting in the German trenches
opposite Givenchy, where the Battalion had stayed so long; sometimes
they heard unexplained French fire to the southward. Next day would
bring its rumours of gains won and lost, or warnings to stand-to
for expected counter-attacks that turned out to be no more than
the rumble of German transport, heard at night, moving no one knew
whither. When our stinted artillery felt along the enemy’s trenches
in front of them--for the high corn made No Man’s Land blind and
patrol-work difficult--the German replies were generally liberal and
not long delayed.

On the 17th June one such outburst of ours loosed an hour’s heavy
shelling, during which Staff-Captain the Hon. E. W. Brabazon
(Coldstream), on his rounds to look at a machine-gun position under
the Battalion Machine-gun Officer, Lieutenant Straker, was killed
by a shell that fell on the top of the dug-out. Lieutenant Straker,
who was sitting in the doorway, had his foot so pinned in the fallen
timber that it took an hour to extricate him. Captain Brabazon, in
the dug-out itself, was crushed by a beam. He was buried at Cambrin
next morning at nine o’clock, while the Battalion was repairing the
damage done to the blown-in trenches and the French were fighting
again in the south.

The brotherly Herts Battalion had been doing all the work of digging
in their rear for some time past, and on the 20th the Battalion
took over their fatigue-work and their billets at Annequin and
Cambrin, while the Herts went to the front line. It was hot work in
that weather to extend and deepen unending communication-trenches
that cut off all the air. The Prince of Wales looked in on them at
Annequin and watched the German guns searching for a heavy battery
which had gone elsewhere. The movements of the Heir to the Crown,
even as guardedly recorded in this Diary, not to mention others, and
the unofficial stories of his appearance, alone, on a bicycle or
afoot in places of the most “unhealthy” character, must have been a
cause of considerable anxiety to those in charge of him. He spent
his birthday (June 23) visiting along the line, which happened to be
quiet after a bombardment of Annequin the day before. The place drew
much fire at that time, as one of our batteries lay in front of it,
and a high coal dump, used as an observation-post, just behind it.
The Battalion was still on fatigues, and, in spite of many rumours
and alerts, had suffered very little. Indeed, the total casualties
of June were but 2 men killed and an officer and 22 men wounded.
Meantime, the new drafts were learning their work.

The really serious blow they took was the departure at the month’s
end of Lord Cavan, their Brigadier, to command the Fiftieth
Division. They had known and loved him as a man who understood their
difficulties, who bore his share, and more, of their hardships, and
whose sympathy, unsparing devotion and, above all, abounding cheery
common-sense, had carried them at every turn so far through the
campaign.

He bid them farewell at Béthune on the 28th, where they were in
rest-billets, in these words:

  I have come to say good-bye to you, as I have to go away and take
  command of the Fiftieth Division. I wish to thank the Irish Guards
  for all they have done since they have been under my command.
  Before the war they had had no opportunity of proving themselves
  worthy to take their place in the Brigade of Guards. But during the
  course of this war they have always conducted themselves worthy
  of taking their place with the other illustrious Regiments of the
  Brigade of Guards--and more so. It is part of all of you young
  officers, who have taken the place of those who have fallen, to
  keep up the reputation of the Battalion, and you have a difficult
  task, as its reputation is very high. I need hardly say how much
  I feel leaving the 4th (Guards) Brigade, and I would rather remain
  its Brigadier than be a Field-Marshal elsewhere.

  General Feilding, whom you all know, is coming to take my place,
  and I could not leave you in better hands. I wish you all luck.

His special farewell order ran:

  _28th June 1915._

  On leaving the Brigade to take Command of a Division it would not
  be seemly to recall the various actions since 18th September in
  which it has been my privilege and my delight to command you, but
  I may say this--whether in action, in trenches, or in billets, no
  unit of the 4th (Guards) Brigade has ever disappointed me, nor has
  any Battalion ever fallen short of that great standard set us by
  our predecessors.

  We welcomed the 1st Herts Territorials at Ypres, and most worthily
  have they borne their part with the rest of us.

  To you all I convey the gratitude of a very full heart, and I wish
  you Good-bye and God Speed.

  (Sd.) CAVAN,
  Brigadier-General
  Commanding 4th (Guards) Brigade.

And for recognition of their work in the trenches for the past three
weeks, the following was sent from the G.O.C. Second Division to the
Officer commanding the Irish Guards:

  The Brigadier-General has received the following letter from the
  G.O.C. Second Division, and he would like C.O.’s to arrange that
  all the men hear it, so that they may realise how fully their
  splendid efforts are appreciated both by General Horne and himself:

  “Since the 4th (Guards) Brigade went into ‘Z’ Section on June
  6, it has really done splendid work. In addition to opening up
  and deepening the communication-trenches and the construction of
  several different minor works in rear, you have dug and wired a
  new line across a front of at least 2000 yards. The 4th (Guards)
  Brigade and the 11th Company R.E. have done great work on many
  previous occasions, but I think that this last achievement
  surpasses them all.”

  _26th June 1915._

  The C.O. directs that the above is read to all platoons, and not
  more than one platoon at a time.

  (Sd.) DESMOND FITZGERALD,
  Captain Adjutant,
  1st Battalion Irish Guards.

  _26th June 1915._

It was the Brigadier’s reference to their having proved themselves
worthy to take place with the other regiments of the Brigade of
Guards, “and more so,” that delighted them most; for the Battalion
felt that it had won its spurs in every field. Yet, for all that, the
Diary which, under the well-worn official phrases, represents the
soul of the regiment and knows how that soul is made and tempered,
emphasizes the fact that at Béthune there are some “quite good
parade-grounds, where a good deal of steady drill will be carried
out” and plenty of country for route-marching, where the men could
learn how to bear themselves without “budging” beneath the casual
shells that dropped miles behind the line.

So they “rested” at Béthune and gave a concert in the theatre, to
which they invited many inhabitants of the town who, being new to
the manners and customs of the Irish, “could not understand much,”
but a French officer sang the “Marseillaise” with great effect, and
at dinner afterwards, when the Prince of Wales was among the guests,
there were not only red and white roses on the table, but, according
to one account, “silver spoons and forks,” provided by the owner of
the house. If Béthune did not yet comprehend the songs of these wild
outlanders, it had full confidence in them.


CUINCHY

The first week of July saw them returned to their own old trenches
at Cuinchy--the fifty times fought-over line that ran from the La
Bassée Canal to within a hundred yards of the La Bassée-Béthune
road. A couple of companies of the Herts, one on each side of the
La Bassée road, lay on their right, and right of those again, the
2nd Coldstream. They boasted as many as six machine-guns in position
belonging to the Battalion, and three to the 2nd Grenadiers, their
relief. The trenches had not improved by use since February. There
were mine-craters directly in front of them, their opposing edges
occupied by our men and the enemy; the breastworks were old bursten
sandbags; fire-steps had broken down, dug-outs were inadequate
against the large-size trench-mortar bombs that the Germans were
using, and generally the condition and repair of things was
heart-breaking to the new-comers and their Brigadier, who spent most
of his time, night and day, in the front line.

Annequin, where two of the companies were billeted, had become more
than ever a shell-trap full of English batteries for which the
Germans were constantly searching; and, since experts told them
that we now had got the upper hand of the enemy at mining, the
cynical expected that, at any moment, some really big mine would
go up beneath them. As an interlude, the companies in billets were
employed in making dug-outs without any material; which trifling task
they somehow accomplished. The big shells and the bombing from the
trench-mortars forced them to deepen all dug-outs to ten or twelve
feet. These were shored with bricks and topped with rails as material
became more plentiful.

On the 17th July Captain A. H. L. McCarthy, R.A.M.C., who had broken
his arm at Lapugnoy six weeks before, returned to duty and was
made welcome. His sick-leave, which he seems to have filled with
beseeching letters to the C.O., had been darkened by a prospect
of being detached from the Battalion and sent to the Dardanelles.
Father Gwynne, also, came back from his two months’ rheumatism
cure, relieving Father Knapp. He was not quite restored and so was
forbidden by the C.O., to show himself in the front line for at least
ten days. It is to be hoped that he obeyed, but in a battalion where
the call for the priest goes out with, or before, the call for
stretcher-bearers, neither shepherds nor flock are long separated
under any circumstances. They tell the tale of one of their priests
who, utterly wearied, dropped for an hour’s sleep in a trench that
was being deepened under fire. He was roused by a respectful whisper
from the working-party: “We’ve dug to your head an’ your feet,
Father, an’ now, if you’ll get up, we’ll dig out under the length of
ye.”

The Brigade’s system of forty-eight hours’ reliefs enabled them
to do more in a given time than battalions who went in for four
days at a stretch, as a man could carry two days’ rations on him
without drawing on the fatigue-parties, and the knowledge he would
be relieved at the end of the time kept his edge. A Brigadier
of experience could tell any section of the line held by the
Brigade as far as he could see it, simply from the demeanour of
the working-parties. This state of things was only maintained
by unbroken discipline and the gospel that if one man can keep
himself comparatively clean in all that dirt and confusion every
one else can. It behoved the Battalion, also, to make and leave a
good name among the French upon whom they were quartered, as well
as with the enemy over against them. They were at that time, as
for long afterwards, almost unmixed Irish, and for that reason,
the relations between officers and men were unlike anything that
existed elsewhere, even in nominally pure Irish battalions. If there
be any mystery in the training of war that specially distinguishes
the Brigade of Guards from their fellows it is that the officers
lie under discipline more exacting than that of the rank and file;
and that even more than in any other branch of the service they
are responsible for the comfort of their men. Forced together as
they were in the stark intimacy of the trenches, that at any moment
may test any soul to the uttermost; revealed to each other, every
other day at least, in the long and wearisome march to billets,
where the companies and platoons move slowly and sideways through
the communication-trenches, gambling against death--if the German
heavies are busy--at each step of the road, officers and men came
to a mutual comprehension and affection--which in no way prevented
the most direct and drastic criticism or penalties--as impossible
to describe as it would be to omit, since it was the background
against which their lives ran from day to day. The Celt’s national
poise and manner, his gift of courtesy and sympathy, and above all
the curious and communicable humour of his outlook in those days
made it possible for him and his officers to consort together upon
terms perhaps debarred to other races. When the men practised “crime”
they were thorough and inventive in the act and unequalled in the
defence as the records of some court-martials testify. But the same
spirit that prompted the large and imaginative sin and its unexpected
excuse or justification (as, for example, that three sinners detected
in removing a large cask of beer were but exercising their muscles
in “rowling it a piece along the pavé”) bred a crop of forceful
regimental characters. Many, very many of these, have perished and
left no record save the echo of amazing or quaint sayings passed from
mouth to mouth through the long years; or a blurred record of some
desperately heroic deed, light-heartedly conceived and cunningly
carried through to its triumphant end and dismissed with a jest. The
unpredictable incidence of death or wounds was a mystery that gave
the Irish full rein for sombre speculation. Half an hour’s furious
bombardment, with trenches blowing in by lengths at a time, would
end in no more than extra fatigues for the disgusted working-parties
that had to repair damage. On another day of still peace, one sudden
light shell might mangle every man in a bay, and smear the duckboards
with blood and horrors. A night-patrol, pinned down by a German
flare, where they sprawled in the corn, and machine-gunned till
their listening comrades gave up all hope, would tumble back at last
into their own trenches unscathed, while far back in some sheltered
corner the skied bullet, falling from a mile and a half away, would
send a man to his account so silently that, till the body slid off
the estaminet bench, his neighbours never guessed. The ironies and
extravagances of Fate were so many, so absurd, and so terrible,
that after a while human nature ceased to take conscious account of
them or clutched at the smallest trifles that could change a mind’s
current. The surest anodyne and one that a prudent commanding officer
took care to provide was that all hands should have plenty to do.
To repair a breach or to cut a fire-step was not enough. There was
a standard in these matters to be lived up to, which was insisted
upon through all the days of trench-warfare. None knew how long the
deadlock would last or when the enemy, wearied of mining, bombs, and
heavy artillery, might attempt a break-through. When the first line
was cleaned and consolidated and finished with what was deemed then
ample dug-out accommodation, supporting parties behind it had to be
brought up to a like level; and so on.

The enemy at that time, on that line, interfered very little.
They rigged a searchlight on one of the brick-stacks in their
possession one evening, but took it down after our guns had
protested. Occasionally they shelled Béthune, while trying to hit
an observation-balloon near the town; and sometimes they bombed
with trench-mortars. There were, however, days on end when nothing
could stir them up, or when a few authoritative warnings from our
guns would cut short a demonstration almost as it began. They were
bombed for some hours to keep them out of the craters and to cover
our men at work. In this work No. 4906 Private Henry won the D.C.M.
in continuing to throw bombs though twice wounded (the Irish are
gifted at hurling things) till he was at last ordered off the field.
The enemy replied with everything except rifle-fire and in the
darkness of a rainy night “his machine-guns caused some annoyance,”
till, after our artillery had failed to find them, the Battalion
trench-mortars silenced them and allowed us to finish digging the new
trenches and sap. The whole affair lasted four hours and was carried
out by No. 1 Company, under Captain M. V. Gore-Langton, at the cost
of 1 man killed, 1 officer, Lieutenant the Hon. H. A. V. Harmsworth,
slightly wounded, and 7 men wounded.

On the 3rd August Lieutenant H. F. Law was sent out with a patrol
to examine yet another mine-crater close to the two which the
Battalion had occupied on its first night. He threw bombs into it,
found it empty, and the companies began at once to dig up to it from
two points and make it all their own. The enemy “interfered” with
the working-parties for a while but was bombed off. At daybreak he
retaliated with a methodical bombardment along the line of seven-inch
minenwerfers--one every three minutes--for an hour and a half. These
could be seen dropping perpendicularly ere they exploded but they
did no great damage, and the rest of the day was peaceful till a
sudden thunderstorm made everything and everybody abominably dirty.
(Additional fatigues are always more resented than any additional
risks of death.)

When they came up again on the 6th August they found that an enemy
mine in the orchard had exploded, wounding several of the Grenadiers
whom they were relieving, and done damage to some of our own work.
While they were making good, the Mining Company overheard Germans at
work in a gallery a few feet from one of ours. The men were withdrawn
at once from the forward line till dawn, when our mine was sprung “to
anticipate enemy action.” It might have injured some of the enemy’s
work, but it certainly disorganized several of our own sap-heads
which had to be re-dug.

Into the variegated activities of that morning dropped a staff
officer of the First Army Corps anxious to get the C.O.’s notes and
instructions on mining for new troops who might later have to hold
that line “in accordance with the manner taught by experience.”
Captain J. H. T. Priestman of the Lincolnshires, a Sandhurst
instructor, arrived with him and was attached to the sector for a
few days “to see how things were carried on.” As he was being taken
round the trenches by the C.O. and the Adjutant, next morning, a
private, on sentry with a bomber, tried to throw a bomb on his own
account, but, says the Diary, “not knowing how to, he blew himself up
and wounded the bomber.” By breakfast time the enemy were shelling
the line in enfilade from the direction of Auchy and two men were
blown to pieces. A couple of hours later the bombardment was repeated
with, from first to last, 6 killed and 9 wounded. The instructor was
but one of many whose unregarded duty was to study at first hand
every device of the enemy in action and to lecture upon it at the
training-centres in England a few days later.

The Battalion relieved the Grenadiers once more on the 10th August,
after another German mine had been exploded on the salient, and had
carried away so much German wire that it seemed possible to effect
an entry into their trenches across the new-made crater. A patrol
under Lieutenant A. F. L. Gordon was therefore sent out at night but
reported the slopes too steep to climb and, since another mine had
gone up and destroyed four of our own sap-heads with it, the night
was spent in repairing these under intermittent bomb-fire on both
sides.

On the 11th August fresh attempts were made to work some sort of
foothold across the crater-pitted ground into the enemy’s trenches,
specially at the spot where a crater had been partially filled
up by the explosion of a fresh mine. The day was quiet. Captain
M. V. Gore-Langton spent the evening of it in reconnoitring the
enemy’s wire, went out across the partly filled crater, found yet
another crater which ran into the enemy’s line, and there met one
German lying out within a few yards of him, whom Private Dempsey,
his orderly, killed, thereby rousing the enemy in that particular
point. They opened with bombs on a party of ours at work on a sap
in one of the innumerable craters, and were discomfited for the
moment. An hour later, Captain Gore-Langton, with one man, went
out for the second time across the same crater to put up some more
wire. He fell into the arms of a German bombing party, was knocked
down thrice by explosions of bombs around him and only got back
to the trenches with great difficulty. The C.O., Colonel Trefusis,
then “remonstrated” with him on the grounds that “it is not the
Company Commander’s business to go out wiring.” On the heels of
this enterprise, a really vicious fight with machine-guns as well
as bombs developed in the dark. It was silenced by four rounds
of our howitzers when the roar of the bombs stopped as though by
order. A third affair broke out just on dawn when our men found
enemy working-parties in craters below them and bombed with them
exceedingly, for the Germans were not good long-range throwers.

On the morning of the 12th August came General Horne to look at the
position, which he examined leisurely from every part of the line
instead of merely through the covered loop-holes which had been built
for his convenience. “I was glad when I got him safely out of it,”
wrote the C.O., “for one never knows when bombs may come over.” Just
before they were relieved, the C.O., Colonel Trefusis, was telephoned
word that he was to command the 20th Brigade and was pathetically
grieved at his promotion. He hated leaving the Battalion which, after
eleven months of better or worse, he had come to look upon as his
own. No man could possibly wish to command a better. He was going to
a brigade where he knew no one, and his hope was that he might be
allowed to remain one day more with the Battalion “when it goes to
the trenches” before going into reserve. He had his wish when they
went into the line on the 14th August, and he faced the ordeal, worse
than war, of saying good-bye to each company in the morning, and at
evening “went round to make sure that the night companies had plenty
of bombers in the proper places.” Bombs were the one tool at that
time which could deal with nests of occupied craters, and since the
work was dangerous the Irish were qualifying for it with zeal and
interest, even though they occasionally dropped or released bombs by
accident.

They were relieved (August 15) by a battalion from the 5th Brigade,
who “had heard all sorts of dreadful stories about the position.”
“But I told them,” said Colonel Trefusis, “it was not so bad,
provided their bombers kept on bombing at night. Mines, of course,
one cannot help, and the only way to minimise their effect is to keep
as few men in the front line as possible.”

And so, Colonel the Hon. J. Trefusis passes out of the Battalion’s
story, to his new headquarters and his new staff and bombing
officers, and his brand-new troops, who “simply out of curiosity to
see what was going on put their heads over the parapet while under
instruction and so lost two men shot through the head, which I hope
will be a lesson to them.”

He had commanded the Battalion since November, 1914, and no sudden
occasion had found him wanting. The Diary says: “It is impossible
to say all that he has done for the Battalion,” and indeed,
high courage, unbroken humour, a cool head, skill, and infinite
unselfishness are difficult things to set down in words. He was
succeeded in the command by Major G. H. C. Madden who arrived from
England on the 16th August, when the Battalion was in rest at Béthune
and the hands of their company and platoon officers were closing upon
them to make sure once more that such untidy business as mining,
counter-mining, and crater-fighting had not diminished smartness
on parade. This was doubly needful since the 4th (Guards) Brigade
ceased, on the 19th August, to be part of the First Army and became
the 1st Guards Brigade in the newly formed Guards Division of four
Battalions Grenadiers, four Coldstream, two Scots, two Irish, and the
Welsh Guards.

The 2nd Battalion of the Irish Guards, raised at Warley, left England
for France on the 17th August.

Preparations on what was then considered an overwhelming scale,
were under way to break the German line near Loos while the French
attacked seriously in the Champagne country; the idea being to
arrive at the long-dreamed-of battle of manœuvre in the plain
of the Scheldt. Guns, gas-smoke apparatus, and material had been
collected during the summer lull; existing communications had been
more or less improved, though the necessity for feeder-railways was
not at all realised, tanks were not yet created, and the proportion
of machine-guns to infantry was rather below actual requirements.
As compared with later years our armies were going into action with
hammers and their bare hands across a breadth of densely occupied,
tunnelled and elaborately fortified mining country where, as one
writer observed “there is twice as much below ground as there
is above.” Consequently, for the third or fourth time within a
twelvemonth, England was to learn at the cost of scores of thousands
of casualties that modern warfare, unlike private theatricals, does
not “come right at the performance” unless there have been rehearsals.

The training of the men in the forms of attack anticipated went
forward energetically behind the front lines, together with
arrangements for the massing and distribution of the seventy thousand
troops of the First Army (First and Fourth Corps) assigned to the
attack. For the next six weeks or so the Irish Guards were under
instruction to that end, and the trenches knew them no more.

There was a formal leave-taking as they left Béthune for St. Hilaire,
when the ex-4th (Guards) Brigade was played out of Béthune by the
band of the 1st King’s Liverpools and marched past General Horne
commanding the Second Division between lines of cheering men. A
company of the trusty Herts Territorials, who had been with the
Brigade since 1914, took part in the ceremony. It was repeated next
day before Sir Douglas Haig at Champagne and again in the Central
Square of St. Omer, when Sir John French thanked all ranks for “the
splendid services they had rendered” and was “much impressed with
their soldier-like bearing.”

Major-General Horne’s special farewell order ran as follows:

  _18th August 1915._

  The 4th (Guards) Brigade leaves the Second Division to-morrow.
  The G.O.C. speaks not only for himself, but for every officer,
  non-commissioned officer, and man of the Division when he expresses
  sorrow that certain changes in organisation have rendered necessary
  the severance of ties of comradeship commenced in peace and
  cemented by war.

  For the past year, by gallantry, devotion to duty, and sacrifice
  in battles and in the trenches the Brigade has maintained the
  high traditions of His Majesty’s Guards and equally by thorough
  performance of duties, strict discipline, and the exhibition of
  many soldier-like qualities, has set an example of smartness which
  has tended to raise the standard and elevate the morale of all with
  whom it has been associated.

  Major-General Horne parts from Brigadier-General Feilding, the
  officers, non-commissioned officers, and men of the 4th (Guards)
  Brigade with lively regret--he thanks them for their loyal support,
  and he wishes them good fortune in the future.

  (Sd.) J. W. ROBINSON,
  Lieut.-Colonel,
  A.A. & Q.M.G. Second Division.

General Haig on the 20th August handed the following Special Order of
the Day to the Brigade Commander:

  HEADQUARTERS 1ST ARMY,
  _20th August 1915._

  The 4th (Guards) Brigade leaves my command to-day after over a
  year of active service in the field. During that time the Brigade
  has taken part in military operations of the most diverse kind and
  under very varied conditions of country and weather, and throughout
  all ranks have displayed the greatest fortitude, tenacity, and
  resolution.

  I desire to place on record my high appreciation of the services
  rendered by the Brigade and my grateful thanks for the devoted
  assistance which one and all have given me during a year of
  strenuous work.

  (Sd.) D. HAIG,
  General Commanding 1st Army.

And the reward of their confused and unclean work among the craters
and the tunnels of the past weeks came in the Commander-in-Chief’s
announcement:

  GUARDS DIVISION,

  The Commander-in-Chief has intimated that he has read with great
  interest and satisfaction the reports of the mining operations and
  crater fighting which have taken place in the Second Division Area
  during the last two months.

  He desires that his high appreciation of the good work performed
  be conveyed to the troops, especially to the 170th and 176th
  Tunnelling Cos. R.E., the 2nd Battalion Irish Guards, the 1st
  Battalion K.R.R.C., and the 2nd Battalion South Staffordshire
  Regiment.

  The G.O.C. Second Division has great pleasure in forwarding this
  announcement.

  (Sd.) H. P. HORNE,
  Major-General,
  Commanding Second Division.

  Second Division,
  21.8.15.

They lay at Eperlecques for a day or two on their way to Thiembronne,
a hot nineteen-mile march during which only five men fell out. It was
at St. Pierre between Thiembronne and Acquin that they met and dined
with the 2nd Battalion of the Regiment which had landed in France
on the 18th August. There are few records of this historic meeting;
for the youth and the strength that gathered by the cookers in that
open sunlit field by St. Pierre has been several times wiped out and
replaced. The two battalions conferred together, by rank and by age,
on the methods and devices of the enemy; the veterans of the First
enlightening the new hands of the Second with tales that could lose
nothing in the telling, mixed with practical advice of the most grim.
The First promptly christened the Second “The Irish Landsturm,” and a
young officer, who later rose to eminent heights and command of the
2nd Battalion sat upon a table under some trees, and delighted the
world with joyous songs upon a concertina and a mouth-organ. Then
they parted.


LOOS

The next three weeks were spent by the 1st Battalion at or near
Thiembronne in training for the great battle to come. They were
instructed in march-discipline, infantry attack, extended-order
drill and field-training, attacks on villages (Drionville was one
of them selected and the French villagers attended the field-day
in great numbers) as well as in bussing and debussing against
time into motor-buses which were then beginning to be moderately
plentiful. Regimental sports were not forgotten--they were a
great success and an amusement more or less comprehensible to the
people of Thiembronne--and, since the whole world was aware that
a combined attack would be made shortly by the English and French
armies, the officers of the Guards Brigade were duly informed by
Lieutenant-General Haking, commanding the Eleventh Army Corps, to
which the Guards Division belonged, that such, indeed, was the case.

The domestic concerns of the Battalion during this pause include the
facts that 2nd Lieutenant Dames-Longsworth from the 2nd Middlesex
was attached on the 9th September “prior to transfer” to the Irish
Guards; Captain C. D. Wynter, Lieutenant F. H. Witts, and 2nd
Lieutenant W. B. Stevens were transferred (September 10, from the
1st to the 2nd Battalion) and 2nd Lieutenant T. K. Walker and T. H.
Langrishe transferred on the same day from the 2nd to the 1st, while
Orderly-Room Quartermaster-Sergeant J. Halligan, of whom later, was
gazetted a 2nd Lieutenant to the Leinster Regiment. Captain L. R.
Hargreaves was on the 13th “permitted to wear the badge of Captain
pending his temporary promotion to that rank being announced in the
_London Gazette_,” and the C. O., Major G. H. C. Madden, was on the
6th September gazetted a temporary Lieutenant-Colonel. These were the
first grants of temporary rank in the Battalion.

On the 18th September the C.O.’s of all the battalions in the Guards
Division motored to the Béthune district, where a reconnaissance
was made “from convenient observation-posts” of the country between
Cuinchy and Loos that they might judge the weight of the task before
them.

It was a jagged, scarred, and mutilated sweep of mining-villages,
factories, quarries, slag-dumps, pit-heads, chalk-pits, and railway
embankments--all the plant of an elaborate mechanical civilization
connected above ground and below by every means that ingenuity and
labour could devise to the uses of war. The ground was trenched and
tunnelled with cemented and floored works of terrifying permanency
that linked together fortified redoubts, observation-posts, concealed
batteries, rallying-points, and impregnable shelters for waiting
reserves. So it ran along our front from Grenay north of the plateau
of Notre Dame de Lorette, where two huge slag-heaps known as the
Double Crassier bristled with machine-guns, across the bare interlude
of crop land between Loos and Hulluch, where a high German redoubt
crowned the slopes to the village of Haisnes with the low and
dangerous Hohenzollern redoubt south of it. Triple lines of barbed
wire protected a system of triple trenches, concrete-faced, holding
dug-outs twenty feet deep, with lifts for machine-guns which could
appear and disappear in emplacements of concrete over iron rails;
and the observation-posts were capped with steel cupolas. In the
background ample railways and a multitude of roads lay ready to
launch fresh troops to any point that might by any chance be forced
in the face of these obstacles.

Our armies were brought up for the most part on their own feet and
lay in trenches not in the least concreted; nor were our roads
to the front wholly equal to the demands on them. The assaulting
troops were the First and Fourth Army Corps (less some troops
detached to make a feint at Festubert and Cuinchy) disposed in the
trenches south from the line of the Béthune-La Bassée Canal to the
Vermelles-Hulluch road. Their work, as laid down, was to storm
Auchy-La Bassée, Haisnes, capture the Hohenzollern redoubt to the
south-west of it and the immensely fortified Mine-head Pit 8 (with
which it was connected), the Hulluch quarries, equally fortified, and
the long strip of wood beside them, and the village of Cité St. Elie
between Hulluch and Haisnes. South of the Vermelles-Hulluch road,
the Fourth Army Corps was to occupy the high ground between Loos and
Lens, including the redoubt on Hill 69; all the town of Loos, which
was a museum of veiled deaths, the Double Crassier, the Chalk-Pit,
the redoubt on Hill 70 on the Loos-Haisnes road, and the village of
Cité St. Auguste. After which, doubtless, the way would be open to
victory. The Eleventh Army Corps formed the main infantry reserve
and included the newly formed Guards Division, the Twenty-first and
Twenty-fourth Divisions of the New Army and the Twenty-eighth. The
Twenty-first and Twenty-fourth were brought up between Beuvry and
Nœux-les-Mines; the Twenty-eighth to Bailleul, while the Guards
Division lay in reserve near Lillers, ten miles north-west or so
from Souchez; the Third Cavalry Division near Sains-en-Gohelle, and
the British Cavalry Corps at Bailleul-les-Pernes ten miles west of
Nœux-les-Mines, in attendance on the expected break-through.

On the 21st September the Battalion was inspected by Lord Kitchener
at Avroult, on the St. Omer road--the first time it was ever paraded
before its Colonel-in-chief--who in a few brief words recalled what
it had already done in the war and hinted at what lay before it. Lord
Cavan commanding the Guards Division, in wishing the men God-speed
on the eve of “the greatest battle in the world’s history,” reminded
them that the fate of future generations hung on the issue and that
great things were expected of the Guards Division. They knew it well
enough.

By a piece of ill-luck, that might have been taken as an omen, the
day before they moved from Thiembronne to the front, a bombing
accident at practice caused the death of Lance-Sergeant R. Matthews
and three men, which few casualties, on the eve of tens of thousands
to come, were due subjects of a court of inquiry and a full report
to Headquarters. Then they marched by Capelle-sur-Lys to Nedon in
mist and gathering rain as the autumn weather broke on the 24th,
and heard the roar of what seemed continuous bombardment from Vimy
to La Bassée. But it was at dawn on the 25th September that the
serious work of the heavy guns began, while the Division crawled in
pouring rain along congested roads from Nedon to Nœux-les-Mines. All
they could see of the battle-front was veiled in clouds of gas and
the screens of covering smoke through which our attacks had been
launched after two hours of preliminary bombardment. Our troops
there found, as chance and accident decreed, either broken wire and
half-obliterated trenches easy to overpass for a few hundred yards
till they came to the uncut stuff before which the men perished as
their likes had done on like fields. So it happened that day to the
6th Brigade of the First Division north of La Bassée, and the 19th
Brigade south of it; to the 28th Brigade of the Ninth Division by
the Hohenzollern redoubt and Pit 8. These all met wire uncut before
trenches untouched, and were slaughtered. The 26th Brigade of the
Ninth Division broke through at a heavy cost as far as Pit 8, and,
for the moment, as far as the edge of the village of Haisnes. The
Seventh Division, working between the Ninth Division and the road
from Vermelles to Hulluch, had better fortune. They penetrated as far
as the edge of Hulluch village, but were driven back, ere the day’s
end, to the quarries a thousand yards in the rear. One brigade, the
1st of the First Division of the Fourth Army on their right, had
also penetrated as far as the outskirts of Hulluch. Its 2nd Brigade
was hung up in barbed wire near Lone Tree to the southward, which
check again exposed the left flank of the next (Fifteenth Highland)
Division as that (44th, 45th, and 46th Brigades) made its way into
Loos, carried Hill 70, the Chalk Pit, and Pit 14. The Forty-seventh
Division on the extreme right of the British line at its junction
with the French Tenth Army had to be used mainly as a defensive flank
to the operation, since the French attack, which should have timed
with ours, did not develop till six hours after our troops had got
away, and was then limited to Souchez and the Vimy Ridge.

At noon on the 25th September the position stood thus: The First
Army Corps held up between the Béthune-La Bassée Canal and the
Hohenzollern redoubt; the Seventh Division hard pressed among the
quarries and houses by Hulluch; the Ninth in little better case as
regarded Pit 8 and the redoubt itself; the Highland Division pushed
forward in the right centre holding on precariously in the shambles
round Loos and being already forced back for lack of supports.

All along the line the attack had spent itself among uncut wire and
unsubdued machine-gun positions. There were no more troops to follow
at once on the heels of the first, nor was there time to dig in
before the counter-attacks were delivered by the Germans, to whom
every minute of delay meant the certainty of more available reserves
fresh from the rail. A little after noon their pressure began to
take effect, and ground won during the first rush of the advance was
blasted out of our possession by gun-fire, bombing, and floods of
enemy troops arriving throughout the night.

Both sides were now bringing up reserves: but ours seem to have
arrived somewhat more slowly than the Germans’.

The Guards Division had come up on foot as quickly as the traffic on
the roads allowed, and by the morning of the 26th the 1st Brigade
(2nd Grenadiers, 2nd and 3rd Coldstream, and 1st Irish) were marched
to Sailly-Labourse. The weather had improved, though the ground was
heavy enough. Loos still remained to us, Hulluch was untaken. The
enemy were well established on Hill 70 and had driven us out of Pit
14 and the Chalk Pit quarry on the Lens-La Bassée road which had
been won on the previous day. It was this sector of the line to which
the 2nd and 3rd Brigades of the Guards Division were directed. The
local reserves (21st and 24th Divisions) had been used up, and as the
Brigade took over the ground were retiring directly through them. The
1st Guards Brigade was employed in the work of holding the ground to
the left, or north, of the other two brigades. Their own left lay
next what remained of the Seventh Division after the furious wastage
of the past two days.

On the afternoon of the 26th September the 2nd and 3rd Coldstream,
with the 2nd Grenadiers in support, occupied some trenches in a
waste of cut-up ground east of a line of captured German trenches
opposite Hulluch. The 1st Irish Guards lay in trenches close to the
wrecked water-tower of the village of Vermelles, while the confused
and irregular attacks and counter-attacks broke out along the line,
slackened and were renewed again beneath the vault of the overhead
clamour built by the passage of countless shells.

The field of battle presented an extraordinary effect of dispersion
and detachment. Gas, smoke, and the continuous splash and sparkle of
bombs marked where the lines were in actual touch, but behind and
outside this inferno stretched a desolation of emptiness, peopled
with single figures “walking about all over the place,” as one
observer wrote, with dead and wounded on the ground, and casualties
being slowly conveyed to dressing-stations--every one apparently
unconcerned beneath shell-fire, which in old-time battles would have
been reckoned heavy, but which here, by comparison, was peace.

A premature burst of one of our own shells wounded four men of the
Battalion’s machine-gun group as it was moving along the Hulluch
road, but there were no other casualties reported, and on Sunday
27th, while the village of Vermelles was being heavily shelled, No.
2 and half of No. 3 Company were sent forward to fetch off what
wounded lay immediately in front of them on the battle-field. There
was need. Throughout that long Sunday of “clearing up” at a slow
pace under scattered fire, the casualties were but eleven in all--2nd
Lieutenant Grayling-Major, slightly wounded, one man killed and nine
wounded. Three thousand yards to the left their 2nd Battalion, which,
with the 2nd and 3rd Guards Brigades, had been set to recapture Pit
14 and Chalk-Pit Wood, lost that evening eight officers and over
three hundred men killed and wounded. Officer-losses had been very
heavy, and orders were issued, none too soon, to keep a reserve
of them, specially in the junior ranks. Lieutenants Yerburgh and
Rankin, with 2nd Lieutenants Law, Langrishe, and Walker, were thus
sent back to the first-line Transport to be saved for contingencies.
2nd Lieutenant Christie and twenty men from the base joined on the
same day. The Battalion lay at that time behind the remnants of
the 20th Brigade of the Seventh Division, whose Brigadier, Colonel
the Hon. J. Trefusis, had been their old C.O. His brigade, which
had suffered between two and three thousand casualties, was in no
shape for further fighting, but was hanging on in expectation of
relief, if possible, from the mixed duties of trying to establish
a line and sending out parties to assist in repelling the nearest
counter-attack. Fighting continued everywhere, especially on the left
of the line, and heavy rain added to the general misery.

By the 28th September we might have gained on an average three
thousand yards on a front of between six and seven thousand, but
there was no certainty that we could hold it, and the front was
alive with reports--some true, others false--that the enemy had
captured a line of trench here, broken through there, or was massing
in force elsewhere. As a matter of fact, the worst of the German
attacks had spent themselves, and both sides were, through their own
difficulties, beginning to break off their main engagements for the
bitter localised fightings that go to the making of a new front.

In rain, chalky slime, and deep discomfort, after utter exhaustion,
the broken battalions were comparing notes of news and imperturbably
renewing their social life. Brigadier-General Trefusis slips, or
wades, through rain and mud to lunch with his old battalion a few
hundred yards away, and one learns indirectly what cheer and comfort
his presence brings. Then he goes on with the remnants of his
shattered brigade, to take over fresh work on a quieter part of the
line and _en route_ “to get his hair cut.”

The Battalion, after (Sept. 29) another day’s soaking in Vermelles
trenches, relieved the 3rd Brigade, First Division, in front-line
trenches just west of Hulluch.

The ground by Le Rutoire farm and Bois Carré between the battered
German trenches was a sea of shell craters and wreckage, scorched
with fires of every sort which had swept away all landmarks. Lone
Tree, a general rendezvous and clearing-station for that sector of
the line and a registered mark for enemy guns, was the spot where
their guides met them in the rainy, windy darkness. The relief took
four hours and cost Drill-Sergeant Corry, another N.C.O., and a
private wounded. All four company commanders went ahead some hours
before to acquaint themselves with the impassable trenches, the
battalions being brought on, in artillery formation, by the Adjutant.

On the 30th September, the English losses having brought our efforts
to a standstill, the troops of the Ninth French Army Corps began
to take over the trenches defending Loos and running out of the
ruins of that town to Hill 70. Foch and D’Untal in their fighting
since the 27th had driven, at a price, the Germans out of Souchez,
and some deceptive progress had been made by the Tenth French Army
Corps up the Vimy heights to the right of the English line. In all,
our armies had manufactured a salient, some five miles wide across
the bow of it, running from Cuinchy Post, the Hohenzollern redoubt,
the Hulluch quarries, the edge of Hill 70, the south of Loos, and
thence doubling back to Grenay. On the other hand, the enemy had
under-driven a section south of this at the junction of the Allied
forces running through Lens, Liévin, Angres by Givenchy-en-Gohelle
over the Vimy heights to the Scarpe below Arras. There may, even on
the 30th, have remained some hope on our part of “breaking through”
into the plain of the Scheldt, with its chance of open warfare to
follow. The enemy, however, had no intention of allowing us any
freedom of movement which localised attacks on his part could limit
and hold till such time as his reserves might get in a counter-attack
strong enough to regain all the few poor hundreds of yards which we
had shelled, bombed, and bayoneted out of his front. The fighting was
specially severe that day among the rabbit-warrens of trenches by the
Hohenzollern redoubt. Sections of trenches were lost and won back or
wiped out by gun-fire all along a front where, for one instance of
recorded heroism among the confusion of bombs and barricades, there
were hundreds unrecorded as the spouting earth closed over and hid
all after-knowledge of the very site of the agony.

A section of trench held by the Scots Fusiliers on the immediate left
of the Irish Guards was attacked and a hundred yards or so of it were
captured, but the Battalion was not called upon to lend a hand. It
lay under heavy shell and sniping fire in the wet, till it was time
to exchange the comparative security of a wet open drain for the
unsheltered horrors of a relief which, beginning in the dusk at six,
was not completed till close on two in the morning. The last company
reached their miserable billets at Mazingarbe, some three miles’ away
across a well-searched back-area at 6 A. M. One N.C.O. was killed and
ten N.C.O.’s and men were wounded.

They spent the next three days in the battered suburbs of Mazingarbe
while the Twelfth Division took over the Guards’ line and the Ninth
French Army Corps relieved the British troops who were holding the
south face of the Cuinchy-Hulluch-Grenay salient. The 1st Battalion
itself was now drawn upon to meet the demands of the 2nd Battalion
for officers to make good losses in their action of the 27th. Five
officers, at least, were badly needed, but no more than four could
be spared--Captain J. S. N. FitzGerald, as Adjutant, Lieutenant R.
Rankin, Lieutenant H. Montgomery, who had only arrived with a draft
on the 1st October, and 2nd Lieutenant Langrishe. Officers were a
scarce commodity; for, though there was a momentary lull, there had
been heavy bomb and trench work by the Twenty-eighth Division all
round the disputed Hohenzollern redoubt which was falling piece by
piece into the hands of the enemy, and counter-attacks were expected
all along the uncertain line.


THE HOHENZOLLERN TRENCHES

On October 3 the Guards Division relieved the Twenty-eighth round
the Hohenzollern and the Hulluch quarries. The 3rd Brigade of the
Division was assigned as much of the works round the Hohenzollern as
yet remained to us; the 1st Brigade lay on their right linking on to
the First Division which had relieved the Twelfth on the right of the
Guards Division. The 2nd Guards Brigade was in reserve at Vermelles.
The 1st Battalion acted as reserve to its own, the 1st, Brigade, and
moving from Mazingarbe on the afternoon of the 3rd bivouacked in
misery to the west of the railway line just outside Vermelles. The
2nd Grenadiers, in trenches which had formed part of the old British
front line north-east of the Chapel of Notre Dame de Consolation,
supported the 2nd and 3rd Coldstream who held the firing-line in a
mass of unsurveyed and unknown German trenches running from St. Elie
Avenue, a notorious and most dismal communication-trench, northwards
towards the Hohenzollern redoubt, one face of which generously
enfiladed our line at all times. The whole was a wilderness of muck
and death, reached through three thousand yards of foul gutters,
impeded by loops and knots of old telephone cables, whose sides
bulged in the wet, and where, with the best care in the world,
reliefs could go piteously astray and isolated parties find
themselves plodding, blind and helpless, into the enemy’s arms.

Opinions naturally differ as to which was the least attractive period
of the war for the Battalion, but there was a general feeling that,
setting aside the cruel wet of The Salient and the complicated barren
miseries of the Somme, the times after Loos round the Hohenzollern
Redoubt and in the Laventie sector were the worst. Men and officers
had counted on getting forward to open country at last, and the
return to redoubled trench-work and its fatigues was no comfort to
them. But the work had to be done, and the notice in the Diary that
they were “responsible for improving and cleaning up the trenches
as far as the support battalions”--which meant as far as they could
get forward--implied unbroken labour in the chalky ground, varied by
carrying up supplies, bombs, and small-arm ammunition to the front
line. There were five bombing posts in their sector of the front with
as many sap-heads, all to be guarded. Most of the trenches needed
deepening, and any work in the open was at the risk of a continuous
stream of bullets from the Hohenzollern’s machine-guns. High
explosives and a few gas-shells by day, aerial torpedoes by night,
and sniping all round the clock, made the accompaniment to their life
for the nine days that they held the line.

Here is the bare record. On the 6th October, two men killed and
three wounded, while strengthening parapets. On the 7th, Lieutenant
Heard and three men with him wounded, while superintending work in
the open within range of the spiteful Hohenzollern. On the 8th, six
hours’ unbroken bombardment, culminating, so far as the Battalion
knew, in an attack on the 2nd Coldstream whom they were supporting
and the 3rd Grenadiers on their left. The Grenadiers, most of their
bombers killed, borrowed No. 1 Company’s bombers, who “did good
work,” while No. 1 Company itself formed a flank to defend the left
of the Brigade in case the Germans broke through, as for a time
seemed possible. Both Grenadiers and Coldstream ran out of bombs and
ammunition which the Battalion sent up throughout the evening until
it was reported that “all was normal again” and that the Germans
had everywhere been repulsed with heavy loss. The Battalion then
carried up rations to the Coldstream and spent the rest of the night
repairing blown-in ammunition trenches. They had had no time to
speculate or ask questions, and not till long afterwards did they
realise that the blast of a great battle had passed over them; that
the Germans had counter-attacked with picked battalions all along
the line of the Cuinchy-Hulluch-Grenay Salient and that their dead
lay in thousands on the cut-up ground from Souchez to Hohenzollern.
In modern trench-warfare any attack extending beyond the range of a
combatant’s vision, which runs from fifty yards to a quarter of a
mile, according to the ground and his own personal distractions, may,
for aught he can tell, be either an engagement of the first class or
some local brawl for the details of which he can search next week’s
home papers in vain.

The battalions got through the day with only six men killed, eleven
wounded, and one gassed, and on the 9th, when they were busiest in
the work of repairing wrecked trenches, they were informed that
certain recesses which they had been cutting out in the trenches for
the reception of gas-cylinders would not be required and that they
were to fill them in again. As a veteran of four years’ experience
put it, apropos of this and some other matters: “Men take more
notice, ye’ll understand, of one extra fatigue, than any three
fights.”

A few aerial torpedoes which, whether they kill or not, make
unlimited mess, fell during the night, and on the morning of the 10th
October Lieutenant M. V. Gore-Langton--one of the Battalion’s best
and most efficient officers--was shot through the head and killed
by a German sniper while looking for a position for a loop-hole in
the parapet. He was buried six hours later in the British Cemetery
at Vermelles, and the command of his company devolved on Lieutenant
Yerburgh. Our own artillery spent the day in breaking German wire
in front of the Hulluch quarries at long range and a little more
than a hundred yards ahead of our trenches. Several of our shells
dropped short, to the discomfort of the Irish, but the wire was
satisfactorily cut, and two companies kept up bursts of rapid fire
during the night to stay the enemy from repairing it. Only 5 men were
killed and 5 wounded from all causes this day.

On the 11th our guns resumed wire-cutting and, besides making it most
unpleasant for our men in the front trenches, put one of our own
machine-guns out of action, but luckily with no loss of life.

The tragedy of the day came later when, just after lunch, a shell
landed in the doorway of Headquarters dug-out, breaking both of
Colonel Madden’s legs, and mortally wounding the Rev. Father John
Gwynne, the Battalion’s R.C. chaplain (Colonel Madden died in
England a few weeks later). The Adjutant, Lord Desmond FitzGerald,
was slightly wounded also. The other two occupants of the dug-out,
Captain Bailie, who had gone through almost precisely the same
experience in the same spot not three days before, and the Medical
Officer, were untouched. It was difficult to get two wounded men down
the trenches to the Headquarters of the supporting battalion, where
they had to be left till dark. And then they were carried back in the
open--or “overland” as the phrase was. Father Gwynne died next day
in hospital at Béthune, and the Battalion lost in him “not merely
the chaplain, but a man unusually beloved.” He had been with them
since November of the previous year. He feared nothing, despised no
one, betrayed no confidence nor used it to his own advantage; upheld
authority, softened asperities, and cheered and comforted every man
within his reach. If there were any blemish in a character so utterly
selfless, it was no more than a tendency, shared by the servants of
his calling, to attach more importance to the administration of the
last rites of his Church to a wounded man than to the immediate
appearance of the medical officer, and to forget that there are times
when Supreme Unction can be a depressant. _Per contra_, Absolution
at the moment of going over the top, if given with vigour and good
cheer, as he gave it, is a powerful tonic. At all times the priest’s
influence in checking “crime” in a regiment is very large indeed,
and with such priests as the Irish Guards had the good fortune to
possess, almost unbounded.

Colonel Madden was succeeded by Captain Lord Desmond FitzGerald as
commanding officer, and the rest of the day was spent in suffering
a bombardment of aerial torpedoes, very difficult to locate and not
put down by our heavy guns till after dark. Besides the 3 wounded
officers that day 3 men were wounded and, 3 killed.

On the morning of the 13th, after heavy shelling, a bomb attack on
the 2nd Grenadiers developed in the trenches to the right, when the
Battalion brought up and detonated several boxes for their comrades.
Their work further included putting up 120 scaling-ladders for an
attack by the 35th Brigade.

Next day they were relieved by the 7th Norfolks, 35th Brigade of the
North Midland Division of Territorials, and went to rest at Verquin,
five or six miles behind the line. It took them nearly seven hours
to clear the trenches; Colonel Madden, on account of his wounds,
being carried out on a sitting litter; Lord Desmond FitzGerald, who,
as Adjutant, had been wounded when Father Gwynne had been killed,
overdue for hospital with a piece of shrapnel in his foot, and all
ranks utterly done after their nine days’ turn of duty. They laid
them down as tired animals lie, while behind them the whole north
front of the Cuinchy-Hulluch Salient broke into set battle once again.

A series of holding attacks were made all along the line almost from
Ypres to La Bassée to keep the enemy from reinforcing against the
real one on the Hohenzollern redoubt, Fosse 8, the Hulluch quarries
and the heart of the Loos position generally. It was preceded
by bombardments that in some cases cut wire and in some did not,
accompanied by gas and smoke, which affected both sides equally; it
was carried through by men in smoke-helmets, half-blinding them among
blinding accompaniments of fumes and flying earth, through trenches
to which there was no clue, over the wrecks of streets of miners’
cottages, cellars and underground machine-gun nests, and round the
concreted flanks of unsuspected artillery emplacements. Among these
obstacles, too, it died out with the dead battalions of Regulars and
Territorials caught, as the chances of war smote them, either in bulk
across open ground or in detail among bombs and machine-gun posts.

There was here, as many times before, and very many times after,
heroism beyond belief, and every form of bravery that the spirit
of man can make good. The net result of all, between the 27th of
September and the 15th of October, when the last groundswell of the
long fight smoothed itself out over the unburied dead, was a loss to
us of 50,000 men and 2000 officers, and a gain of a salient seven
thousand yards long and three thousand two hundred yards deep. For
practical purposes, a good deal of this depth ranked as “No Man’s
Land” from that date till the final break-up of the German hosts in
1918. The public were informed that the valour of the new Territorial
Divisions had justified their training, which seemed expensive; and
that our armies, whatever else they lacked at that time--and it was
not a little--had gained in confidence: which seemed superfluous.


AFTER LOOS

But the Battalion lay at Verquin, cleaning up after its ten days’
filth, and there was Mass on the morning of the 14th, when Father S.
Knapp came over from the 2nd Battalion and “spoke to the men on the
subject of Father Gwynne’s death,” for now that the two battalions
were next-door neighbours, Father Knapp served both. No written
record remains of the priest’s speech, but those who survive that
heard it say it moved all men’s hearts. Mass always preceded the
day’s work in billets, but even on the first morning on their return
from the trenches the men would make shift somehow to clean their
hands and faces, and if possible to shave, before attending it, no
matter what the hour.

Then on the 14th October they moved from Verquin to unpleasing
Sailly-Labourse, four miles or so behind the line, for another day’s
“rest” in billets, and so (Oct. 17) to what was left of Vermelles, a
couple of miles from the front, where the men had to make the wrecked
houses habitable till (Oct. 19) they took over from the Welsh Guards
some reserve-trenches on the old ground in front of Clerk’s Keep, a
quarter of a mile west of the Vermelles railway line.

The 20th October was the day when the 2nd Battalion were engaged in
a bombing attack on the Hohenzollern, from which they won no small
honour, as will be told in their story. The 1st Battalion lay at
Vermelles, unshelled for the moment, and had leisure to make “light
overhead cover for the men against the rain.” The Division was in
line again, and the Battalion’s first work was to improve a new
line of trenches which, besides the defect of being much too close
to the Hohenzollern, lacked dug-outs. In Lord Desmond FitzGerald’s
absence, Major the Hon. H. R. Alexander from the 2nd Battalion took
command of the Battalion, and they relieved the 2nd Coldstream on the
21st and resumed the stale routine--digging saps under fire, which
necessitated shovelling the earth into sand-bags, and emptying it out
by night; dodging snipers and trench-mortars, and hoping that our
own shells, which were battering round the Hohenzollern, would not
fall too short; fixing wire and fuses till the moon grew and they
had to wait for the dawn-mists to cloak their work; discovering and
reconnoitring old German communication-trenches that ran to ever-new
German sniping-posts and had to be blocked with wire tangles; and
losing in three days, by minenwerfers, sniping, the fall of dug-outs
and premature bursts of our own shells, 7 men killed and 18 wounded.
The two companies (1 and 2) went back to Vermelles, while 3 and 4
took over the support-trenches from the 3rd Coldstream, reversing the
process on the 24th October.

When letters hint at “drill” in any connection, it is a sure sign
that a battalion is on the eve of relief. For example, on the 24th,
2nd Lieutenant Levy arrived with a draft of fifty-eight men, a
sergeant, and two corporals, who were divided among the companies.
The Diary observes that they were a fair lot of men but “did not
look too well drilled.” Accordingly, after a couple of days’ mild
shelling round and near Vermelles Church and Shrine, we find the
Battalion relieved by the Norfolks (Oct. 26). All four companies
worked their way cautiously out of the fire-zone--it is at the moment
of relief that casualties are most felt--picked up their Headquarters
and transport, and marched for half of a whole day in the open to
billets at pleasant, wooded Lapugnoy, where they found clean straw
to lie down on and were promised blankets. After the usual clean-up
and payment of the men, they were ordered off to Chocques to take
part in the King’s review of the Guards Division at Haute Rièze on
the afternoon of the 28th, but, owing to the accident to His Majesty
caused by the horse falling with him, the parade was cancelled.

“Steady drill” filled the next ten days. Lieutenant the Hon. B.
O’Brien started to train fresh bombing-squads with the Mills bomb,
which was then being issued in such quantities that as many as twenty
whole boxes could be spared for instruction. Up till then, bombs had
been varied in type and various in action. As had been pointed out,
the Irish took kindly to this game and produced many notable experts.
But the perfect bomber is not always docile out of the line. Among
the giants of ’15 was a private against whom order had gone forth
that on no account was he to be paid on pay-days, for the reason that
once in funds he would retire into France at large “for a day and a
night and a morrow,” and return a happy, hiccuping but indispensable
“criminal.” At last, after a long stretch of enforced virtue, he
managed, by chicane or his own amazing personality, to seduce five
francs from his platoon sergeant and forthwith disappeared. On his
return, richly disguised, he sought out his benefactor with a gift
under his arm. The rest is in his Sergeant’s own words: “‘No,’ I
says, ‘go away and sleep it off,’ I says, pushin’ it away, for
’twas a rum jar he was temptin’ me with. ‘’Tis for you, Sergeant,’
he says. ‘You’re the only man that has thrusted me with a centime
since summer.’ Thrust him! There was no sergeant of ours had not
been remindin’ me of those same five francs _all_ the time he’d been
away--let alone what I’d got at Company Orders. So I loosed myself
upon him, an’ I described him to himself the way he’d have shame at
it, but shame was not in him. ‘Yes, Sergeant,’ he says to me, ‘full
I am, and _this_ is full too,’ he says, pattin’ the rum jar (and it
was!), an’ I know where there’s plenty more,’ he says, ‘and it’s all
for you an’ your great thrustfulness to me about them five francs.’
What could I do? He’d made me a laughing-stock to the Battalion. An
awful man! He’d done it _all_ on those five unlucky francs! Yes,
he’d lead a bombin’ party or a drinkin’ party--his own or any other
battalion’s; and he was worth a platoon an’ a half when there was
anything doing, and I thrust in God he’s alive yet--him and his five
francs! But an awful man!”

Drunkenness was confined, for the most part, to a known few
characters, regular and almost privileged in their irregularities.
The influence of the Priest and the work of the company officers
went hand in hand here. Here is a tribute paid by a brother officer
to Captain Gore-Langton, killed on the 10th October, which explains
the secret. “The men liked him for his pluck and the plain way in
which he dealt with them, always doing his best for the worst, most
idle, and stupidest men in our company.... One can’t really believe
he’s gone. I always expect to see him swinging round a traverse.” The
Battalion did not forget him, and while at Lapugnoy, sent a party to
Vermelles to attend to his grave there.

On the 31st October Lieut.-Colonel R. C. McCalmont arrived from
commanding a battalion of the New Ulster Army Division and took over
the command from Major Alexander who reverted to the 2nd Battalion,
from which he had been borrowed.


LAVENTIE

On the 10th of the month the Guards Division were for duty again
on the Laventie sector, which at every time of the year had a
bad reputation for wet. The outcome of Loos had ended hope of a
break-through, and a few thousand yards won there against a few
thousand lost out Ypres way represented the balance of the account
since November 1914. Therefore, once again, the line had to be held
till more men, munitions and materials could be trained, manufactured
and accumulated, while the price of making war on the spur of the
moment was paid, day in and day out, with the bodies of young men
subject to every form of death among the slits in the dirt along
which they moved. It bored them extremely, but otherwise did not
much affect their morale. They built some sort of decent life out of
the monotonous hours; they came to know the very best and the very
worst in themselves and in their comrades upon whom their lives and
well-being depended; and they formed friendships that lasted, as
fate willed, for months or even years. They lied persistently and
with intent in their home letters concerning their discomforts and
exposure, and lent themselves to the impression, cultivated by some
sedulous newspapers, that the trenches were electrically-lighted
abodes of comfort and jollity, varied with concerts and sports. It
was all part of the trial which the national genius calls “the game.”

The Battalion (Lieut.-Colonel R. C. McCalmont commanding) was at
Pacaut, due north of Béthune, on the 11th, at Merville on the 14th,
training young soldiers how to use smoke-helmets--for gas was
a thing to be expected anywhere now--and enjoying every variety
of weather, from sodden wet to sharp frost. The effects of the
gas-helmet on the young soldiers were quaintly described as “very
useful on them. ’Twas like throwin’ a cloth over a parrot-cage. It
stopped _all_ their chat.”

On the 20th November they took over reserve-billets from the 1st
Scots Guards near Bout Deville, and the next day, after inspection
of both battalions by General Feilding, commanding the Division,
and the late Mr. John Redmond, M.P., went into trenches with the
happy fore-knowledge that they were likely to stay there till the
2nd of January and would be lucky if they got a few days out at
Christmas. It was a stretch of unmitigated beastliness in the low
ditch-riddled ground behind Neuve Chapelle and the Aubers Ridge,
on the interminable La Bassée-Estaires road, with no available
communication-trenches, in many places impassable from wet, all
needing sandbags and all, “in a very neglected state, except for the
work done by the 2nd Guards Brigade the week before the Battalion
moved in.” (It is nowhere on record that the Guards Division, or
for that matter, any other, was ever contented with trenches that
it took over.) The enemy, however, were quiet, being at least as
uncomfortable as our people. Even when our field-guns blew large
gaps in their parapets a hundred yards away there was very little
retaliation, and our casualties on relief--the men lay in scattered
billets at Riez Bailleul three miles or so up the road--were
relatively few.

In one whole week not more than four or five men were killed and
fifteen or sixteen wounded, two of them by our own shrapnel bursting
short while our guns experimented on block-houses and steel cupolas,
as these revealed themselves. Even when the Prince of Wales visited
the line at the Major-General’s inspection of it, and left by the
only possible road, “Sign Post Lane,” in broad daylight in the open,
within a furlong of the enemy, casualties did not occur! There
is no mention, either, of any of the aeroplane-visitations which
sometimes followed his appearances. As a personal friend of one of
the officers, he found reason to visit along that sector more often
than is officially recorded.

At the beginning of the month the 1st Guards Brigade was relieved
by the 3rd of its Division, and the Battalion handed its line
over to the 4th Grenadiers, not without some housewifely pride at
improvements it had effected. But, since pride ever precedes a fall,
the sharp frost of the past week dissolved in heavy rain, and the
neat new-made breastworks with their aligned sandbags collapsed. If
the 4th Grenadiers keep veracious diaries, it is probable that that
night of thaw and delayed reliefs is strongly recorded in them.

La Gorgue, under Estaires, upon the sluggish Lys in sodden wet
weather (December 3-8) gave them a breathing space for a general
wash-up and those “steady drills” necessary to mankind. The new
stretch that they took over from their own 2nd Battalion was about
two miles north of their previous one and south-east of Laventie,
running parallel to the Rue Tilleloy, that endless road, flanked,
like all others hereabouts, with farm-houses, which joins Armentières
to Neuve Chapelle. The ground was, of course, sop, the parapets were
perforable breastworks, but reliefs could arrive unobserved within
five hundred yards of the front, and the enemy’s line lay in most
places nearly a quarter of a mile from ours. More important still,
there was reasonable accommodation for Battalion Headquarters in a
farm-house (one of the many “Red Houses” of the war) which, by some
accident, had been untouched so far, though it stood less than a mile
from the front line. Where Headquarters are comfortable, Headquarters
are happy, and by so much the more placable. Only very young soldiers
grudge them protection and warmth.

For a few days it was a peaceful stretch of the great line that
buttressed on Switzerland and the sea. Christmas was coming, and,
even had the weather allowed it, neither side was looking too
earnestly for trouble.

A company of Welsh Fusiliers with their C.O. and Adjutant came up for
eight days’ instruction, and were distributed through the Battalion.
The system in the front line at that moment was one of gangs of
three, a digger, an armed man, and a bomber, relieving each other by
shifts; and to each of these trios one Welshman was allotted.

The Welsh were small, keen and inquisitive. The large Irish praised
their Saints aloud for sending them new boys to talk to through the
long watches. It is related of one Welshman that, among a thousand
questions, he demanded if his tutor had ever gone over the top. The
Irishman admitted that he had. “And how often _does_ one go over?”
the Welshman continued. “I’ll show you. Come with me,” replied
the other Celt, and, moving to a gap in the parapet, lifted the
Welshman in his arms that he might the better see what remained,
hung up in German wire, of a private of some ancient fight--withered
wreckage, perhaps, of Neuve Chapelle. “_He_ went over wanst,” said
the Irishman. The working-party resumed their labours and, men say,
that that new boy put no more questions “for the full of the half an
hour--an’ that’s as long as a week to a Welshman.”

All four companies were held in the first line except for three
posts--Picantin, Dead End, and Hougoumont--a few hundred yards behind
that were manned with a platoon apiece, but on the 12th December
rumours of a mine made it wise to evacuate a part of the right
flank till one of our 9.2’s should have searched for the suspected
mine-shaft. Its investigations roused the enemy to mild retaliation,
which ended next day in one of our men being wounded by our own 9.2,
and three by the enemy’s shrapnel--the first casualties in four days.

The wet kept the peace along the line, but it did not altogether damp
the energies of our patrols. For a reason, not explained officially,
Lieutenant S. E. F. Christy was moved to go out with a patrol
and to hurl into the German lines a printed message (was it the
earliest workings of propaganda?) demanding that the Germans “should
surrender.” There is no indication whether the summons was to the
German army at large or merely to as many of them as lay before the
Battalion; but, the invitation being disregarded, Lieutenants Christy
and Law made themselves offensive in patrol-work to the best of their
means. On one excursion the latter officer discovered (December 15)
a water-logged concrete-built loop-hole dug-out occupied by Germans.
Being a hardened souvenir-hunter, he is reported to have removed the
official German name-board of the establishment ere he went back for
reinforcements with a view of capturing it complete. On his return
he found it abandoned. The water had driven the enemy to a drier
post, and the cutting-out expedition had to be postponed. Too long
in the line without incident wears on every one’s temper, but luck
was against them and an attempt on the 20th December by a “selected
party” under some R.E.’s and Lieutenants Law and Christy was ruined
by the moonlight and the fact that the enemy had returned to their
concrete hutch and were more than on the alert. By the light of later
knowledge the Battalion was inclined to believe that the dug-out had
been left as bait and that there were too many spies in our lines
before Laventie.

On the 21st December the Battalion came out for Christmas and
billeted at Laventie, as their next turn would be in the old sector
that they had handed over to the 4th Grenadiers three weeks ago. The
same Battalion relieved them on this day, and, as before, were an
hour late in turning up--a thing inexcusable except on one’s own part.

Their Adjutant’s preoccupations with officers sick and wounded;
N.C.O.’s promoted to commissions in line battalions, and the catching
and training of their substitutes; and with all the housekeeping
work of a battalion in the field, had not prevented him from making
strict and accurate inquiries at Headquarters as to “what exactly is
being sent out for Christmas Day. Is it plum-pudding only or sausages
alone? Last year we had both, but I should like to know for certain.”

All things considered (and there was no shelling), Christmas dinner
at La Gorgue 1915 was a success, and “the C.O. and other officers
went round the dinners as at home” in merciful ignorance that those
of them who survived would attend three more such festivals.

Major-General Lord Cavan, commanding the Guards Division, who had
been appointed to command the newly formed Fourteenth Corps,[7]
addressed the officers after dinner and half-promised them the
Christmas present they most desired. He spoke well of the Battalion,
as one who had seen and shared their work had right to do, saying
that “there might be as good, but there were none better,” and added
that “there was just a hope that the Guards Division might eventually
go to his corps.” They cheered.

The quiet that fell about Christmastide held till the birth of the
New Year, which the inscrutable Hun mind celebrated punctually on
the hour (German time) with twenty minutes’ heavy machine-gun and
rifle-fire in the darkness. One killed and one wounded were all their
casualties.

Here is the roll of the Officers and Staff of the Battalion as the
year ended in mud, among rotten parapets and water-logged trenches,
with nothing to show for all that had gone before save time gained
and ground held to allow of preparation for the real struggle, on
the edge of which these thousand soldiers and all their world stood
ignorant but unshaken:


HEADQUARTERS

  Lieut.-Colonel R. C. A. McCalmont    Commanding Officer.
  Major Lord Desmond FitzGerald        Adjutant.
  Lieut. T. E. G. Nugent               a./Adjutant.
  Hon. Lieut. H. Hickie                Quartermaster.
  Capt. P. H. Antrobus                 Transport.
  Lieut. C. Pease                      Brigade Company.
  Lieut. L. C. Whitefoord                     “
  Lieut. J. Grayling-Major             Depot.
  Capt. Rev. A. H. A. Knapp, O.P.      Chaplain.
  Capt. P. R. Woodhouse, R.A.M.C.      Medical Officer.
  No. 108 Sgt. Major Kirk              Sgt. Major.
  No. 176 Q.M.S. J. M. Payne           Q.M.S.
  No. 918 Drill-Sgt. T. Cahill         Senior Drill Sgt.
  No. 2666 Drill-Sgt. G. Weeks         Junior Drill Sgt.
  No. 1134 O.R.Cr. Sgt. P. Matthews    Orderly-Room Sgt. at Base.
  No. 3933 Sgt. Dr. W. Cherry          Sgt. Drummer.
  No. 1119 Sgt. R. Nugent              a./Pioneer Sgt.
  No. 837 Armr. Q.M.S. S. Bradley      Armr. Q.M.S.
  No. 3874 Sgt. M. Greaney             Transport Sgt.
  No. 4166 Sgt. J. Fawcett             Signalling Sgt.
  No. 2900 Sgt. P. J. Curtis           Orderly-Room Clerk.


_No. 1 Company._

  Capt. R. G. C. Yerburgh.
  Lieut. D. J. B. FitzGerald.
  2562 C.S.M. P. A. Carroll.
  (3726 C.Q.M.S. P. M’Goldrick.)
  3303 a./C.Q.M.S. J. Glynn.


_No. 2 Company._

  Capt. V. C. J. Blake.
  Lieut. C. E. R. Hanbury.
  3949 C.S.M. D. Voyles.
  999 C.Q.M.S. H. Payne.


_No. 3 Company._

  Capt. T. M. D. Bailie.
  Capt. A. F. L. Gordon.
  Lieut. S. E. F. Christy.
  Lieut. K. E. Dormer.
  (2112 C.S.M. H. M’Veigh.)
  3972 C.Q.M.S. R. Grady.
  2922 a./C.S.M. J. Donolly.


_No. 4 Company._

  Capt. P. S. Long-Innes.
  Lieut. Hon. H. B. O’Brien (Bombing Officer).
  Lieut. R. J. P. Rodakowski.
  2nd Lieut. M. B. Levy.
  3632 C.S.M. M. Moran.
  (2122 C.Q.M.S. T. Murphy.)
  798 a./C.Q.M.S. J. Scanlon.




1916

THE SALIENT TO THE SOMME


Brigadier-General G. Feilding, D.S.O., as we know, succeeded Lord
Cavan in the command of the Guards Division, and the enemy woke up
to a little more regular shelling and sniping for a few days till
(January 4) the 1st Guards Brigade was unexpectedly relieved by a
fresh brigade (the 114th), and the Battalion moved to billets in St.
Floris which, as usual, were “in a very filthy condition.” There they
stayed, under strong training at bombing and Lewis gunnery, till
the 12th. Thence to Merville till the 23rd, when Lieutenant Hon. H.
B. O’Brien, a specialist in these matters, as may have been noticed
before, was appointed Brigade Bombing Officer. The bomb was to be the
dominant factor of the day’s work for the next year or so, and the
number of students made the country round billets unwholesome and
varied. There is a true tale of a bombing school on a foggy morning
who, hurling with zeal over a bank into the mist, found themselves
presently being cursed from a safe distance by a repairing party
who had been sent out to discover why one whole system of big-gun
telephone-wires was dumb. They complained that the school had “cut it
into vermicelli.”

The instruction bore fruit; for, so soon as they were back in the
trenches at Ebenezer farm, which they had quitted on the 4th, bombing
seems to have been forced wherever practicable. A weak, or it might
be more accurate to say, a sore point had developed on the front in
a crater thrown up by one of our own mines, which it was necessary
to sap out to and protect by intermittent bombing. This brought
retaliation and a few casualties nightly. A trench-mortar battery
was imported to deal with the nuisance and, as might be expected,
drew the enemy’s artillery.

On the 28th January a single stray bullet in the dark found and
killed Captain V. C. J. Blake, No. 2 Company, while he was laying out
some work in wire for his company, and a bombing attack round the
mine-crater ended in three other ranks killed and one wounded.

On February 1 our mine-shaft in the same locality flooded without
warning and drowned a couple of men in a listening-post. Our pumps
could make no impression on the water; it was difficult to put up
any head-cover for the men in the forward sap, and the enemy’s wire
was being strengthened nightly and needed clearing away. This was
routine-work undertaken by our artillery who blew gaps in it in three
places, which the Battalion covered with machine-gun fire. It kept
the enemy reasonably quiet, and H.R.H. Prince Albert, who was out on
a tour from England, breakfasted with Battalion Headquarters the same
morning (February 5). Once again the enemy’s information must have
been inaccurate or delayed since there is no mention of any shelling
or aeroplane work on Headquarters.

They came out of the line on the 7th and billeted near Merville.
Reckoned by their standards it had been an uneventful stretch of
duty, and those officers who could be spared had gone on short leave;
for there was a rumour that leave would be stopped after the 20th of
the month. The French and their English allies knew well that the
great German attack on Verdun was ripening (it opened in the third
week of February) and the world had no doubt of the issues that
depended upon that gate to the heart of France holding fast. The
whole long line stiffened to take the weight of any sudden side-issue
or main catastrophe that the chance of war might bring about. But a
battalion among hundreds of battalions knows as little what its own
movements mean as a single truck in a goods yard knows of the import
and export trade of Great Britain. The young officers snatched their
few hours’ leave at home, loyally told their people that all was
going well, returned--“to a most interesting lecture on the Battle
of Neuve Chapelle,” delivered at La Gorgue by a Divisional Staff
Officer, and to an inspection of the 1st Guards Brigade by Lord
Kitchener on a vile wet day when they were all soaked to the skin
(February 10), and “to the usual routine in very poor weather.”

Lord Desmond FitzGerald, being now second in command by seniority,
resigned his adjutancy and was succeeded by Lieutenant T. E. G.
Nugent; No. 2, Captain Blake’s, Company was commanded by Major the
Hon. A. C. S. Chichester, fresh from home, and Father S. Knapp,
their priest, who had been transferred to the 1st London Irish,
was followed by Father J. Lane-Fox from the same Battalion. Of the
six Fathers who served the two battalions, two--Fathers Gwynne and
S. Knapp, D.S.O., M.C.--were killed, one--Father F. M. Browne,
M.C.--wounded twice, and one--Father F. S. Browne, M.C.--wounded once.

On the face of it nothing could have been quieter and more domestic
than their daily life round Merville, and after a week of it they
were moved (February 16) north towards Steenvoorde, in a hurricane
of wind and rain, to the neighbourhood of Poperinghe, on the
Ypres-Poperinghe-Dunkirk road, and a camp of tents, mostly blown
down, and huts connected, for which small ease they were grateful,
by duck-boards. This brought them into the Second Army area and into
the Fourteenth Corps under Lord Cavan, precisely as that officer had
hoped. He explained to them there was “a small German offensive” on
the left of the line here, and that “if it came to anything” the
Brigade might be wanted.

The “small offensive” had opened on the 13th with a furious
bombardment of the extreme southern end of the Ypres Salient between
the Ypres-Comines Canal and Ypres-Comines railway, a little to the
south of Hill 60, followed by the springing of five mines under
the British front line and an infantry attack, which ended in the
capture by the enemy of four or five hundred yards of trench and
the low ridge called “The Bluff,” over which they ran. The affair
bulked big in the newspaper-press of the day; for a battalion,
the 10th Lancashire Fusiliers, was literally buried by one of the
mine explosions. The German gain was well held, but prevented from
extending by a concentration of our artillery, and later on (March 2)
the whole position was recaptured after desperate fighting and the
line there came to rest.

For the first time the Battalion seems impressed by the hostile
aircraft with which the Salient was filled. Poperinghe and Hazebrouck
were bombed almost as soon as they came in, and their camp was
visited by four aeroplanes at high noon, after a snow-fall, which
showed up everything below. They had been attending a demonstration
to prove the harmlessness of a Flammenwerfer if only one lay flat
on the ground and let the roaring blast hiss over. Ribald men have
explained, since, that these demonstrations were more demoralising
than the actual machine in action, especially when, as occasionally
happened, the nozzle of the flame-shooter carried away and, in the
attempts to recontrol the thing, the class, bombed from above and
chased by fire below, broke and fled.

But the whole Salient was a death-trap throughout. The great shells
crossed each other’s path at every angle, back and forth, single
or in flights. For no certain cause that our side could guess,
fire would concentrate itself on some half-obliterated feature of
the landscape--a bank, the poor stumpage of a wood, a remnant of a
village or the angle of a road, that went out in smoke, dust, and
flying clods, as though devils were flinging it up with invisible
spades. The concentrated clamours would die down and cease; the
single shells would resume their aimless falling over a line of
fields, with the monotony of drips from a tap, till, again, it seemed
as though one of them had found something worthy of attention and
shouted back the news to its fellows who, crowding altogether in one
spot, roared, overturned, and set alight for five or ten wild minutes
or through a methodical half-hour. If the storm fell on bare ground,
that was churned and torn afresh into smoking clods; if upon men in
trenches, on relief, or with the transport, no eye could judge what
harm had been done; for often where it had seemed as though nothing
could live, dispersed units picked themselves up and reformed, almost
untouched, after inconceivable escapes. Elsewhere, a few spurts of
stinking smoke in a corner might cover all that remained of a platoon
or have ripped the heart out of a silent, waiting company. By night,
fantastic traceries of crossing fire-lines ran along the shoulder of
a ridge; shrapnel, bursting high, jetted a trail of swift sparks,
as it might be steel striking flint; dropping flares outlined some
tortured farm-house among its willow-stumps, or the intolerable glare
of a big shell framed itself behind a naked doorway; and coloured
lights dyed the bellies of the low clouds till all sense of distance
and direction was lost, and the bewildered troops stumbled and
crawled from pavé to pot-hole, treading upon the old dead.

Dawn brought dirty white desolation across yellow mud pitted with
slate-coloured water-holes, and confused by senseless grey and
black lines and curled tangles of mire. There was nothing to see,
except--almost pearl-coloured under their mud-dyed helmets--the
tense, preoccupied faces of men moving with wide spaces between their
platoons, to water-floored cellars and shelters chillier even than
the grave-like trenches they had left, always with the consciousness
that they were watched by invisible eyes which presently would choose
certain of them to be killed. Those who came through it, say that the
sense of this brooding Death more affected every phase of life in the
Salient than in any other portion of the great war-field.

The German offensive on the Bluff and the necessary measures of
retaliation did not concern the Battalion for the moment. After a
few days’ aimless waiting they were sent, in bitter cold and snow,
to rest-camp at Calais for a week. They were seven hours slipping
and sliding along the snow-covered roads ere they could entrain at
Bavichore Street, and untold hours detraining at the other end;
all of which annoyed them more than any bombing, even though the
C.O. himself complimented them on their march “under very trying
circumstances.” The Irish, particularly in their own battalions, have
not the relief of swearing as other races do. Their temperament runs
to extravagant comparisons and appeals to the Saints, and ordinary
foul language, even on night-reliefs in muddy trenches choked with
loose wires and corpses, is checked by the priests. But, as one said:
“What we felt on that cruel Calais road, skatin’ into each other,
an’--an’ apologisin’, would have melted all the snows of Europe that
winter.”

Bombing instruction and inter-platoon bombing matches on Calais beach
kept them employed.

On March 3, during practice with live bombs, one exploded
prematurely, as several others of that type had done in other
battalions, and Major Lord Desmond FitzGerald was so severely wounded
that he died within an hour at the Millicent Sutherland (No. 9. Red
Cross) Hospital. Lieutenant T. E. G. Nugent was dangerously wounded
at the same time through the liver, though he did not realise this
at the time, and stayed coolly in charge of a party till help came.
Lieutenant Hanbury, who was conducting the practice, was wounded in
the hand and leg, and Father Lane-Fox lost an eye and some fingers.

Lord Desmond FitzGerald was buried in the public cemetery at Calais
on the 5th. As he himself had expressly desired, there was no formal
parade, but the whole Battalion, of which he was next for the
command, lined the road to his grave. His passion and his loyalty had
been given to the Battalion without thought of self, and among many
sad things few are sadder than to see the record of his unceasing
activities and care since he had been second in command cut across by
the curt announcement of his death. It was a little thing that his
name had been at the time submitted for a well-deserved D.S.O. In a
hard-pressed body of men, death and sickness carry a special sting,
because the victim knows--and in the very articles of death feels
it--what confusion and extra work, rearrangement and adjustments of
responsibilities his enforced defection must lay upon his comrades.
The winter had brought a certain amount of sickness and minor
accidents among the officers, small in themselves, but cumulatively
a burden. Irreplaceable N.C.O.’s had gone, or were going, to take
commissions in the Line; others of unproven capacities had to be
fetched forward in their place. Warley, of course, was not anxious to
send its best N.C.O.’s away from a depot choked with recruits. The
detail of life was hard and cumbersome. It was a lengthy business
even to draw a typewriting machine for use in the trenches. Companies
two thirds full of fresh drafts had to be entrusted to officers who
might or might not have the divine gift of leadership, and, when
all was set, to-morrow’s chance-spun shell might break and bury the
most carefully thought-out combinations. “Things change so quickly
nowadays,” Desmond FitzGerald wrote not long before his death; “it is
impossible to see ahead.” And Death took him on Calais beach in the
full stride of his power.

He had quietly presented the Battalion the year before with service
drums. “No mention need be made of who paid.” They were the only
battalion of the Brigade which lacked them at that time, and they had
been the only battalion to bring them out of the beginning of the
war, when, during the retreat from Mons, “the artillery drove over
the big drum at Landrecies.”

Temporary Captain A. F. L. Gordon followed Lieutenant Nugent as
Adjutant, and the Rev. F. M. Browne from G.H.Q. replaced Father
Lane-Fox. They moved into the Salient again on the 6th March,
billeting at Wormhoudt, and were told several unpleasant things about
the state of the line and the very limited amount of “retaliation”
that they might expect from their own artillery.

The snow stopped all training except a little bombing. Opinion as
to the value of bombs differed even in those early days, but they
were the order of the day, and gave officers the chance to put in
practice their pet theories of bowling. A commanding officer of great
experience wrote, a year later, after the Battle of Arras, thanking
Heaven that that affair had “led to the rediscovery of the rifle as
a suitable weapon for infantry,” adding, “I swear a bomb is of all
weapons the most futile in which to specialize.”

The French were as keen on the bomb as the rest of the world, and
parties of officers visited our bombing competitions at Wormhoudt,
where the Battalion lay till the 16th March, moving to billets
(Brandhoek) near Vlamertinghe for St. Patrick’s Day and the sports
sacred to the occasion. They were played into camp by a naval party
to the tune of “A Life on the Ocean Wave,” not a little to their
astonishment. A little later they were to be even more astonished.

Then the 1st Guards Brigade took over their sector of the Fourteenth
Division’s new front from the Sixth Division and, as usual,
complained that the trenches which ran from the east to the town were
in bad condition. The Brigade Reserve camp near Vlamertinghe was not
much better. It is significant that, at this date, a train, specially
oiled and treated to run noiselessly through the night, used to take
the reliefs up into Ypres--a journey that did not lack excitement.

On the 23rd March, as the Battalion was going into the trenches
on the Ypres Canal bank, the meaning of that “naval party” at
Vlamertinghe became plainer. Three naval officers and twenty-five
petty officers on special leave appeared among them for the purpose
of spending a happy four days with them at their labours. They wore
the uniforms of private soldiers without pack or equipment, and were
first seen joyously walking and talking on a well-observed road,
which combination of miracles led the amazed beholders to assume
that they were either lunatics or escaped criminals of the deepest
dye; and it was a toss-up that the whole cheery picnic-party was
not arrested--or shot to save their lives. One officer, at least,
had the liveliest memories of chaperoning for several hours a naval
officer with a passion for professional souvenirs in the shape of
large-calibre shell fragments. “I’ve never been at the wrong end of
this size gun before,” the mariner would say as the German heavies
fell. “It’s tremendously interesting! I _must_ just make sure about
that fuse, if you don’t mind.” The host, to whom 5.9’s, and much
larger, were no novelty (for the Canal bank dug-outs did not keep
them out) had to feign an interest he did not feel till it dawned on
the sailor that if he pursued his investigations too far he would
be cut off by German patrols. The visitors all agreed that ships,
under normal circumstances, were the Hotel Ritz compared to the daily
trench-routine of the army. We vaingloriously fired several rounds
from a 9.2 to please the Senior Service who, naturally, had seen such
things before. The enemy replied with two days’ full “retaliation”
after the navy had left.

Yet, as things went in the Salient, it was, like their reserve
camp, “not too uncomfortable.” Though there was only one workable
communication-trench (The Haymarket) to their line, and that a bad
one, the main St. Jean road could be used after dark at reasonable
risks. No work was possible by daylight, but, except for general and
indiscriminate shelling, they lived quietly, even when, as happened
on the first night (March 23), No. 1 Company and Headquarters were
solemnly misguided down the Menin road in the dark _over_ Hell Fire
Corner to within a few hundred yards of Hooge and returned “without
even being fired at.” The regimental transport, too, managed to come
up as far as Potijze with supplies, on three of the four nights of
the Battalion’s first tour, and had no casualties, “though the woods
were regularly shelled.” This was an extraordinary stroke of luck for
the Battalion since other transports had suffered severely.

The outstanding wonder that any one in the Salient should be alive
at all, is not referred to in the Diary. Men who watched the shape
of that cape of death, raken by incessant aeroplanes and cross-cut
by gun-fire that fell equally from the flanks and, as it seemed, the
very rear, sometimes speculated, as did the French in the livelier
hells of Verdun, how long solid earth itself could hold out against
the upheavals of the attack. Flesh and blood could endure--that was
their business--but the ground on which they stood did not abide. As
one man said: “It ’ud flee away in lumps under the sole of your foot,
till there was no rest anywhere.”

Their first four days’ tour saw three men killed in the line by
a single whizz-bang in a dug-out; one wounded, and an officer,
Lieutenant R. J. P. Rodakowski, slightly hit by a piece of shrapnel.
They buried their dead by night at Potijze. Reliefs were the real
difficulty; for the line and the roads were continuously shelled,
and at any moment in the dusk they might find their only sound
communication-trench impassable. They watched it go up from end
to end, one dreadful night on the 29th of March, when they were
in support and the Grenadiers in the line, and the King’s Company
was wiped out almost to a man. It was a prelude to an attack that
never arrived--a suddenly launched, suddenly arrested, wantonness of
destruction. Coming, going, standing, or sitting still gave no minute
of guaranteed safety. A party returning from home-leave were caught
by a single shell in the streets of Ypres on April 2. Sergeant-Major
Kirk and a private were killed, and an N.C.O. and three men were
wounded. Men dropped, too, almost in the hour when they took their
leave. They worked up the line of nights, half the shift at a time
repairing damage, and the remainder standing by for attacks.

On the 3rd April, after an untouched turn of duty, eight men were
wounded by blind fire during the relief.

At Poperinghe, on April 4, they were billeted in the Convent which
supplied them with variety entertainments, cinemas, band concerts,
and performing troupes, all liable at any moment to be dispersed by
the enemy’s artillery or ’planes and therefore doubly precious.
The Battalion had its share of professional honour, too, in a
matter of ceremonial. As regards the outside world the Brigade of
Guards is one; as regards the various battalions of it, there are
allowable internal differences of opinion. Consequently when a
Russian General, late Chief of the Staff to the Grand Duke Nicholas
of Russia, visited Poperinghe, and the 1st Battalion of the Irish
Guards--out of five Guards Battalions within reach--was chosen as
the one for him to inspect, life smiled upon them, and they rose to
the occasion. Hear the words of an observer, experienced, if not
altogether disinterested: “The day (April 5) was lovely, and our
fellows, in spite of their months of trench-work, did magnificently.
The wonderful precision of their drill excited the admiration even of
officers belonging to some of the other regiments. The Huns missed a
grand opportunity.”

The Huns had their revenge a few days later when the Battalion’s
billets and Headquarters at Poperinghe were suddenly, on April 11,
shelled just as the Battalion was going into line at Ypres. The
thing began almost with a jest. The Regimental Chaplain was taking
confessions, as is usual before going up, in Poperinghe Church, when
the building rocked to bursts of big stuff obviously drawing nearer.
He turned to open the confessional-slide, and smelt gas--chlorine
beyond doubt. While he groped wildly for his gas-helmet in the
dusk, the penitent reassured him: “It’s all right, Father. I’ve
been to Divisional Gas School to-day. That smell’s off my clothes.”
Relieved, the Padre went on with his duties to an accompaniment
of glass falling from the windows, and when he came out, found
the porch filled with a small crowd who reported: “Lots of men
hit in an ambulance down the road.” Thither ran the Padre to meet
a man crazy with terror whom a shell-burst had flung across the
street, half-stripped and blackened from head to foot. He was given
Absolution, became all of a sudden vehemently sick, and dropped into
stupor. Next, on a stretcher, an Irish Guardsman crushed by a fallen
wall, reported for the moment as “not serious.” As the priest turned
to go, for more wounded men were being borne up through the dusk,
the lad was retaken by a violent hæmorrhage. Supreme Unction at once
was his need. Captain Woodhouse, R.A.M.C., the regimental doctor,
appeared out of the darkness, wounded in the arm and shoulder, his
uniform nearly ripped off him and very busy. He had been attending
a wounded man in a house near headquarters when a shell burst at
the door, mortally wounded the patient, killed one stretcher-bearer
outright and seriously wounded two others. The Padre, dodging shells
_en route_, dived into the cellars of the house where he was billeted
for the Sacred Elements, went back to the wayside dressing-station,
found a man of the Buffs, unconscious, but evidently a Catholic (for
he carried a scapular sewed in his tunic), anointed him, and--the
visitation having passed like a thunder-storm--trudged into Ypres
unworried by anything worse than casual machine-gun fire, and set
himself to find some sufficiently large sound cellar for Battalion
Mass next morning. The Battalion followed a little later and went
underground in Ypres--Headquarters and a company in the Carmelite
Convent, two companies in the solid brick and earth ramparts that
endure to this day, and one in the cellars of the Rue de Malines.

It was the mildest of upheavals--a standard-pattern affair hardly
noted by any one, but it serves to show what a priest’s and a
doctor’s duties are when the immediate heavy silence after a
shell-burst, that seems so astoundingly long, is cut by the outcries
of wounded men, and the two hurry off together, stumbling and feeling
through the dark, till the electric torch picks up some dim, veiled
outline, or hideously displays the wounds on the body they seek.
There is a tale of half a platoon among whom a heavy gas-shell
dropped as they lay in the flank of a cutting beside a road. Their
platoon-commander hurried to them, followed by the sergeant, calling
out to know the extent of the damage. No one replied. The question
was repeated. Then: “Speak up when the Officer’s askin’,” cried the
scandalized sergeant. But even that appeal failed. They were all dead
where they lay, and, human nature being what it is, the sergeant’s
words became a joke against him for many days after. Men cannot live
in extreme fear for more than a very limited time. Normal little
interests save them; so while they lay in cellars by candle-light
at Ypres and worked stealthily at night, the Battalion found time
to make a most beautiful Irish Star, four feet across, of glass and
pounded brick from the rubbish of the Convent garden. It was a work
of supererogation, accomplished while cleaning up the billets, which
drew favourable notice from high authorities.

On the 16th April they were shifted to relieve the 2nd Grenadiers at
Railway Wood north-west of Hooge. This was almost the most easterly
point of the Salient on the north of the Menin road by the Roulers
railway, and ranked as quite the least desirable stretch of an
acutely undesirable line. In addition to every other drawback, the
wood welled water at every pore, for the Bellewaarde Beck brought to
it all the drainage from the Bellewaarde ridge, and even the trenches
on high ground were water-logged. They were bombed from overhead as
soon as they moved in; Hell Fire Corner was shelled on the 17th April
and six men were wounded.

The 18th April was quiet, only two men wounded, and “except for
violent bombardments, north and south, and an attack on Wieltje and
other places,” so was the 19th. Wieltje was two thousand yards,
and the “other places” even farther away. The “disturbance” was
nothing more than principal German attacks on four different fronts
of the Salient among mud and mud-filled shell-holes and craters of
old mines where men sunk and choked where they fought waist-deep
in the dirt; where the clogged rifles were useless, and the bomb
and the bayonet were the only hope. From any reasonable point of
view the Salient was a particularly weak position, always worth an
attack in the intervals of its regular use as a gunnery school for
German artillery. The enemy knew that we were on the way to take the
pressure off the French at Verdun, which had been a factory of death
since February, and argued that it would be well to make trouble
anywhere they could. They chose the 1st and 2nd Canadian Divisions
round Ypres, and fought them for two days with very little profit
beyond filling more shell-holes with more dead.

At that date men had learned by experience the comparative values
of their flanking divisions and the battalions immediately beside
them. When a local attack fell on some of these, those unaffected
would rest as unconcernedly as the watch below takes its ease when
the watch on deck is struggling with the squall. The syren-like hoot
of the gas-horns, one or two miles off, might break their rest on
relief, but the division involved being known to be adequate, the
Battalion was not roused and “spent a quiet day.” Other divisions,
new to the line caused anxiety and interfered with regular routine,
till they had shaken into place; and yet others might be always
trusted to hoot and signal for help on the least provocation.
These peculiarities would be discussed in the cantonments and
coffee-bars of the rest-areas, or, later, out on the roadside
with an occasional far-ranging German shell to interrupt a really
pleasant inter-battalion or divisional argument where, if reports
be true, even the Military Police sometimes forget to be impartial.
And there were unambitious, unimproving units quite content to
accept anything that their predecessors had left them in the way of
openwork parapets, gapped sandbags, and smashed traverses. Against
these, experienced corps builded, not without ostentation, strong
flanks so that if their neighbours went of a sudden, they themselves
might still have a chance for their lives. The Irish had a saying
of their own--a sort of lilting call that ran down the trenches at
odd times--to the effect that God being in his Heaven and “the
Micks in the line, all was well. Pom-pom!” Every battalion, too,
had its own version of the ancient war-song which claims that they
themselves were in the front line with their best friends of the
moment immediately behind them, but that when they went to look for
such-and-such a battalion with whom they were unfriends for the
moment, they were blessed (or otherwise) if they could find them.

Theirs was the misfortune to be the only battalion of the division
available for fatigues during their sixteen days’ tour; so they
supplied parties without intermission, both to the trenches round
Railway Wood, and in battered Ypres in the cellars where they rested
by candle-light to the accompaniment of crashing masonry and flying
pavement blocks. A fatigue-party, under Lieutenant T. K. Walker,
carrying Engineers’ stuff to near Railway Wood, was caught and
shelled on the 24th, on the last two hundred yards or so of utterly
exposed duckboards, every piece of which the enemy guns had taped to
a yard. The water-logged soil made any sort of trenches here out of
the question. Men slid, and staggered across the open under their
loads till the shells chose to find them, or they reached Railway
Wood and found some cover in the mine which was always being made
there and always pumped out. Lieutenant Walker and four men were
killed at once and seven men were wounded, of whom two afterwards
died. It was as swift as the shelling of Headquarters at Poperinghe
on the 11th; and Captain Woodhouse, the M.O., had to get forward to
the wreckage under a heavy fire of shells and aerial torpedoes. With,
or not far from him, went, crawled, ran or floundered the priest; for
if by any means the body could be relieved, repaired or eased, so
could the soul. It is true that both these men more or less respected
direct orders not to expose themselves too much, but they suffered
from curious lapses of memory.

Then Spring came to the Salient in one swift rush, so warm and so
windless that, at the end of April, when they were in rest under
leafing trees at Poperinghe, it was possible to dine in shirt
sleeves in the open by candle and starlight. The gentle weather
even softened the edge of war for a day or two, till Ypres and the
neighbourhood were vigorously shelled on the 5th May. The Battalion
was then in Ypres prison and the cellars beneath it, where some
unloved enthusiast had discovered that there was plenty of room for
drill purposes in the main gaol-corridor, and drilled they were
accordingly to the music of the bombardments. On such occasions
men were sometimes seen to “budge,” _i.e._ roll their eyes in the
direction of plaster and stones falling from the ceiling, for which
heinous “crime” their names were justly taken.

On the 9th May they relieved the 2nd Grenadiers on the left sector of
their Brigade’s front at Wieltje, where what were once trenches had
been bombed and shelled into a sketchy string of bombing-posts--or
as a man said, “grouse-butts.” It was perhaps one degree worse than
their stretch at Hooge and necessitated companies and posts being
scattered, as the ground served, between what was left of Wieltje,
St. Jean, and La Brique. The enemy opened by shelling the Reserve
Company (No. 4) at St. Jean and wounding eight men, while their
machine-gun fire held up all work in the front line where No. 1
Company was trying to dig a communication-trench through old dirt and
dead to No. 2 Company in support.

The demonstration might have meant anything or nothing, but to be on
the safe side and to comply with Brigade orders, regular observation
and snipers’ posts were posted henceforward, and Lieutenant
Rodakowski was struck off all trench duties as “Intelligence (and
Sniping) Officer.” The arrangements and supervision of a dozen or so
snipers, imaginative, stolid or frankly bored, as the case might be,
and the collation of their various reports based (for very little
could be actually seen) on the Celtic imagination operating at large;
the whole to be revised and corrected from hour to hour by one’s own
faculties of observation and deduction; make Intelligence work a
little strenuous.

On the 12th May St. Jean, which included Battalion Headquarters, half
way between St. Jean and Wieltje, was heavily shelled for eight hours
of the night with heavy stuff--but no casualties beyond a couple of
men wounded.

On the 18th May, when they were in the line once more, the enemy
who had recently been remarkably quiet made an attempt to rush a
bombing-post, but, says the Diary, “Lieutenant Tisdall and 4182
Private A. Young came upon them unexpectedly, and owing to the
former’s coolness and the latter’s vigorous offensive action with
rifle and bombs, the hostile party, about twenty, fled.” The Diary
is never emotional in such little matters as these, and the officers
concerned say less than nothing. It is the old-timers among the men
who cherish memories of the “vigorous offensive” action. No pen dare
put on paper the speech of the orderly who, with rifle and bomb,
erupts along the trench or over the edge of the shell-crater either
in deadly silence or with threatenings and slaughter in his own
dialect, and, when the quick grisly business is over, convulses his
associates with his private version of it.

The orderly got the D.C.M. and the officer the Military Cross.

The enemy retaliated next night by shelling the support line and
wounded seven men just as the Battalion was going into rest and
was relieved late, which they noticed with deep displeasure, by a
battalion of the Twentieth Division.

The 20th May saw them in the clean back-area at the pleasant
well-treed village of Longuenesse, three miles south-west of St.
Omer, all together in good billets and plenty of clean straw at one
farm; Headquarters at a neighbouring château, the 2nd Coldstream,
their particular friends with them, and the other battalions of their
brigade at villages near by. The weather was good; for a week at
least work was reasonable, and they all went to pay a visit disguised
as a “Battalion Drill” to the parade ground of the cadet-school at
Blendecques, of which Lieutenant J. Halligan, late Orderly-Room
Quartermaster-Sergeant of the Battalion, was Adjutant. It is
reasonable to infer that the Russian General at the Poperinghe camp
got no better in the way of a ceremonial parade than did their old
comrade.

The shadow of preparations for the Somme fell over them afterwards.
They dug quadruple lines of trenches and assaulted them in full kit
with gas helmets; and found time, between whiles, to hold a boxing
competition, at which the 12th Lancers arrived with “their private
Young,” who was defeated by the Battalion’s Company Sergeant-Major
Voyles. These things are as sacred as the Eton dinner at St. Omer on
the 3rd June, which seven officers from the Battalion attended.

On the 7th June they moved on a twelve-mile march to Hondeghem, under
Cassel, _en route_ for a Poperinghe camp once more, and developed
several cases of sore feet. This was put down to a “bad issue of
socks,” but it supports the theory of the Sergeant’s Mess, that
nothing but careful inspection, coupled with steady route-marching,
can “put a foot” on men who have been paddling in trench-mud with
twisted, water-logged boots.

At Poperinghe they were coolies again till they went into line on the
15th June. A permanent fatigue-party of 150, under 2nd Lieutenants
Hegarty and Earle, was sent to the Engineers near Ypres. Another, a
hundred strong, helped to bury field-cables by night at Brielen on
the Ypres-Elverdinghe road, a place much sought after by the enemy’s
artillery. But digging is reckoned better than drill, and their next
tour of duty was to be a wearisome one. Lieutenant J. N. Marshall
from the Entrenching Battalion joined on the 15th, and Lieutenant J.
K. Greer took command of No. 1 Company, Lieutenant Law being on a
course.

They relieved the 11th Essex and the 8th Bedfordshires (Sixth
Division) on the night of the 16th, in the surprisingly short time
of one hour, which was nearly a record and showed that all hands
were abreast of their work. Their new sector lay north-west of
Wieltje and due north of Ypres, covering the Ypres-Pilckem road,
with supports at Lancashire farm, and the Battalion Headquarters amid
loose bricks and mud on the Canal bank. The trenches were bad; only
one communication-trench (Skipton Road) was moderately dry, and the
parapets were thin, low and badly gapped, which gave enemy snipers
their chance. Two men were killed outright the first day; one died of
wounds and four were wounded.

No Man’s Land at this point was several hundred yards deep, and
covered with long grass and weeds. The periscopes soon learned to
know that poppies and thistles grew brightest and tallest round the
edges of shell-holes, and since shell-holes meant cover, all patrols
directed their belly-flat course to them.

On the 18th June officer patrols went out to look at the enemy’s
wire. Second Lieutenant F. H. N. Lee was wounded in the leg while
close to it, and was carried back by No. 3836 Corporal Redmond; dying
later of gangrene. Another officer, Lieutenant Hon. P. Ogilvy, ran
by mistake into wire on his return journey, and had to fight his way
back with his orderly. One man was killed and one wounded, besides
the wounded officer.

On the 19th Lieutenant J. N. Marshall, while out with a
working-party, was sniped in the arm, but finished his work before
reporting it. A man was killed and two were wounded. “The day was
normal--probably the quietest of the tour,” says the Diary, but
one may be certain that certain inconspicuous German snipers were
congratulating themselves on their bag. The bulk of the trouble came
from five old dug-outs known as the “Canadian dug-outs,” some two or
three hundred yards away, which had once been in our hands. These had
been wired round collectively and individually, and their grass-grown
irregular moundage made perfect snipers’ nests.

The Battalion lay, from the 21st to the 23rd June, in shelters round
and cellars beneath Elverdinghe Château, the trees of which were
still standing, so that it was possible to put in an inspection and
a little drill beneath them, but careful watch had to be kept for
hostile aeroplanes. Drill under these circumstances is discipline
of the highest. “’Tis not the dhrill, ye’ll understand, but the
not budgin’ in the ranks that’s so hard to come by. For, ye’ll
understand, that you can’t help liftin’ an eye when you hear _them_
buzzin’ above. And, of course, if a man budges on parade, he’ll be
restless when he’s shelled.”

Our artillery had been cutting German wire on the front of the
Division with the idea of raids to follow. Consequently, there was
night-firing on both sides when the Battalion went back on the 24th.
The trenches had been a little improved, and one man only was killed
and one wounded by the snipers.

On the 26th June four men were sniped. On the 27th June wire-cutting
by our guns drew heavy retaliation from the enemy. Lieutenant F. L.
Pusch, D.S.O., as brave a man as the War made, who had only come up
from the Entrenching Battalion a few days before, was sniped and
killed at once. He had gone with his orderly to pick up a wounded man
in a trench, and both were hit by the same bullet. The sniper did his
best to kill Private Carroll, who dragged the wounded man and the
officer’s body under cover. Private Carroll was awarded the Military
Medal for this. Four dead and seven wounded were that night’s total.

The 28th June was the worst of that tour. The enemy opened on
the trenches and supports through night and day with everything
available, down to aerial torpedoes, killing five men and wounding
eight.

The casualties for a “quiet” twelve days’ tour, including three days
only in the front line, were three officers and forty-seven other
ranks killed and wounded. Some of the credit of this must go to the
German snipers, who, working without noise or display, gave the
Battalion the idea there was nothing much doing. The brutal outcry of
artillery, its visible effect on the ground--above all, the deadly
accuracy of the single aimed shells on the well-registered trench
from which none must move--upset men sometimes more than repeated
single casualties in the front line, which can be hurried off round
the traverses without rousing more than a few companions.

They lay for a week beneath the trees near Poperinghe and started
inter-platoon bombing competitions to “accustom the men to throw
overarm without jerking.” These little events forbade monotony, and
were sometimes rather like real warfare, for not every one can be
trusted to deliver a ball accurately when he is throwing in against
time.


THE SOMME

Meanwhile, Verdun had been in the fire since February, there was no
sign of the attacks on it weakening, and France and the world looked
uneasily at that dread point of contact where men and stuff consumed
as the carbon of arc-lights consumes in the current. It was time
that England should take the strain, even though her troops were not
fully trained or her guns yet free to spend shells as the needs of
the War demanded. What had gone before was merely the initial deposit
on the price of national unpreparedness; what was to come, no more
than a first instalment. It was vital to save Verdun; to so hold the
enemy on the western front that he could not send too much help to
his eastern line or his Austrian allies, who lay heavy on the Italian
Army: most vital, to kill as many Germans as possible.

The main strength, the actual spine of the position, so far as the
British front was concerned, was some twenty-five miles of high
ground forming the water-shed between the Somme and the rivers of
southern Belgium, which ran, roughly, from Maricourt in the south,
where our line joined the French, to Gomiecourt in the north. Here
the enemy had sat untroubled for two years, looking down upon
France and daily strengthening himself. His trebled and quadrupled
lines of defence, worked for him by his prisoners, ran below and
along the flanks and on the tops of five-hundred-foot downs. Some
of these were studded with close woods, deadlier even than the
fortified villages between them; some cut with narrowing valleys
that drew machine-gun fire as chimneys draw drafts; some opening
into broad, seemingly smooth slopes, whose every haunch and hollow
covered sunk forts, carefully placed mine-fields, machine-gun pits,
gigantic quarries, enlarged in the chalk, connecting with systems
of catacomb-like dug-outs and subterranean works at all depths, in
which brigades could lie till the fitting moment. Belt upon belt of
fifty-yard-deep wire protected these points, either directly or at
such angles as should herd and hold up attacking infantry to the fire
of veiled guns. Nothing in the entire system had been neglected or
unforeseen, except knowledge of the nature of the men, who in due
time, should wear their red way through every yard of it.

Neither side attempted to conceal their plans. The work of our airmen
would have been enough to have warned the enemy what was intended,
even had his own men overlooked the immense assembly of troops and
guns in a breadth of country that had been remodelled for their
needs, above ground and below. Our battalions in the Salient, where
the unmolested German aeroplanes bombed them, knew well enough that,
in the phrase of the moment, “everything had gone south,” and our
listening-posts in the front line round Ypres could tell very fairly
when a German “demonstration” was prompted by natural vice or orders
to cover a noisy withdrawal of their guns in the same direction. It
did not need placards in English, “Come on, we are ready for you!”
which were hoisted in some of the German trenches on that Somme front
to make men wiser than they had been for weeks past.

Side by side with this elaborate and particular knowledge, plus a
multitude of camp-rumours, even more circumstantial, was the immense
incuriousness that always exists in veteran armies. Fresh drafts
would pour out from England filled with vain questions and the
hope of that immediate “open warfare,” so widely advertised, to be
told they would know all about it when their turn came, and that,
meantime, deep trenches were not bad things after all. When they
had looked for a little on the full face of war, they were content
to copy their elders and ask no questions. They understood it was
to be a wearing-out battle. Very many men had already been worn out
and cast aside in the mere detail of preparation, in building the
light and broad-gauge railways of supply and the roads beside them;
in fetching up and installing timber, hutments, hangars, telephones,
hospitals, pipe-lines for water, and the thousand other necessities
of mechanical war. As it happened to individuals, so, they knew,
would it be with the battalions, brigades and divisions of all the
armies which General Rawlinson on the 1st of July moved up against
that fortress of a whole countryside, called in history “The Somme.”

And while that storm gathered and broke, the Battalion went on with
its horrible necessary work in the Salient till the hour should come
for it and its Division to be cast into the furnace and used up with
the rest.

On the 7th July they moved as a support to the broken and filthy
banks of the Canal north of Ypres and sat in dug-outs connected by
a tunnel and begirt with water and mud. Except for a mere nightly
fatigue of a couple of hundred men, the Diary noted that “there
was no training possible but there was little shelling.” The 2nd
Grenadiers were in the line which the Battalion relieved (11th July)
on a broken and marshy front, between Buffs Road and Forward Cottage
with Battalion Headquarters near St. Jean and the 3rd Coldstream on
their left. They were shelled during relief, when Lieutenant Christy,
who, but a little while before, had just escaped a sniper’s bullet
through the loophole, was killed.

That same morning four Germans wormed their way through the rank
grass and broken ground and for a while almost captured an isolated
post of six men of No. 1 Company. They tried, indeed, to march them
off as prisoners, but the Irish edged away under cover of the next
platoon’s fire, and all got back safely. The day closed with heavy
bombardments from 5.9’s. An officer and three other ranks killed and
seventeen wounded were counted as a light casualty-list “considering
the bad cover.” No man could stand upright for an instant, and all
repairs, parapets, and drainage work were done at night, stooping and
crawling between spurts of machine-gun hose-work.

The 13th July was another “light” day with but seven men wounded.
Second Lieutenant G. V. Williams joined from the base and Major C. F.
Fleming went sick on the 14th. The sector being rather too active and
noisy of nights just then, a patrol under Lieutenant J. N. Marshall
went out to see what the enemy might intend in the way of digging a
sap across “No Man’s Land.” The Lieutenant was wounded in the side
as he left the trench, but insisted on doing his work and was out
two hours; for which he paid by having to go into hospital a month
later. Their casualties on the 15th, when they were relieved by the
2nd Grenadiers and went back to their dug-outs by the Canal, were
five wounded, one of whom died. Out of this tense life were suddenly
chosen an officer and twenty men to form part of the contingent
representing our armies at the French review in Paris on the 14th
July. They were chiefly veterans of 1914, and under Captain J. S. N.
FitzGerald, then of the 2nd Battalion, repaired to a bright clean
city where a man could hold up his head, walking in unchoked streets
between roofed and glazed houses: and the day after the glittering
affair was over they returned to their brick-heaps and burrows in the
Flanders mire.

On the Battalion’s next turn (July 18-22), suspecting that the enemy
might be newly relieved, our patrols worked hard night after night
to catch prisoners for identification purposes. 2346 Lance-Corporal
Hennigan, a regimental “character” and a man of strong powers of
leadership, with 5743 Private O’Brien, of whom, too, many tales are
told, were marked as “very prominent in the work.” But the Germans
took great care not to leave men or corpses about, and they got
nothing for their toil.

On the 23rd July orders came that their expected term of rest was to
be cancelled as the Division would go “elsewhere,” which all knew
meant towards the Somme. There were five days yet ere the Battalion
drew clear of the Salient, each day with its almost unnoticed
casualty that in the long run makes the bulk of the bills of war, and
brings home the fact that the life-blood of the Battalion is dripping
away. The support platoons were reckoned lucky to have only one man
killed on the 23rd after bombardment by a six-inch high-explosive
gun. Captain Pollok, who took over command of No. 1 Company on
the same day, was wounded two days later, just after relief, by a
machine-gun bullet; and their last “normal” day in the trenches gave
one sergeant killed and three other ranks wounded.

They were relieved on the 27th July, after dark as usual, by the
1st Royal Warwicks, “recently come from the south, having been in
the fighting there.” The Warwicks knew “The Somme.” They looked on
the clean, creosoted, deep-bayed, high-parapeted trenches they were
to hold and announced that they would feel “cushy” in such a line.
“Cushy!” said the Brigade. “Wait till you’ve had to live in ’em!”
“But,” said the Warwicks, “you see, _we_’ve been fighting.” The large
Guardsmen looked at the little worn Linesmen and swallowed it in
silence. The 4th Division, to which the Warwicks belonged, had been
part of that terrible northern attack along the line from Serre to
Fricourt, which had spent itself in vain against the German defence
a month before, and had been ground and milled day by day since. But
all that the Diary notices is that that last relief was “carried out
smoothly and quietly” in what to the Warwicks, after such experience,
must have been grateful peace.

After their three weeks in dug-outs, the Battalion rested and washed
south of merry Poperinghe which had been heavily shelled and for
some days completely evacuated.

Between March 18 and July 18, excluding four weeks in rest, they had
lost four officers and thirty other ranks killed; five officers and a
hundred and fifty-three other ranks wounded--a total of one hundred
and ninety-two, in the mere routine of the slow days.

There was a saying of the war, “no one notices weather in the front
line”; and it is curious that, so soon as the Battalion was above
ground, walking under naked skies with light and air all round
it, men dwelt on weather as almost a new discovery. They found it
hot when the Division entrained at Proven for St. Pol. Forty-two
trains took the Division and forty-seven lorries bore the Battalion
itself from St. Pol to Bouque-Maison on the Doullens road. There,
Headquarters were in an orchard beneath unbarked trees with leaves on
the branches and a background of gun-voices from the Somme, to remind
the men who laughed and talked in that shadow and sun what waited for
them after this short return to real life.

They moved on the 4th August to Vauchelles-les-Authies, the
matchboard huts of which, on the trampled ground, have been likened
to a “demobbed poultry show.” It lay just off the well-worn
Doullens-Albert road, now flooded with a steady current of troops
and material. They waited there for ten days. During that time 2nd
Lieutenant Cook (4th Connaught Rangers), Lieutenant T. Butler-Stoney
from the Entrenching Battalion, and Lieutenant N. Butler from
Hospital joined them.

The Regimental Band arrived from England for a three months’ tour.
The officer who accompanied it wore a wound-stripe--the very first
which the Battalion collectively had ever seen--and men wondered
whether wound-stripes would become common, and how many one might
accumulate. It was removed from the officer by laughing friends, as
a matter something too suggestive in present company, and the band
played in the still warm evenings, while the dust of feet going
Sommeward rose and stretched unbroken along the Doullens-Albert
pavé. Here the very tree-boles, before they began to be stripped and
splintered by shell-fire, were worn and rubbed beneath the touch of
men’s shoulders and gnawed by the halted horses.

The King came on the 9th August to visit the Division. Special
arrangements were impossible, so bombing-assault practice went
on, while the officers of the Battalion were presented to him “in
the orchard where the messes were pitched.” He made no orations,
uttered no threats against his enemies, nor guaranteed the personal
assistance of any tribal God. His regiments merely turned out and
cheered the inconspicuous car as long as they could see it. But there
is a story that a Frenchman, an old Royalist, in whose wood some
officers had rigged a temporary hut of which he highly disapproved,
withdrew every claim and complaint on the promise that the chair in
which the King of England had sat should be handed over to him, duly
certificated. Which was done.

On the 11th the Brigade moved over the open country _via_ Louvencourt
and Bertrancourt to the woods south of Mailly-Maillet, a six-mile
march in hot and dusty weather, and the Brigade (2nd Grenadiers,
3rd Coldstream, 2nd Coldstream in reserve and 1st Irish Guards in
support) took over trenches east of Englebelmer and “well within the
shell area.” Thiepval and the Schwaben redoubt across the Ancre were
only a thousand yards away and unsubdued; and, for a while, it looked
as though that weary corner of death was to be the Guards’ objective.
But, next day, orders came to move out of the line again, back to
high and breezy Louvencourt in warm rain, taking over billets from
the 2nd Sherwood Foresters and, by immense good luck, coming across
a heaven-sent Expeditionary Force Canteen, a thing not often found
in front-line billets. Upon this, pay was at once arranged for, and
every one shopped at large. The incident stayed in their minds long
after the details of mere battles were forgotten, and “that canteen
at Louvencourt” is a landmark of old memories.

By this date the battle of the Somme was six weeks old, and our
troops had eaten several--in some places as much as five or
six--thousand yards deep into the area. Two main attacks had been
delivered--that of the 1st July, which had lasted till the 14th,
and that of the 14th, which went on till the end of the month.
From Serre to Ovillers-la-Boiselle the Germans’ front stood fast;
from Ovillers-la-Boiselle to the junction with the French armies
at Hardecourt, the first tremendous system of their defence had
been taken literally a few score yards at a time, trench by trench,
village by village, quarry by quarry, and copse by copse, lost, won,
and held again from three to eight or nine times. A surge forward
on some part of the line might succeed in making good a few hundred
yards of gain without too heavy loss. An isolated attack, necessary
to clear a flank or to struggle towards some point of larger command,
withered under enormous far concentrations of enemy guns, even as
the woods withered to snapped, charred stickage. At every step and
turn, hosts of machine-guns at ground-level swept and shaved the
forlorn landscapes; and when the utmost had been done for the day,
the displaced Germans seemed always to occupy the crest of some yet
higher down. Villages and woods vanished in the taking; were stamped
into, or blown out of, the ground, leaving only their imperishable
names. So, in the course of inconceivable weeks fell Mametz and the
ranked woods behind it, Contalmaison, Montauban, and Caterpillar
Wood, Bernafay, Trônes Wood, Longueval, and the fringe of Delville
(even then a charnel-house among shattered stumps), both Bazentins,
and Pozières of the Australians. The few decencies and accommodations
of the old settled trench-life were gone; men lived as best they
could in the open among eternal shell-holes and mounds of heaped
rubbish that were liable at any moment to be dispersed afresh; under
constant menace of gas, blinded with the smoke-screens of local
attacks, and beaten down from every point of the compass either
by enemy fire, suddenly gathered and loosed, or that of their own
heavies searching, from miles off, some newly cleared hollow or
skyline of the uplands where our troops lay indistinguishable from
the skinned earth.

Battalions, brigades, and divisions went into the fight, were worn
down in more or in less time, precisely as the chances of the ground
either screened or exposed them for a while to the fire-blasts.
Sometimes it was only a matter of hours before what had been a
brigade ceased to exist--had soaked horribly into the ground. The
wastage was brought down and back across the shell-holes as well
as might be, losses were made good, and with a half, two thirds,
or three quarters, new drafts, the original Battalion climbed
back to its task. While some development behind the next fold of
land was in progress or brought to a standstill, they would be
concerned only with the life-and-death geography of the few hundred
yards immediately about them, or those few score yards over which
profitable advances could be made. A day, even an hour, later, the
use and value of their own hollow or ridge might be altogether
abolished. What had been a hardly won foothold would become the very
pivot of a central attack, or subside into a sheltered haven of
refuge, as the next dominating ridge or lap of the large-boned French
landscape was cleared. Equally suddenly, even while the men thanked
God for their respite, German batteries or a suddenly pushed-forth
chain of German machine-guns would pound or spray their shelter into
exposed torment once more.

As one philosopher of that unearthly epoch put it some time
afterwards: “We was like fleas in a blanket, ye’ll understand, seein’
no more than the next nearest wrinkle. But Jerry and our Generals,
ye’ll understand, they kept us hoppin’.”

“Our Generals,” who, it may be presumed, knew all the wrinkles of
the blanket, shifted the Brigade on the 16th August opposite Serre
on the far left of the line, which was not destined to be pierced
till the next year. It was a fleeting transfer to another Army Corps;
their own, the Fourteenth, under Lord Cavan, having joined the Fourth
Army. They took over from the Somerset L.I. (61st Brigade) a set of
trenches which, after their experiences in the Salient, struck them
as dry, deep and good, but odd and unhomely. They had been French,
were from six to nine feet deep, paved in places with stone, which
our men had never seen in trenches before, and revetted with strange
French stickwork. The dug-outs, too, were not of their standard
patterns. The front line was badly battered, but reliefs could be
effected in broad daylight without casualties. The activities and
comforting presence of our aeroplanes impressed them also as a great
contrast to Ypres, where, naturally, our troops for the moment held
only a watching-brief and every machine that could be spared had gone
to the Somme. The dead of the opening battles lay thick about the
place. The Irish buried two hundred of a division that had passed
that way, five weeks or so before, and salved, with amazement at
its plenty, the wreckage of their equipment. “There’s the world
and all out there, Sorr,” said a man returning from his work. “The
very world an’ all! Machine-guns and”--his voice dropping in sheer
awe--“rum-jars!” They were unmolested, save by a few minenwerfers.
Undertaker’s work does not hearten any troops, and they were glad to
get back to hutments in the untouched woods behind Authie, near their
old “poultry-show.” During these days 2nd Lieutenants J. N. Ward
and T. Gibson joined from home, the latter going to the first-line
transport and Captain L. R. Hargreaves took over No. 2 Company on
joining from home on the 20th.

On the 23rd August they moved with the Brigade across to Beauval on
the Doullens-Amiens road (where camps and hutments almost touched
each other), and on the 25th embarked at Canaples in a horror called
a “tactical train,” which was stuffed with two thousand of their
brigade. After slow and spasmodic efforts it bore them quite fifty
kilometres in seven hours to Méricourt l’Abbé, whence they marched to
Méaulte in a green hollow under the downs, and found themselves once
more in their own Fourteenth Corps under Lord Cavan. More immediately
to the point, and a thing long remembered, their billets were damp,
dirty, and full of fleas; the weather that was destined to ruin the
campaign broke in torrents of rain, and the continuous traffic of
stuff had knocked the very bowels out of all the hard-worked roads.
This was the first time they realised what the grey clinging Somme
mud meant.

They trained in that wet at bombing, at assaulting from trenches, at
visual signalling to aeroplanes, and at marking out trenches by night
with white tapes, as scores of thousands had done before them, while
the roar of the guns rose and dropped without explanation, like the
tumult of unseen crowds; and rumours and contradictory orders for
standing fast or leaving on the instant kept them in tension for ten
days. But, most wonderful of all to the men from The Salient, where
silence and guarded movement were automatic, was the loud life of
this open-air world of troops around them--men and guns spread over
the breadth of counties--horses in the open by thousands ranked in
endless horse-lines--processions of roaring lorries and deep-rumbling
heavy guns; and, only a few miles away--the war in full blast. It was
possible to catch a ride in a lorry and go up and see “The War,” as
the saying ran. Yonder, but a very little way, stretched horizons,
downs, and tablelands as far as imagination could range. All the
firmament groaned to the artillery hidden and striving within them;
and statelily, and regularly and unceasingly, the vast spaces of
open were plumed with vertical columns of changeful shell-smoke.
Men perceived that everything they had known, till then, had been a
field-day. Here was The War!

A story that a wonderful new weapon would soon appear was very
general. Some one had half-seen or been told about the tanks in their
well-screened shelters; one or two over-zealous English journals had
been industriously hinting at the developments of science; the enemy
was uneasy, and, German-fashion, had issued portentous instruction to
his men to be on their guard against something. But, however short
his training, the British infantryman is a born scoffer. “We had
heard about moving forts that weighed thirty ton,” said one of them.
“Whatever it might be, we knew we’d have to take the thick o’ the
coffee.”

The local battles and operations on the southern stretch of the
front, now immediately in front of the Battalion, were almost as
indistinguishable as waves on a beach that melt into or rise out of
each other in the main flood. But there was a fresh tidal movement
at the beginning of September, when our whole line attacked again,
in conjunction with the French. We gained nothing of any account in
the north, but in the south Guillemont fell, and, after desperate
attack and counter-attack, almost all of Ginchy and the whole
thousand-yard-square of Delville Wood and the south end of High Wood.

The net result up to the middle of September had been to advance and
establish the centre of our line on the crest of the high ground
from Delville Wood to the road above Mouquet farm (Thiepval and its
outworks still untaken), so that we had observation over the slopes
ahead. From Delville Wood eastward to Leuze--historically known as
“Lousy” Wood--overlooking the little town of Combles on our right
flank, our advance held the main ridge of land there, but had not
gone beyond it. Still farther east, across the valley where Combles
stood, the French were working north along the heights towards
Sailly-Saillisel, three thousand yards away. Their line was pinched
on the right by the big St. Pierre Vaast woods, fortified throughout.
Their left was almost equally constricted by the valley where
Combles, among its quarries and hidden shelters, squatted and dealt
death, which all the heights to the north--Morval, Lesbœufs and Le
Transloy--joined, with Sailly-Saillisel and St. Pierre Vaast in the
east, to make more sure. It was necessary, then, to free the ground
at the junction of the two armies in the direction of Morval, which
commanded far too complete a fire; and also beyond Ginchy towards
Lesbœufs, where the outlying spurs of high land raked “Lousy” Wood.

That clearing-up, a comparatively small detail on a vast front, fell
to the lot of the Fourteenth Army Corps (Lord Cavan commanding),
which lay between Ginchy village and Leuze Wood. The Corps was made
up of the Fifty-sixth London Territorial Division, on the extreme
right or east, next to the French; the Sixth Division, a little north
of Leuze Wood, facing the Quadrilateral, a veiled defensive work as
strong as ample time and the ground could make it, and destined to
turn the fortunes of that day; and on the left of the Sixth, again,
the Guards Division in front of what remained of Ginchy, Ginchy farm
and orchard, all strongly held by the Germans, and some battered
brick-fields hard by.

Lord Cavan did not overstate the case in his message to the Guards
Division just before the attack when he wrote: “The Corps Commander
knows that there are difficulties to be cleared up on the left and in
front of the 1st Guards Brigade and on the right of the 2nd Guards
Brigade, but the Commander-in-Chief is of opinion that the general
situation is so favourable that every effort should be made to take
advantage of it, etc., etc.”

A battalion looks at life from a more limited standpoint. Brigade
Orders issued on the 11th September announced: “The French Army
will attack the enemy defences between Combles Ravine, and
Martinpuich on Z day, with the object of seizing Morval, Lesbœufs,
Gueudecourt and Flers, and breaking through the enemy’s defences.”
But what interested the Irish, who prefer fighting light, even as
the Frenchman can shuffle into action under all his high-piled
possessions, was the amount of weight they would have to carry up
there. It included two days’ rations, a couple of bombs, two extra
bandoliers of ammunition, a pick or a shovel and three sandbags
per man, plus wire-cutters and other fittings. On the other hand,
greatcoats and packs were discarded and cardigan waistcoats worn
beneath their jackets.

On the 10th September the Battalion, with the 1st Brigade, moved in
from Méaulte to the valley behind Carnoy, and, after dark that night,
Nos. 3 and 4 Companies, under Major T. M. D. Bailie, were ordered up
through Bernafay Wood to a line of what passed for trenches behind
Ginchy, and next morning Nos. 1 and 2 (Captain Hargreaves and Captain
Rankin) bivouacked in some old trenches at the north end of Bernafay,
where they were used in carrying-fatigues for the 3rd Guards Brigade,
then in the front line. The other two companies were heavily shelled
in their Ginchy trenches, and lost seven killed and thirteen wounded.
A bombing accident in bivouac the day before had also wounded six men.

On the 12th September No. 1 Company, stationed in a small copse near
Trônes Wood, which was choked with wreckage and dead, had three of
their Lewis-gunners killed and five wounded by a single shell.

On the 13th September the Battalion spent a quiet day (with only one
killed and seven wounded), except for a deadly tiring fatigue of
carrying bombs to Guillemont under shell-fire. Our artillery began
on the 12th, and continued day and night without much break till the
hour of advance on the 15th, when it changed to the duly ordered
stationary and creeping barrages of the field-guns.


THE 15TH SEPTEMBER

On the evening of the 14th, the 1st Brigade of Guards moved out
to the shell-holes and fragments of trench that formed their
assembly-positions, on a front of five hundred yards between Delville
Wood and the northern flank of Ginchy. There it lay in the cold with
the others till “Zero,” 6.20 A. M. of the 15th. The 2nd and 3rd
Coldstream had the front line, for they were to lead the attack;
the 2nd Grenadiers lay behind to support them and consolidate
the first objective--a line of trench about twelve hundred yards
north-east--and to hold it till the 1st Irish Guards came up and
had passed through them. Then, if the flanks were secure, the 2nd
Grenadiers were to come on and support in turn. The 1st Irish Guards
were to pass through the 2nd and 3rd Coldstream after the latter
battalions had reached the third objective, another line of trench
twenty-five hundred yards off, and were thence to go and take the
final objective--the northern outskirts of Lesbœufs, thirty-five
hundred yards from their jumping-off place. There was a limited
objective, three hundred yards beyond the first, which worked in with
the advance towards Flers of the divisions on the left of the Guards
from Delville Wood to Martinpuich. It was supposed to concern only
the Battalion (2nd Coldstream) on the left flank of the 1st Brigade.

Incidentally, it was announced that as soon as all the objectives had
been seized, “Cavalry would advance and seize the heights ahead.”

The Battalion formed up north-west of Ginchy in two lines, facing
north-east. Nos. 3 and 4 Companies in the first line; 1 and 2 in the
second on the right, commanded as follows:

  No. 1, Lieutenant J. K. Greer, M.C.
  No. 2, Captain R. Rankin.
  No. 3, Captain C. Pease.
  No. 4, Captain P. S. Long-Innes.

Captain L. R. Hargreaves, Lieutenants the Hon. P. J. Ogilvy, and
R. Rodakowski, 2nd Lieutenant T. C. Gibson, and C.S.M. Voyles and
Farrell were left in reserve. Lieutenant L. C. Whitefoord and his
section of the Brigade Machine-gun Company was attached to the
Battalion.

[Illustration:

  _THE SOMME_
  _First Battalion_
  _1916-1917-1918_

  _Emery Walker Ltd. del. et sc._]

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY EMERY WALKER LTD., LONDON

They waited the hour and occupied themselves, many times over, with
trivial details, repetitions of orders and comparisons of watches and
compasses. (Their compass-bearing, by the way, was N. 37, or within
a shade of North North-east.) Every one noticed that every one else
fussed a little, and rather resented it. The doctor and the priest
seemed to loom unnaturally large, and the sergeants were busier than
was necessary over shortcomings, till ten minutes or so before Zero,
Father Browne, who had given Absolution, spoke to the companies
one by one as they knelt before him, their bayonets fixed and the
searching dawn-light on their faces. He reminded them that that day
was one set apart to Our Lady, and, ere many minutes, not few of them
would be presenting their homage to Her in person. They realised that
he told no more than truth.

Through some accident, Zero had been a little mis-timed, and the
troops left their lairs, not under the roar and swish of their own
barrage, but in a silence which lasted perhaps less than a minute,
but which seemed endless. They felt, one man averred, like amateur
actors upon whom the curtain unexpectedly rises. The enemy, not
looking for the attack, were only expending occasional shots, which
emphasised the awful loneliness and exposure of it all, till, with
a wrench that jerked the ground, our barrage opened, the enemy’s
counter-barrage, replied, and through a haze of flying dirt No. 1
Company of the Irish saw a platoon of Coldstream in front of them
crumped out of existence in one flash and roar. After that, the
lines moved into a blizzard of shell and machine-gun fire where all
landmarks were indistinguishable in the upheaval of explosives. (“We
might as well have tried to guide ourselves by the waves of the
sea--the way they spouted up.”)

There naturally cannot be any definite or accurate record of the
day’s work. Even had maps been issued to the officers a week, instead
of a day or so, before the attack; even had those maps marked all
known danger-points--such as the Ginchy-Flers sunk road; even had
the kaleidoscopic instructions about the brown and yellow lines been
more intelligible, or had the village of Ginchy been distinguishable
from a map of the pitted moon--once the affair was launched, there
was little chance of seeing far or living long. The two leading
platoons of No. 3 Company following the Coldstream, charged, through
the ripping fire that came out of Ginchy orchard, to the German
first-line trench which ran from the sunken road at that point.
The others came behind them, cheering their way into the sleet of
machine-gun fire. The true line of advance was north-easterly, but
the 2nd Guards Brigade on the right of the 1st, caught very heavily
by the German barrage on their right flank, closed in towards the
1st Brigade and edged it more northward; so that, about an hour and
a half after the advance began, what the countless machine-guns had
left of the Irish found itself with three out of its four company
commanders already casualties, all officers of No. 2 Company out
of action, and the second in command, Major T. M. D. Bailie,
killed. They were held up under heavy shelling, either in front
of German wire, or, approximately, on the first-line objective--a
battered German trench, which our artillery had done its best to
obliterate, but fortunately had failed in parts. With the Irish were
representatives of every unit of the 1st and 2nd Brigades, mostly
lacking officers, and some fresh troops of the Fourteenth Division
from the left of the line. Outside their area, the Sixth Division’s
attacks between Ginchy Telegraph and Leuze Wood had failed, thanks to
a driving fire from the Quadrilateral, the great fortified work that
controlled the landscape for a mile and a half; so the right flank of
the Guards Division was left in the air, the enemy zealously trying
to turn it--bomb _versus_ bayonet.

Judgment of time and distance had gone with the stress and roar
around. The two attacking battalions (2nd and 3rd Coldstream) of the
1st Brigade had more or less gone too--were either dead or dispersed
into small parties, dodging among smoking shell-holes. The others
were under the impression that they had won at least two of the
three objectives--an error due to the fact that they had found and
fought over a trench full of enemy where no such obstacle had been
indicated. Suddenly a party of snipers and machine-guns appeared
behind the Irish in a communication-trench, fired at large, as much
out of bewilderment as design, wounded the sole surviving company
officer of the four companies (Lieutenant J. K. Greer), and owing
to the jamming of our Lewis-guns got away to be killed elsewhere. A
mass of surrendering Germans, disturbed by the advance of a division
on the left, drifted across them and further blinded the situation.
Nobody knew within hundreds of yards where they were, but since it
was obvious that the whole attack of the Division, pressed, after the
failure of the Sixth Division, by the fire from the Quadrilateral,
had sheered too far towards the left or north, the need of the moment
was to shift the men of the 2nd Guards Brigade back along the trench
towards their own area; to sort out the mixed mass of officerless men
on the left; and to make them dig in before the vicious, spasmodic
shelling of the congested line turned into the full roll of the
German barrage.

They cleared out, as best they could, the mixed English and German
bodies that paved the bottom of the trench, and toiled desperately
at the wreckage--splinters and concrete from blown-in dug-outs,
earth-slides and collapses of head-cover by yards at a time, all
mingled or besmeared with horrors and filth that a shell would
suddenly increase under their hands. Men could give hideous isolated
experiences of their own--it seemed to each survivor that he had
worked for a lifetime in a world apart--but no man could recall
any connected order of events, and the exact hour and surroundings
wherein such and such a man--private, N.C.O., or officer--met his
death are still in dispute. It was a still day, and the reeking,
chemical-tainted fog of the high explosives would not clear. Orders
would be given and taken by men suddenly appearing and as suddenly
vanishing through smoke or across fallen earth, till both would
be cut off in the middle by a rifle bullet, or beaten down by the
stamp and vomit of a shell. There was, too, always a crowd of men
seated or in fantastic attitudes, silent, with set absorbed faces,
busily engaged in trying to tie up, staunch, or plug their own
wounds--to save their own single lives with their own hands. When
orders came to these they would shake their heads impatiently and go
on with their urgent, horrible business. Others, beyond hope, but
not consciousness, lamented themselves into death. The Diary covers
these experiences of the three hours between 8 A. M. and 11 A. M.
with the words: “In the meantime, despite rather heavy shelling, a
certain amount of consolidation was done on the trench while the
work of reorganization was continued.” In the meantime, also, some
of the Coldstream battalions, mixed with a few men of the Irish
Guards, the latter commanded by Lieutenant W. Mumford, had rushed
on into the wilderness beyond the trench towards the brown line, or
what was supposed to be the brown line, three hundred yards or so
ahead, and for the moment had been lost. About half-past eleven the
Commanding Officer, the Adjutant, and 2nd Lieutenant G. V. Williams
and Lieutenant L. C. Whitefoord of the 1st Guards Brigade Machine-gun
Company, who represented all that was left of the officers, went
forward with all that was left of the Irish Guards and all available,
not too badly wounded Coldstreamers, towards the next objective.
Every one was glad to step out from the sickening trench into the
wire-trapped, shell-ploughed open whence the worst of the German
barrage had lifted, though enemy machine-guns were cropping it
irregularly. Their road lay uphill through a field of rank, unweeded
stuff, and, when they had topped a little rise, they saw what seemed,
by comparison, untouched country where houses had some roofs on them
and trees some branches, all laid out ahead, in the hot sunshine
between Flers and Lesbœufs. There were figures in the landscape
too--Germans on the move with batteries and transport--an enemy in
sight at last and, by the look of them, moving away. Then a German
field-battery, also in the open, pulled up and methodically shelled
them. They came upon a shallow trench littered with wreckage,
scraped themselves in, and there found some more of the Division,
while the German battery continued to find them. In the long run,
that trench, which had been a German covered-way for guns, came
to hold about sixty of the 1st Irish Guards, thirty of the 2nd
Grenadiers under Captain A. F. S. Cunningham, and a hundred or so of
both Battalions Coldstream under Colonel J. V. Campbell, the senior
officer present. Somewhere on the left front of it, fifteen of the
Irish were found lying out in shell-holes under C. S. M. Carton and
Sergeant Riordan. They were in touch, so far as touch existed then,
with the 9th Rifle Brigade on their left, but it was not advisable to
show one’s head above a shell-hole on account of enemy machine-guns
which were vividly in touch with everything that moved. Their right
was all in the air, and for the second time no one knew--no one could
know--where the trench in which they lay was situated in the existing
chaos. They fixed its position at last by compass-bearings. It was
more or less on the line of the second objective, and had therefore
to be held in spite of casualties. The men could do no more than
fire when possible at anything that showed itself (which was seldom)
and, in the rare intervals when shelling slackened, work themselves
a little further into the ground. At this juncture, Captain L. R.
Hargreaves, left behind with the Reserve of Officers in Trônes Wood,
was ordered up, and reached the line with nothing worse than one
wound. He led out a mixed party of Coldstream and Irish to a chain
of disconnected shell-holes a few hundred yards in advance of the
trench. Here they suffered for the rest of the afternoon under the
field-battery shelling them at less than half a mile, and the regular
scything of the machine-guns from the Quadrilateral on their right.
A machine-gun detachment, under Lieutenant L. C. Whitefoord, went
with them, and Lieutenant W. C. Mumford and 2nd Lieutenant F. S. L.
Smith with their little detachments of Irish and Coldstream came up
later as reinforcements. That scattered forward fringe among the
shell-holes gave what help it could to the trench behind it, which
filled up, as the day wore on, with more Irish and Coldstream working
their way forward. Formation was gone--blown to bits long ago. Nearly
every officer was down, and sergeant after sergeant succeeding to
the command, had dropped too; but the discipline held, and with it
the instinct that made them crawl, dodge, run and stumble as chance
offered and their corporals ordered, towards the enemy and not away
from him. They had done so, at first, shouting aloud in the massed
rush of the full charge that now seemed centuries away in time, and
worlds in space. Later, as they were scattered and broken by fire,
knowing that their battalion was cut to pieces, they worked with a
certain automatic forlorn earnestness, which, had any one had time to
think, was extremely comic. For instance, when a sergeant came across
a stray private meditating longer than seemed necessary at the bottom
of a too-tempting shell-hole, he asked him gravely what he thought he
was doing. The man, dazed and shaken, replied with an equal gravity
that he did not know. “Then,” said the sergeant, “get on forward out
o’ this an’ maybe ye’ll find out,” and smote him dispassionately
with the flat of a spade. The man, without a word, rose up, lifted
his head once more into the bullet-torn air, and pitched forward,
dead, a few paces farther on. And, at one time, in a terrible waiting
pause, when it was death to show a finger, they saw one man out on
the flank suddenly taken by madness. He lifted himself up slowly,
and as slowly marched across the open towards the enemy, firing his
rifle in the air meantime. The bullets seemed to avoid him for a long
while till he was visibly jerked off his feet by several that struck
him altogether. The stiff, blind death-march ended, and the watching
Irish clicked their tongues for wonder and pity.

The Battalion had had no communication with Brigade Headquarters
or any one else since early morning. It lacked supports, lights,
signals, information, wood, wire, sandbags, water, food and at
least fifty per cent. of its strength. Its last machine-gun had
been knocked out, and it had no idea what troops might be next on
either side. As the sun went down, word came from the advanced
party in the shell-holes where the wrecked machine-gun lay, that
the Germans were massing for a counter-attack on the blue line of
what had been the third objective. They could be seen in artillery
formation with a mass of transport behind them, and it passed the
men’s comprehension why they did not come on and finish the weary
game. But the enemy chose to wait, and at the edge of dusk the Irish
saw the 2nd Scots Guards attacking on their right through a barrage
of heavy stuff--attacking and disappearing between the shell-bursts.
The attack failed: a few of the Scots Guards came back and found
places beside the Irish and Coldstream in the trench. Night fell;
the enemy’s counter-attack held off; the survivors of the advanced
party in the shell-holes were withdrawn to help strengthen the main
trench; and when it was dark, men were sent out to get into touch
with the flanks. They reported, at last, a battalion of the Duke of
Cornwall’s on their left and the 2nd Grenadiers on their right. In
the protecting darkness, too, water and rations arrived from the
Ginchy-Lesbœufs road, by some unconsidered miracle-work of Captain
Antrobus and the other Battalion Transport Officers; and throughout
the very long night, stragglers and little cut-off parties, with
their wounded, found the trench, reported, fed, and flung themselves
down in whatever place was least walked over--to sleep like the dead,
their neighbours. Ground-flares had at last indicated the Battalion’s
position to our night-scouting contact aeroplanes. There was nothing
more to be done except--as one survivor put it--“we was busy thryin’
to keep alive against the next day.”

The dawn of September 16 pinned them strictly to their cramped
position, for the slope behind them ran in full view of the enemy.
Moreover, enemy aeroplanes had risen early and taken good stock
of the crowded shallow trench where they lay; and in due time the
enemy artillery began to scourge them. But some of our batteries had
moved up in the night, and one little field-battery that the Irish
thought very kindly of all that day, distracted their tormentors, so
that, though they were shelled with H.E. and shrapnel as a matter
of principle from dawn to dark, they could still make shift to hang
on. The only orders they received from the Brigade that day were
to maintain their positions and stand by to support an attack by
the 3rd Brigade. That attack, however, never was launched. They
lay still and watched, between bursts of shelling, a battalion on
their left attacking some German trenches south of Gueudecourt.
This happened once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Small
stooping or crawling figures crept out for a while over the face
of the landscape, drew the German guns, including those that were
shelling the Irish trench, upon their advance, wavered forward
into the smoke of it, spread out and disappeared--precisely as the
watching Guards themselves had done the day before. The impression
of unreality was as strong as in a cinema-show. Nothing seemed to
happen that made any difference. Small shapes gesticulated a little,
lay down and got up again, or having lain down, rose no more. Then
the German guns returned to bombarding the brown-line trench, and
the men lying closer realised that the lime-light of the show had
shifted and was turned mercilessly upon themselves again. All they
wanted was relief--relief from the noises and the stenches of the
high explosives, the clinging horror of the sights nearest them
and from the tension that lay at the back of the minds of the most
unimaginative. The men were dumb--tired with mere work and suffering;
the few officers doubly tired out by that and the responsibility
of keeping awake and thinking consecutively, even when their words
of command clotted on their tongues through shear weariness. The
odds were heavily in favour of a German attack after dark; and a
written warning from the rear said it would certainly come in the
course of the night. A party of explorers sent to look for defences,
found some sections of barb-wire on trestles in the wreck of an
enemy-trench behind them. It was man-handled and brought away by
lengths and, in some fashion, set up before the trench so that the
enemy might not actually stroll over them without warning.

Fresh rumours of German counter-attacks arrived after midnight, in
the way that information blows back and forth across a battle-field
in reaction. The men were once more roused--in a burst of chill
rain--to strengthen the outpost line. They must have made some
noise about it, being more than half asleep at the time, but the
enemy, so far from attacking, opened with long-range small-arm fire
and sent up a myriad lights. That riot died down at last, and when
the Battalion’s third dawn in the line had well broken, a company
of Lincolns from the 62nd Brigade came up to the trench, and said
their orders were to relieve. The light was full enough now to
reveal them very clearly, and “a rapid relief was effected with some
difficulty.” The enemy shelled till they reached the shelter of the
ridge behind and there, at last, drew clear of the immediate aspect
of war. Other scattered parties of the Battalion, with little knots
of lightly wounded men, joined them on their way to the southern
edge of Bernafay Wood, where they took reckoning of their losses.
They had still seven officers left, including 2nd Lieutenant T. F.
MacMahon, who with some forty men had been left behind in Divisional
Reserve on the 16th, and the whole of the working platoon which had
not been in action “rejoined the Battalion practically intact.” The
“working platoon,” which was made up of two men from each platoon was
popularly credited with fabricating Headquarters dug-outs at enormous
distances from the firing-line and was treated rather as a jest by
men not lucky enough to be drawn for it. As for the rest, Major T. M.
Bailie, Lieutenant C. R. Tisdall, Lieutenant L. C. Whitefoord, and
2nd Lieutenant N. Butler were killed. Captain C. Pease and Lieutenant
J. K. Greer died of wounds. Captain P. S. Long-Innes, Captain R.
Rankin, Lieutenant A. C. W. Innes, 2nd Lieutenants H. C. Holmes, T.
Butler-Stoney and Count J. E. de Salis were wounded; and there were
over 330 casualties in the other ranks. The total casualties in the
Brigade were 1776.

No one seems to recall accurately the order of events between the
gathering in Bernafay Wood and the arrival of the shadow of the
Battalion in camp at the Citadel. The sun was shining; breakfast was
ready for the officers and men near some trees. It struck their very
tired apprehensions that there was an enormous amount of equipage and
service for a very few men, and they noticed dully a sudden hustling
off of unneeded plates and cups. They felt as though they had
returned to a world which had outgrown them on a somewhat terrifying
scale during all the ages that they had been away from it. Their one
need, after food eaten sitting, was rest, and, when the first stupor
of exhaustion was satisfied, their sleep began to be broken by dreams
only less horrible than the memories to which they waked.


SEPTEMBER 25

But the cure was ready to hand. On the evening of the 18th September,
in wet and cold weather, the Brigadier sent the Battalion a letter of
praise and prophecy:

  As your Brigadier I wish to express my feelings as to your most
  gallant work on the 15th September 1916 in the operations at
  Ginchy. The advance from the Orchard in the face of machine-gun
  fire is equal to anything you have yet accomplished in this
  campaign, and once more the 1st Battalion Irish Guards has carried
  out a most magnificent advance and held ground gained in spite
  of the most severe losses. In this, your first campaign, you are
  upholding the highest standard of bravery and efficiency for your
  successors and more praise than that I cannot give you. You may be
  called upon in the very near future to carry out similar work and
  I know you will not fail.

  (Sd.) C. E. PEREIRA,
  Brigadier-General,
  Commanding 1st Guards Brigade.

This meant that they would be moved again as soon as they could stand
up, and would go into their next action with at least 50 per cent.
new drafts and half their proper allowance of officers. Indeed, they
were warned, next day, with the rest of their Division for further
operations in the “immediate future,” and the work of re-making and
re-equipping the Battalion from end to end, saved them from that
ghastly state of body and soul which is known as “fighting Huns in
your sleep.”

On the 19th, Major T. M. D. Bailie’s body was brought back from the
front and buried in the cemetery in the centre of the camp at Carnoy,
and on the same day Lord Cavan, commanding the Corps, rode over and
spoke to the officers on horseback of the progress of the campaign,
of what had so far been accomplished on the Somme, what was intended
for the future, and specially, as bearing on their next battle, of
what their artillery had in store for the enemy. It was a simple,
unadorned speech, the substance of which he repeated to the N.C.O.’s,
then wished the gentlemen of His Majesty’s Foot Guards all good
fortune and rode away.

The Division had expected to be used again as soon as might be, but
their recent losses were so heavy that every battalion in it was
speculating beneath its breath how their new drafts would shape. It
is one thing to take in men by fifties at a time and weld them slowly
in The Salient to a common endurance; it is quite another to launch a
battalion, more than half untried recruits, across the open against
all that organized death can deliver. This was a time that again
tested the Depot and Reserve Battalion whose never-ending work all
fighting battalions take for granted, or mention only to blame. But
Warley and Caterham had not failed them. Over three hundred recruits
were sent up immediately after the 15th and 16th, and on the 20th
September the re-made Battalion, less than six hundred strong, with
ten officers, marched out of Citadel Camp to its detestable trenches
on Ginchy Ridge. The two Coldstream Battalions of the 1st Brigade
held the front line there; the 2nd Grenadiers in reserve, and the
1st Irish Guards in support.

The ground was not yet a sea of mud, but quite sufficiently
tenacious. “The area allotted” was old trenches and newish
shell-holes with water at the bottom, in “the small rectangular wood
east of Trônes Wood.” They were employed for three or four days in
cleaning up the litter of battle all about the slopes and piling it
in dumps, while the enemy shelled them more or less regularly with
large black 5.9 shells--a very fair test of the new drafts’ nerves.
The stuff would drop unheralded through the then leafy woods, and
explode at large among the shelters and slits that the men had made
for themselves. They took the noise and the shaking with philosophy
as their N.C.O.’s testified. (“There was some wondherin’ in the new
drafts, but no budgin’, ye’ll understand.”)

Reading between lines one can see that the R.C. Priest, the Reverend
Father F. M. Browne, was busy in those days on spiritual affairs, for
he was hit in the face on the 23rd, “while visiting a neighbouring
battery,” so that Mass on the 24th--the day before their second
battle of the Somme--was celebrated by the Reverend Father Casey.
They were shelled, too, that Sunday in the wood, a single unlucky
shell killing two men and wounding thirteen. The last available
officer from the base, Lieutenant A. H. Blom, had joined the night
before; all drafts were in; the ground was assumed to be walkable
(which was not the case), and about 9 P. M. of a pitch-black Sunday
night the Battalion left the wood and reached its assembly-trench,
an extraordinary bad and unprotected one, about midnight. They were
promiscuously shelled in the darkness, and the trench, when found,
was so narrow that they had to stand on the edge of it till the
Battalion that they relieved--it did not keep them waiting long--got
out. No. 1 Company (Captain L. R. Hargreaves), No. 2 Company (Captain
the Hon. P. J. Ogilvy) were in the front line, the latter on the
right, No. 3 Company (Lieutenant A. H. Blom), and No. 4 Company
(Captain Rodakowski) about 150 yards behind with the Battalion
Headquarters, in a diagonal communication-trench well bottomed with
water. Second Lieutenant T. C. Gibson was wounded on the way up, and
was replaced by 2nd Lieutenant T. F. MacMahon who had been left in
Regimental Reserve.

The idea of the day’s work for the 25th was less ambitious than
on the 15th, and the objectives were visible German trenches, not
imaginary lines on uniformly indistinguishable landscapes. Here is
the Brigade-Major’s memorandum for the 1st Brigade on the lie of the
land, issued on the 22nd September: They were to attack and carry
the village of Lesbœufs, up the Ginchy-Lesbœufs road, about fifteen
hundred yards, on a front, again, of five hundred yards; the Irish
Guards leading the attack throughout on the left of the 1st Brigade,
and the 2nd Grenadiers on the right. It was in essence the clearing
out of a badly shaken enemy line by the help of exceedingly heavy
barrages.

  1ST GUARDS BRIGADE NO. 262

  The forthcoming attack differs from the last in that the whole
  scheme is not such an ambitious one. The distance to the first
  objective is about 300 yards, to the second objective 800 yards,
  and to the last objective about 1300 yards. In each case the
  objective is a clearly defined one, and not merely a line drawn
  across the map.

  Between our present front line and the first objective there is
  only “No Man’s Land.” During the next two nights this should be
  actively patrolled to ensure that our attack is not taken by
  surprise by some unknown trench, and in order that Officers and
  N.C.O.’s may have a knowledge of the ground.

  It would also be of great assistance to the artillery if reports as
  to the actual distance to the Green line were sent in.

  The ground slopes down to Lesbœufs, beyond which there is a
  distinct hollow with a plateau the same level as Lesbœufs beyond.
  On reaching the final objective Officers and N.C.O.’s should
  understand the necessity for pushing patrols out to command this
  hollow and give warning or prevent counter-attacks forming up here.

  Large scale maps of Lesbœufs have been sent to all battalions.
  These should be carefully studied by all Officers and N.C.O.’s,
  and especially by those of the companies detailed for the cleaning
  up of Lesbœufs.

  All runners and signallers should know the position of the advanced
  Brigade Report Centre, and that the best means of approach to it
  will probably be down the communication-trench T.3.c and T.8.b.

  Finally, it cannot be too much impressed on assaulting troops the
  necessity for clinging to our own barrage. It will be an attack in
  which this should be comparatively easy, and on which the success
  of the whole operation may depend.

  (Sd.) M. B. SMITH, Captain,
  Brigade-Major,
  1st Guards Brigade.

  _September 22, 1916._

The Battalion’s own task was to clear the three objectives laid down,
supported by the 3rd Coldstream, to clean out the northern portion
of Lesbœufs village, and above all to secure their flanks when they
halted or were held up. They waited in their trenches while our guns,
hour after hour, sluiced the roads they were to take with an even
downpour of shell along the trenches to be attacked--over Lesbœufs
and its hidden defences, and far out into the untouched farming land
beyond. It was a fine sunny morning that hid nothing: at 12.35 our
barrage locked down two hundred yards ahead of the troops, and Nos. 1
and 2 Companies moved out with the rest of the line towards the first
German trench three hundred yards away. The enemy put down a barrage
at once on our front-support and communication-trenches, which caused
a good many casualties (including Captain R. J. P. Rodakowski and
the Doctor) in Nos. 3 and 4 Companies who were moving up as a second
wave. Eventually, these companies found it less hampering to leave
the crowded trench and come out over the open. So far, our artillery
work was altogether a better business than on the 15th. The companies
moved almost leisurely behind the roaring arch-of-triumph of the
barrage, till the leading line reached the first trench with its
half-finished dug-outs. Here they found only dazed German survivors
begging to be taken out of that inferno to the nearest prisoners’
kraal. Some of these captures, officers included, sincerely expected
to be slaughtered in cold blood.

The 2nd Grenadiers, on the right of the 1st Irish Guards, had been
unlucky in their position, for the wire in front of their sector
being veiled by high crop, our guns had missed it. That Battalion
suffered heavily in officers and men, shot down as they tried to work
their way through by hand; but they never lost touch, and the advance
went on unbrokenly to the next point--a sunken road on the east side
of Lesbœufs, five hundred yards ahead of the first objective. All
four companies of the Irish were together now--Lieutenant Blom of
No. 3 had been wounded at the first trench and 2nd Lieutenant T.
F. MacMahon took over. They reached the downward slope to the sunk
road and, as at the first objective, found most of their work had
been done for them by the barrage. Even while they congratulated
themselves and sent off a pigeon, as well as runner messages, to
report the capture to Battalion Headquarters, which, “somewhat
broken” by the German shelling, had arrived in the first-taken
trench, fire fell on them from the south. Our own guns, misranging
across the fields, were supposed to be responsible for this; and a
second pigeon was despatched praying them to cease, but “there were a
number of casualties” before the advance to the last objective began.
This was shown on the map as just east of Lesbœufs village, and east
again of another sunken road. The final surge forward included a
rush across uprooted orchards and through wrecked houses, shops, and
barns, with buildings alight or confusedly collapsing round them, and
the enemy streaming out ahead to hide in shell-holes in the open.
There was not much killing at this point, and, thanks to the tanks
and the guns, a good deal less machine-gun fire than might have been
expected. The Battalion dug in in a potato field a few hundred yards
beyond the village, where the men providently laid aside the largest
potatoes for supper, if so be they should live till that meal. In
the meantime our guns were punching holes into the open land behind
Lesbœufs, where parties of dislodged enemy had taken shelter. These
preferred, at last, to bolt back through that storm and surrender to
our men digging, who received them with derisive cheers--“for all the
world as though they had been hares in a beat.”

Then came the tragedy. Our barrage, for some reason or other, wavered
and stopped almost on the line where the men were digging in, and
there hung for a long while--some accounts say a quarter of an hour,
others two hours. At any rate, it was long enough to account for many
more casualties. Captain L. R. Hargreaves, who had fought wounded
through the 15th, was here so severely wounded that he died while
being carried back, and Captain Drury-Lowe of the King’s Company of
the 1st Grenadiers, digging in on the Irish left, was killed--both
casualties by one shell. The 2nd Grenadiers, all company officers
down, were in touch on the right, but the left was still doubtful,
for the attack there had been held up at Gueudecourt village, and
the 3rd Guards Brigade had to make a defensive flank there, while a
company of the 3rd Coldstream was moved up to help in the work.

In modern war no victory appears till the end of all, and what
is gained by immense bloodshed must be held by immense physical
labour of consolidation, which gives the enemy time to recover
and counter-attack in his turn. The Irish dug and deepened and
strengthened their line north of Lesbœufs, while the enemy shelled
them till afternoon, when there was a breathing space. A German
counter-attack, on the left of the Guards Division, was launched
and forthwith burned up. The shelling was resumed till night, which
suddenly fell so quiet, by Somme standards, that supplies could
be brought up without too much difficulty. As soon as light for
ranging came on the 26th, our men were shelled to ground again; and
an attempt of three patrols to get forward and establish posts of
command on a near-by ridge brought them into a nest of machine-guns
and snipers. The Diary remarks that the patrols located “at least one
machine-gun,” which is probably a large understatement; for so soon
as the German machine-gunners recovered breath and eyesight, after or
between shells, they were up and back and at work again. By the rude
arithmetic of the ranks in those days, three machine-guns equalled a
company, and, when well posted, a battalion.

The Battalion was relieved on the evening of the 26th by its sister
(the 2nd) Battalion, who took over the whole of Lesbœufs ruins from
the Brigade; and the 1st Irish Guards went back with the others
through Bernafay Wood, where they fed, to camp once more at the
Citadel.

In the two days of their second Somme battle, which they entered
less than six hundred strong and ten officers, they had lost one
officer, Captain Hargreaves, died of wounds, and five wounded, and
more than 250 casualties in other ranks. Add these to the casualties
of the 15th, and it will be seen that in ten days the Battalion
had practically lost a battalion. The commanding officer, Colonel
McCalmont, the adjutant, Captain Gordon, and Lieutenant Smith were
the only officers who had come unwounded through both actions.

General Pereira, commanding the 1st Guards Brigade, issued the
following order on the 27th September:

  You have again maintained the high traditions of the 1st Guards
  Brigade when called upon a second time in the battle of the Somme.
  For five days previous to the assault the 2nd and 3rd Battalion
  Coldstream Guards held the trenches under constant heavy shell-fire
  and dug many hundred yards of assembly and communication-trenches,
  this work being constantly interrupted by the enemy’s artillery.
  The 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards and the 1st Battalion Irish
  Guards, though under shell-fire in their bivouacs, were kept clear
  of the trenches until the evening of 24th September, and were given
  the task of carrying by assault all the objectives to be carried by
  this Brigade. Nothing deterred them in this attack, not even the
  fact that in places the enemy wire was cut in the face of rifle
  and machine-gun fire, and in spite of all resistance and heavy
  losses the entire main enemy defensive line was captured.

  Every Battalion in the Brigade carried out its task to the full.

  The German Reserve Division, which includes the 238th, 239th, and
  240th Regiments, and which opposed you for many weeks at Ypres,
  left the Salient on the 18th September. You have now met them in
  the open, a worthy foe, but you have filled their trenches with
  their dead and have driven them before you in headlong flight.

  I cannot say how proud I am to have had the honour of commanding
  the 1st Guards Brigade in this battle, a Brigade which has proved
  itself to be the finest in the British Army.

  The Brigade is now under orders for rest and training, and it must
  now be our object to keep up the high standard of efficiency, and
  those who have come to fill our depleted ranks will strive their
  utmost to fill worthily the place of those gallant officers and men
  who have laid down their lives for a great cause.

  (Sd.) C. E. PEREIRA,
  Brigadier-General,
  Commanding 1st Guards Brigade.

  _September 28, 1916._

Lord Cavan had sent the following message to General Pereira:

  Hearty thanks and sincere congratulation to you all. A very fine
  achievement splendidly executed.

To which the Brigadier had replied:

  Your old Brigade very proud to be able to present you with
  Lesbœufs. All ranks most gratified by your kind congratulations.

And so that little wave among many waves, which had done its work
and gained its few hundred yards of ground up the beach, drew back
into the ocean of men and hutments below the slopes of the Somme.
The new drafts were naturally rather pleased with themselves; their
N.C.O.’s were reasonably satisfied with them, and the remnant of the
officers were far too busy with reorganization and re-equipment
to have distinct notions on any subject except the day’s work. It
was a little later that heroisms or horrors, seen out of the tail
of the eye in action, and unrealised at the time, became alive as
rest returned to the body and men compared dreams with each other,
or argued in what precise manner such and such a comrade had died.
There was bravery enough and to spare on all hands, and there were
a few, but not too many, decorations awarded for it in the course
of the next month. The Battalion took the bravery for granted, and
the credit of the aggregate went to the Battalion. They looked at
it, broadly speaking, thus: “There was times when ye’ll understand
if a man was _not_ earnin’ V.C.’s for hours on end he would not keep
alive--an’ even _then_, unless the Saints looked after him, he’d
likely be killed in the middest of it.” In other words, the average
of bravery required in action had risen twenty-fold, even as the
average of shots delivered by machine-guns exceeds that of many
rifles; and by the mercy of Heaven, as the Irish themselves saw it,
the spirit of man under discipline had risen to those heights.

Captain L. R. Hargreaves (killed on the 25th) and Captain P. S.
Long-Innes (wounded), with Lieutenant G. V. Williams (who was knocked
unconscious and nearly killed by shell-fire on the 25th), were given
the Military Cross for the affair of the 15th. Drill-Sergeant Moran,
a pillar of the Battalion, who had died of wounds (it was he who
had asked the immortal question about “this retreat” at Mons), with
Private Boyd, received the D.C.M., and Sergeant Riordan (wounded
and reported missing) the Bar to the same medal. Lance-Corporal J.
Carroll, Privates M. Kenny, J. O’Connor, J. White and Lance-Corporal
Cousins had the Military Medal--all for the 15th.

For the 15th and 25th combined, Lieutenant Walter Mumford and 2nd
Lieutenant T. F. MacMahon won the Military Cross; and Sergeant P.
Doolan and Private G. Taylor the Military Medal.

For the 25th, temporary Captain the Hon. P. Ogilvy received the
Military Cross; acting Company Sergeant-Major McMullen, the Bar to
his D.C.M.; and Privates Whearty, Troy and M. Lewis, the Military
Medal. Captain Gordon, the Adjutant, was recommended for an immediate
M.C. which he received with the next New Year honours at the same
time as the C.O. received a D.S.O.

It was not an extravagant reward for men who have to keep their heads
under hideous circumstances and apply courage and knowledge at the
given instant; and after inconceivable strain, to hold, strengthen,
and turn desperate situations to their platoon’s or company’s
advantage. The news went into Warley and Caterham, and soured
drill-sergeants, dead-wearied with the repetition-work of forming
recruits to fill shell-holes, found their little unnoticed reward in
it. (“Yes. _We_ made ’em--with the rheumatism on us, an’ all; an’ we
kept on makin’ ’em till I got to hate the silly faces of ’em. An’
what did _we_ get out of it? ‘Tell Warley that their last draft was
dam’ rabbits an’ the Ensigns as bad.’ An’ after that, it’s Mil’try
Crosses and D.C.M.’s for _our_ dam’ rabbits!”)

The Battalion returned to the days of small, detailed, important
things--too wearied to appreciate compliments, and too over-worked
with breaking in fresh material to think.

On the 27th, 2nd Lieutenant R. B. S. Reford joined from the Base;
on the 28th 2nd Lieutenant T. F. MacMahon with a party was sent to
rest-camp for a week. On the 30th Captains the Earl of Kingston and
H. T. A. Boyse joined and took over command of Nos. 1 and 3 Companies.


REST-CAMPS AND FATIGUES

On the 1st October, a Sunday, after mass celebrated by a French
interpreter, which did not affect the devotion of the Battalion, the
whole Brigade were embarked in one hundred and forty “French army
charabancs,” a new and unforeseen torment, and driven _via_ Amiens
from Fricourt to rest-camp at Hornoy. Much must have happened on
that pleasure-trip; for the Diary observes that the drivers of the
vehicles were “apparently over military age, many of the assistants
being natives.” One is left in the dark as to their countries of
origin, but one’s pity goes out to all of them, Annamite, Senegalese,
or Algerian, who helped to convey the newly released Irish for eight
hours over fifty jolting miles. The Battalion found good billets for
themselves, and the Brigade machine-gun company in Hornoy itself,
where the inhabitants showed them no small kindness. “Owing to small
numbers, officers were in one mess,” says the Diary, and one can see
the expansion of that small and shrunken company as the new drafts
come in and training picks up again.

On the 3rd October, 2nd Lieutenants J. J. Fitzwilliam Murphy and J.
N. Nash joined; on the 4th the Reverend P. J. Lane-Fox joined for
duty; on the 5th, 2nd Lieutenant the Hon. D. O’Brien came in sick
with the draft of a hundred and fifty-two and went down sick, all
within forty-eight hours, his draft punctually delivered. Major the
Hon. T. Vesey also joined as second in command during the course of
this month.

They paraded on the 5th October for the Divisional Commander,
Major-General Feilding, who presented the ribbons to the N.C.O.’s and
men who had been awarded medals and complimented the Battalion on
its past work. Second Lieutenant E. Budd (and five other ranks), 2nd
Lieutenant E. M. Harvey, with a draft of ninety-five, not counting
eleven more who had joined in small parties, and 2nd Lieutenants
A. L. Bain, H. H. Maxwell, and J. J. Kane all came in within the
next ten days. Captain R. G. C. Yerburgh, on rejoining from the
Central Training School at Havre, was posted to the command of No. 4
Company; and on the 8th October, a team, chiefly officers, greatly
daring, played a Rugby football match against “a neighbouring
French recruit battalion,” which campaign seems to have so inspired
them that they all attended a Divisional dinner that night at 1st
Brigade Headquarters at Dromesnil. There is, alas! no record of that
match nor of what the French Recruit Battalion thought of it; but
just before their departure from Hornoy they played a Soccer match
against the 26th French Infantry, and next day the C.O. and all
company officers rode over to that regiment to see how it practised
the latest form of attack over the open. Thus did they combine
instruction with amusement, and cemented the Sacred Alliance!

They dined also with their own 2nd Battalion, who were billeted
five miles away--a high and important function at Hornoy where
Brigadier-General Butler, formerly in command of the 2nd Battalion,
was present, with all the officers of both battalions. The band of
the Welsh Guards assisted and they all drank the health, among many
others, of the belle of Hornoy, who “responded with enthusiasm.”
Further, they played a football match against their brethren and won;
entertained the village, not forgetting the 26th French Infantry,
with their drums; drove all ranks hard at company drills and
battalion attacks; rehearsed the review for the approaching visit of
H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught, and welcomed small detachments as they
came in. The last was 2nd Lieutenant D. A. B. Moodie with 50, on the
26th October, when Lieutenant H. F. S. Law rejoined the Battalion
from his Intelligence duties with the Ninth Corps. Drill-Sergeant J.
Orr assumed the duties of 2nd Lieutenant from November 2.

The mess was now full again. The dead of the September Somme had
almost passed out of men’s memories till the war should be over
and the ghosts return; and the Battalion, immortal however much it
changes, was ready (“forty over strength”) for the bitter winter of
’16-’17.

On the 7th November they were warned to move back into line and
celebrated it by an officers’ dinner (thirty-seven strong) of both
battalions at the Hotel London, Hornoy.

On the 10th they regretfully quitted that hospitable village for
the too familiar camping grounds near Carnoy beyond Méaulte, which
in winter becomes a marsh on the least provocation. They were
accommodated “in bell-tents in a sea of mud” with weather to match.

Next day (11th November) they shifted to “a sort of camp” near
Montauban, “quite inadequate” and served by bottomless roads where
they were shelled a little after mass--a proof, one presumes, that
the enemy had news of their arrival.

On the 13th November, in cold but dry weather, they took over a line
of trench north of Lesbœufs between that village and Gueudecourt.
These were reached by interminable duckboards from Trônes Wood
and up over the battered and hacked Flers ridge. There were no
communication-trenches and, in that windy waste of dead weed and
wreckage, no landmarks to guide the eye. Trench equipment was
utterly lacking, and every stick and strand had to be man-handled
up from Ginchy. In these delectable lodgings they relieved the 7th
Yorkshires and the 8th South Staffordshires, losing one man wounded
by shell-fire, and Major the Hon. T. E. Vesey was sent down sick as
the result of old wounds received at Loos and in ’14. The Somme was
no place for such as were not absolutely fit, and even the fittest
had to pay toll.

Shelling for the next three days was “continuous but
indiscriminate.” Four men were killed, fourteen wounded, and three
disappeared--walked, it is supposed, into enemy ground. The wonder
was there were not more such accidents. Wiser men than they would
come up to the front line with a message, refuse the services of
a guide back because, they protested, they knew every inch of the
ground and--would be no more seen till exhumation parties three or
four years later identified them by some rag of Guards’ khaki or a
button.

The Battalion was relieved by the 2nd Grenadiers at midnight (16th
November), but were not clear till morning, when they crawled back to
camp between Carnoy and Montauban, packed forty men apiece into the
icy-chill Nissen huts, supposed to hold thirty, and were thankful for
the foul warmth of them. Thence they moved into unstable tents on
the outskirts of Méaulte, on the Bray road, where the wind funnels
from all parts of the compass, and in alternate snow, rain, and snow
again, plumbed the deeps of discomfort. When frost put a crust on the
ground they drilled; when it broke they cleaned themselves from mud;
and, fair or foul, did their best to “improve” any camp into which
fortune decanted them.

It was a test, were one needed, that proved all ranks to the
uttermost. The heroism that endures for a day or a week at high
tension is a small thing beside that habit of mind which can hold
fast to manner, justice, honour and a show of kindliness and
toleration, in despite of physical misery and the slow passage
of bleak and indistinguishable days. Character and personality,
whatever its “crime-sheet” may have been, was worth its weight in
gold on the Somme, where a jest counted as high as a rum-ration.
All sorts of unsuspected people came to their own as leaders of men
or lighteners of care. There were stretcher-bearers, for instance,
whose mere presence and personality steadied half a platoon after the
shell-burst when, picking themselves up, men’s first question out of
the dark would be: “Where’s So-and-So?” And So-and-So would answer
with the dignity of Milesian Kings: “I’m here! Caarry on, lads!”

So, too, with the officers. In the long overseeing of endless
fatigues, which are more trying than action, they come to understand
the men with a thoroughness that one is inclined to believe that
not many corps have reached. Discipline in the Guards, as has been
many times pointed out, allowed no excuse whatever for the officer
or the man; but once the punishment, or the telling off, had been
administered, the sinner and the judge could, and did, discuss
everything under heaven. One explanation which strikes at the root of
the matter is this: “Ye’ll understand that in those days we was all
countin’ ourselves for dead men--sooner or later. ’Twas in the air,
ye’ll understand--like the big stuff comin’ over.”

On Sunday the 27th November, the day of the requiem mass for the
Irish Guards in Westminster Cathedral, a requiem mass was said in
Méaulte Church and they moved out to a French camp (“Forked Tree”),
south of the town where the big French huts held a hundred men
apiece, but cook-houses, etc., were all to build and the “usual
routine improvement work began again.” Their Brigade bombing officer,
Lieutenant the Hon. H. P. O’Brien, was appointed Staff Captain to the
1st Guards Brigade, and Captain R. G. C. Yerburgh left to be attached
to the 2nd Guards Brigade H.Q. Staff for instruction in staff duties.

They were visited by their corps and divisional commanders, inspected
by their Brigadier and route-marched till the 3rd December, when they
moved to Maltz Horn Camp.

It had been decided that the British Army should, by degrees, take
over a stretch of the French line from Le Transloy to a point
opposite Roye; and the Battalion’s share of this was about a thousand
yards of trench at Sailly-Saillisel, held by the 160th Regiment of
the Twentieth Corps (Corps de Fer). The front line ran a little in
front of what had once been that long and prosperous village on
the ridge, and, though not continuous, “it held in places.” The
support-line, through, and among the wreck of the houses, was dry and
fairly good. That there were no communication-trenches was a small
matter--men preferred to take their chances in the open to being
buried in trench mud--but there was no road up to it and “the going
was heavy.”

Once installed (December 6), after a prompt and workmanlike French
relief, which impressed them, they found the 156th French Infantry
on their right, a Coldstream Battalion on their left, and an
enemy in front disposed to be quiet “except when frightened” or
suspecting reliefs, when he would drop very unpleasant barrages on
the support-line.

They were relieved on the 9th December by the 2nd Grenadiers who were
late, because they were “constantly delayed by digging men out of
mud.” From Bois de la Haie, the long, thin slip of wood under Morval
whence the relief started at a quarter-past five in the evening, the
distance to the Battalion’s sector might be two miles. That relief
was not completed till half-past one on the morning of the 10th--say
eight hours to cover four or five miles in one continuous nightmare
of mud, darkness, loss of touch and the sudden engulfment of heavily
loaded men. A Grenadier battalion claims to hold the record (fifteen
hours) for the extrication of one man. Six or eight hours was not
uncommon. They were shelled, of course, on their arrival and lost
Sergeant Wylie, killed, and eleven wounded. Captain R. V. Pollok
joined from home on that day and took over command of No. 1 Company,
Major E. B. Greer, on loan from the 2nd Battalion, who had commanded
the Battalion temporarily, handed over to Captain the Hon. H. R.
Alexander, D.S.O. acting C.O. in place of Colonel R. McCalmont on
leave. Captain the Earl of Kingston had to go into hospital on the
10th--“result of an old wound”--and on the 13th December Lieutenant
J. J. V. F. Murphy--“exposure.”

On the 12th December, after a day’s rest in a muddy camp near
Montauban, they marched to Combles through the blackened site of
Guillemont to relieve the 2nd Battalion on a more southerly sector,
to furnish working-parties for the railway lines that were spreading
stealthily north and east, to help lay down plank roads--not the
least burdensome of fatigues, for the “planks” were substantial
logs--and to make the front line a little less impossible. It was an
easy turn, with very little shelling or sniping, “both sides being
only able to reach their front line by going over the open.” When
to this is added full moonlight and a fall of snow, moderation is
imposed on every one till they are under cover. Otherwise a local
battle might have developed--and what is the use of local battles
where both sides are stuck in the mud, and no help can be sent to
either? This question would be put to the Staff when, from the
comfortable security of their decent dug-outs, they lectured the
front-line, and were invited mirthfully to come up and experiment for
themselves.

The Battalion had eleven wounded in three days, and returned to
Bronfay to find their allotted camp already filled up by Gunners.
Then there was confusion and argument, and the quartermaster--notable
even among quartermasters--“procured” fuel and braziers and got
the men more or less warmed and fed. “The muddle,” says the Diary
sternly, “was due to no proper arrangements being made to find out to
whom Camp 108 belonged before the battalions were moved into them.”
Thus, on paper at least, did the front line get back at the Staff.

They returned to the Combles area on the 18th, relieved their
sister-battalion in less than three hours, and in fine frosty
weather, helped by the enemy’s inactivity, improved the trenches,
lost five killed and one wounded, and on their return found Camp 108
also “improved” and devoid of Gunners.

The year closed well. Their Christmas turn (December 25-27, when they
missed their Christmas dinners) was almost bloodless. The reliefs
went smoothly, and though a thaw made the trenches cave here and
there, but four men were wounded, and in their New Year turn, only
one.

About Christmas the Brigade, to their deep regret, lost their
Brigadier-General, C. Pereira--promoted to command the Second
Division, and in him, one of the best friends that they ever had. He
knew the Battalion very personally, appreciated its value, and fought
for its interests with devotion and a strong hand.

Nothing is said in the Diary of any attempts on the enemy’s part to
fraternise, and the New Year was “seen in without any incident,”
which means that no bursts of artillery marked the hour. And on the
3rd January the whole of the Guards Division went out of the line for
refit. The Twentieth Division took its unenvied place, and the 1st
Battalion Irish Guards lay at Sandpits Camp near Méaulte.

The strain was beginning to tell. They had had to transfer Lieutenant
F. S. L. Smith and 2nd Lieutenant J. Kane to the 2nd Battalion “owing
to shortage in that Battalion on account of sickness,” and their own
coolies were in need of rest and change. The strongest cannot stand
up beyond a certain point to exposure, broken rest, alarms all round
the clock; laborious physical exertions, knee or mid-thigh deep in
mud; sweating fatigues, followed by cooling-off in icy blasts or a
broth of snow and chalk-slime; or--more undermining than any bodily
stress--the pressure that grows of hourly responsibility. Sooner
or later, the mind surrenders itself to a mill-round of harassing
obsessions as to whether, if one had led one’s platoon up or down by
such and such a deviation--to the left or the right of a certain dead
horse, for example--if one had halted longer there or whipped up more
cautiously elsewhere--one might have saved such and such a casualty,
entombment in the mud, or some other shrieking horror of the night.
Reason insists that it was not, and could not have been, one’s own
fault. Memory brings back the face or the eyes of the dying, and the
silence, always accusing, as the platoon goes forward. When this
mood overtakes an officer he does well to go into rest for a while
and pad his nerves, lest he arrive at that dreadful stage when he is
convinced that his next turn of duty will see all his men destroyed
by his own act. Between this last stage and the dragging weariness,
the hoarse Somme cold, and the foul taste in the mouth which are
mere signs of “beginning to be fed up,” there is every variety of
derangement, to be held in check by the individual’s own character
and that discipline which age and experience have devised to hold him
when everything else has dropped away. It is the deadly journey, back
and forth to the front-line with material, the known and foreseen
war in darkness and mud against the natural perversity of things,
that shifts the foundations of the soul, so that a man, who scarcely
regards death hunting him at large by the hour, will fall into a
child’s paroxysms of rage and despair when the wire-strand rasps him
across the knuckles or the duckboard for the hundredth time tilts
sideways underfoot. “Ye’ll understand,” says the voice of experience,
“the fatigues do it in the long run.” All of which the Diary will
dismiss with: “A few fatigues were found in this area.”

The Somme was one overwhelming fatigue.




1917

THE SOMME TO GOUZEAUCOURT


The beginning of the year saw the British armies, now more than fifty
divisions strong, holding a front of a hundred and ten miles from
Ypres to within a short distance of Roye. Thus, allowing for changes
imposed by the fluctuations of war and attack, they lay:

The Second Army had the Salient: the First centred on Armentières;
the Third (Gough’s) carried on to the south of Arras, where the Fifth
held all along the valley of the Ancre and a portion of the old
British line on the Somme. The Fourth joined the French left wing
near Roye, and the French pressure worked in with ours.

From the Salient to the Somme battle-front, our line’s business was
to draw as much as possible of the enemy’s strength. Therefore, our
raids on that part of the line, during the latter half of 1916, were
counted by the hundred; and in all that time, at no point on any
given day there, could the Germans feel secure against our irruptions.

On the Somme our pressure was direct and, except for the weather,
worked as continuously as a forest fire in fallen pine-needles. A
fold of the hills might check it there; a bare ridge or a sodden
valley hold it elsewhere for the while; but always it ate north
and east across the stricken country, as division after division
gathered, fought, won foothold, held it, dug in, and gave place to
their unspent fellows beneath the cover of the advancing guns. Here
is a mere outline of the work of a few weeks:

The affairs of the 15th and 25th of September (1916), when the Fourth
Army pushed the line past Lesbœufs and Flers and beyond Gueudecourt
on the right, knocked out, as we know, both battalions of the Irish
Guards for the time being.

On the 27th and 28th of September the Second and First Canadian
Divisions, with the Eleventh and Eighteenth of the Second Army Corps,
captured Thiepval, the Stuff and Schwaben redoubts on the left of the
line; while the Fifty-fifth and New Zealand Divisions made possible
an advance on Le Sars and Eaucourt l’Abbaye villages in the centre,
which, after four days’ continuous fighting by the Forty-seventh,
Fiftieth, and Twenty-third Divisions, ended in the taking of Eaucourt
l’Abbaye and Le Sars.

On the 7th of October the French Army attacked in the direction
of Sailly-Saillisel, the Fourth Army chiming in along its whole
front from Lesbœufs to Destremont farm, which had been taken by the
Twenty-third Division on the 29th September. In this affair the
Twenty-third Division captured Le Sars, and the Twentieth Division
over a mile of trenches east of Gueudecourt.

Then the treacherous weather broke once more, and the battered and
crumbled ground held their feet till a few days of dry cold were
snatched for an attack in the direction of Courcelette by four
Divisions (Fourth Canadian, Eighteenth, Fifteenth, and Thirty-ninth),
where a fresh line was needed.

On the 23rd October, and on the 5th November again, as side-issues
while waiting on the weather for a serious attack on Beaumont-Hamel,
a couple of divisions (Fourth and Eighth) went in with a French
attack against Pierre St. Vaast Wood, where a tangle of enemy
trenches at the junction of the two armies was slowly smoked and
burned out.

The 10th of November (after one day’s fine weather) gave the Fourth
Canadian Division a full day’s fighting and, once more, a thousand
yards of trench in the Courcelette sector.

On the 13th of November the battle of the Ancre opened from Serre
to east of the Schwaben redoubt (Thirty-first, Third, Second,
Fifty-first, Thirty-ninth and Nineteenth Divisions), with the
intention of gaining command of both banks of the river, where it
entered the enemy lines six or seven miles north of Albert. This
was a sector of the old German front to the west, which had thrown
back our opening attack of July 1, and had grown no more inviting
since. Serre itself, helped by the state of the ground before it, was
impossible, but Beaucourt, Beaumont-Hamel, and a portion of the high
ground above it, with the village of St. Pierre-Divion in the valley,
were, in the course of the next few days, captured and held.

All the above takes no count of incessant minor operations, losses
and recaptures of trenches, days and nights of bombing that were
necessary to silence nests of subterranean works, marked on the maps
of peace as “villages”; nor of the almost monotonous counter-attacks
that followed on the heels of every gain. So long as movement was
possible the Somme front was alive from end to end, according as one
hard-gained position gave the key to the next, or unscreened some
hitherto blinded works. Against every disadvantage of weather and
over ground no troops in history had before dared to use at that
season, the system and design of the advance revealed itself to the
enemy. Their counter-attacks withered under our guns or died out in
the fuming, raw-dug trenches; the slopes that had been their screens
were crowned and turned against them; their infantry began to have
no love for the blunt-nosed tanks, which, though not yet come to
the war in battalions, were dragging their smeared trails along the
ridges; the fighting aeroplanes worried them, too, with machine-gun
fire from overhead; photographers marked their covered ways by day
and our heavy bombers searched them by night, as owls search stubble
for mice. It all cost men and stuff, and the German Army Command had
little good news to send back to the German tribes.

Yet the last six months of 1916 had advanced our front no more than
some eight miles--along the Albert-Bapaume road. At no point were
we more than ten miles from our beginnings. All that showed on the
map was that the enemy’s line to the north had been pinched into
a salient which, starting from just east of Arras, followed the
line of the old German front built up two years before, through
Monchy-au-Bois, Gomiecourt and Serre to the high white grounds
above Beaumont-Hamel. Thence it turned east across the Ancre,
seven or eight kilometres north of Arras, skirted Grandcourt,
crossed the arrow-straight Albert-Bapaume road by the dreary Butte
de Warlencourt, ran north-east of Gueudecourt, and on the rim of
the rise above Le Transloy, till it crossed the Péronne-Bapaume
road just north of Sailly-Saillisel. Here it swung south-east from
Rancourt and Bouchavesnes down the long slopes to the Valley of the
Somme, and its marshes west of Péronne. Thence, south-westerly by
Berny-en-Santerre, Ablaincourt to the outskirts of Chaulnes, ending
at Le Quesnoy-en-Santerre, where the French took on. The twenty-five
mile stretch from Le Transloy to Le Quesnoy was the new section that
had been handed over to the British care, piece by piece, at the end
of the year.

To meet this pinch and all that they could see that it meant,
the Germans had constructed, while they and the weather held us,
elaborate second and third lines of defence behind their heavily
fortified front. The first barrier--a double line of trenches,
heavily wired, ran behind Sailly-Saillisel, past Le Transloy to
the Albert-Bapaume road, Grévillers and Loupart woods, and _via_
Achiet-le-Petit to Bucquoy.

Parallel to this, at a distance ranging from one to two miles, was
a new line through Rocquigny, Bapaume, and Ablainzevelle, almost
equally strong and elaborate. Behind it, as every one understood,
was a thing called the Hindenburg Line, known to the Germans as
“Siegfried”--a forty-mile marvel of considered defences with branches
and spurs and switches, one end of which lay on St. Quentin and the
other outside Arras. This could be dealt with later, but, meantime,
the enemy in the Arras-Le Transloy salient were uneasy. The attacks
delivered on selected positions; the little inter-related operations
that stole a few hundred yards of trench or half a village at a leap,
or carried a gun-group to a position whence our batteries could
peer out and punish; above all, the cold knowledge that sooner or
later our unimaginative, unmilitary infantry would shamble after
the guns, made them think well of lines in their rear to which they
could retire at leisure. Verdun had not fallen; very many of their
men lay dead outside its obliterated forts, and so very many living
were needed to make good the daily drain of the Somme that they had
none too many to spare for Austrian or Turkish needs. Their one
energetic ally was the weather, which, with almost comic regularity,
gave them time after each reverse to draw breath, position more guns,
reorganise reliefs, and explain to their doubting public in Germany
the excellence and the method of their army’s plans for the future.
The battle of the Ancre, for instance, was followed by an absolute
deadlock of six weeks, when our armies--one cannot assault and dig
out battalions at the same time--dropped everything to fight the mud,
while our front-line wallowed in bottomless trenches where subalterns
took from three to six hours to visit their posts on a front of one
quarter of a mile.

Bitter frosts set in with the first weeks of the New Year and the
“small operations” began at once, on our side, round such portions
of the Beaumont-Hamel heights as the enemy still clung to. Here the
Third, Seventh, and Eleventh Divisions fought, shift by shift, for
the rest of January and won the high ground needed for our guns to
uncover against Serre and Grandcourt, which were the keys of the
positions at the corner of the Arras-Le Transloy salient. Thanks
to our air-work, and the almost daily improvement in the power and
precision of our barrages, that little army came through its campaign
without too heavy losses, and still further cramped the enemy’s
foothold along the Ancre, while the rest of the line enjoyed as much
peace as the Somme allowed them when “there was nothing doing.”


MARKING TIME

The Guards Division, after their ten days’ rest and clean-up at
Sandpits Camp, Méaulte, supplied one brigade to take over a new
sector of trench opposite St. Pierre Vaast Wood on the extreme
east of things and left their 1st Brigade in reserve at Méaulte,
Ville-sous-Corbie, and Méricourt l’Abbé. The latter camp was allotted
to the Irish Guards who had to send one company for permanent
fatigues to the railway station--all the valley here was one long
siding for men and supplies--and another to the back of Bernafay Wood
for Decauville construction, while the remainder were drilled and
instructed in their specialties. This was the time in our armies’
development when nearly every third man was a “specialist” in some
branch or another except, as company officers remarked under their
breaths, the rifle and its bayonet. The men’s deferred Christmas
dinners (it will be remembered they had been in the line on the day
itself) were duly issued by half a battalion at a time in the big
cinema-hall in camp, and, lest the transport officer should by any
chance enjoy himself, their transport chose this time of rest to
develop “contagious stomatitis,” a form of thrush in the mouth, and
had to be isolated. Still, setting aside the cold, which does not
much trouble well-fed men, the Battalion had some pleasant memories
of its rest by the river. Leave was possible; smoking-parties made
themselves in the big huts; the sergeants gave a dinner, which is a
sure sign of well-being; there were cinemas for the men, and no one
troubled himself too much for the noise of the guns ten miles up
stream.

It is difficult to rediscover a battalion’s psychology at any given
time, but so far as evidence goes they had not too black doubts
as to the upshot of the campaign, though every platoon kept its
loud-voiced pessimists who foretold that they would take root in the
trenches for evermore and christened the R.O.D. locomotives “Roll on
Duration!”

On the 1st February (1917) in “cold bright weather with snow on the
ground,” the 1st Brigade were once again in Divisional Reserve near
Carnoy, ready to relieve the 3rd Coldstream near Rancourt on the
recently taken-over French sector, in trenches a little westerly
of St. Pierre Vaast Wood which is under Sailly-Saillisel. In the
wood itself lay a dreadful mine-crater of the old days, filled, as
it seemed, with dead French Colonial troops--browned and blackened
bodies, their white skulls still carrying jaunty red caps. Our
wondering patrols used to look down into it sometimes of moonlight
nights.

They moved out on the 2nd of February _via_ Maricourt and Maurepas,
left No. 2 Company under canvas in Maurepas Ravine, distributed the
rest in shelters and dug-outs and resumed their watch. The frozen
ground stopped much digging or “improvements,” and the enemy’s front
line gave no trouble, but a few small shells were sent over, one
of which hit 2nd Lieutenant J. Orr temporarily in command of No. 1
Company and wounded a couple of men. The rest of their turn--February
2 to 6--was quiet, for the new-fallen snow gave away the least
movement on either side. While they crouched over their braziers and
watched each other, the operations round Serre and at the nose of the
Arras-Le Transloy salient, began again as the earth’s crust hardened.
The Sixty-third Division hammered its way for a day and a night up
the southern slopes of Serre, and our guns were threatening the line
of enemy’s trenches from Grandcourt westward. This move unkeyed the
arch of his local defences at this point, and next day he evacuated
Grandcourt and such of his front as lay between Grandcourt and the
Stuff redoubt.

By the 7th February our troops had carried forward to midway between
Beaucourt and Miraumont, and on the 10th February the Thirty-second
Division took in hand the business of shifting the enemy out of what
remained to him in the Beaumont Valley. Their advance brought Serre
village into direct danger from our artillery, and any further move
on our part up the valley of the Ancre would make Serre untenable.

On the 17th February that move was made by three Divisions (Second,
Eighteenth, and Sixty-third) before dawn, through heavy mist on
the edge of a thaw, and in the face of a well-contrived barrage
that caught the battalions forming up. But the positions and
observation-points, already gained, helped our guns to help the
infantry, broke up the enemy’s counter-attacks with satisfactory
losses, and, in the next few days, gave us good command over the
enemy’s artillery dispositions in the valley of the Upper Ancre and
a fair look into his defences at Pys and Miraumont. Then the game
stood thus: If Miraumont, which lay at our mercy, were taken, Serre
would go; if Serre went, Puisieux-au-Mont and Gomiecourt, the pillar
of the old German western defences, would be opened too; and it was
no part of the German idea to cling to untenable positions, whose
loss would have to be explained at home where people were asking why
victory delayed so long. Not only was the whole of Arras-Le Transloy
salient shaking by now; there was the prospect of indefinite wastage
to no good end all along the rest of the Somme front, and though
the weather, till then, had blunted the following weight of each
following blow, many considerations pointed to a temporary withdrawal
of a few miles in order to advance the more irresistibly at a more
fitting time. Slowly, methodically then, with careful screens of
veiled machine-guns behind them, and a series of scientifically
chosen artillery positions, equally capable of supporting a
counter-attack, or checking and destroying any too inconvenient
body of pursuers, the enemy moved back into ground not yet churned
and channelled by shell or traffic, over untouched roads which he
had kept in perfect order, to this very end; and left us to follow
through bottomless valleys of desolation.

The frost broke on the third week of February, and the last state
of the ground was worse even than it had been throughout the rainy
autumn. Trenches caved in bodily; dumps sank where they were being
piled; the dirt and the buttresses of overhead shelters flaked and
fell away in lumps; duckboards went under by furlongs at a time;
tanks were immobilised five feet deep and the very bellies of the
field-guns gouged into the mud. Only our airmen could see anything
beyond or outside the present extreme discomfort, but the mists that
came punctually with the thaws helped to baffle even their eyes.

On the 24th February the enemy had evacuated his positions in front
of Pys, Miraumont, and Serre; next day his first system of defence,
from Gueudecourt to west of Serre, running through half-a-dozen
fortified villages, was in our hands.

At the end of the month, Puisieux-au-Mont, with Gomiecourt and its
defences, were occupied by us. The Germans had pulled themselves
cleanly out of the worst of the salient.

By March they were back on their fortified Le Transloy-Loupart line,
except that they still held the village of Irles above Miraumont,
which was linked up to the Le Transloy-Loupart line by a peninsula
of wired trenches. Irles was carried by the Second and Eighteenth
Divisions on the 10th March.

As soon as our guns were able to concentrate on the Le
Transloy-Loupart line itself, which they did the day after, the
enemy, leisurely as always, released it, and fell back on and through
his next line a mile or two behind--Rocquigny-Ablainzevelle--steadied
his rear-guards, and continued his progress towards the Hindenburg
defences, withdrawing along the whole front from south of Arras to
Roye. By the 17th of March word was given for a general advance of
our troops in co-operation with the French.

To go back a month. Rumours of what was to be expected had cheered
the camps for some time past; and just as the fall of single
rocks precedes the collapse of an undermined quarry-face, so the
German line had crumpled in certain spots long before their system
readjusted itself throughout. Front-trenches, far removed from
actual points of pressure, observed that life with them was quieter
than even the state of the weather justified, and began to make
investigations.

When the Battalion went up, as usual, on the 15th February to relieve
the 2nd Grenadiers in the trenches a little north of Rancourt and
opposite St. Pierre Vaast Wood, their casualties for the four days
were but three killed and five wounded. “Practically no sniping and
very occasional shelling.” They treated it lightly enough, for it was
here that the sentry told the conscientious officer who had heard a
shell drop near the trench: “Ah, it fell quite convenient here”--a
jerk of his thumb over his shoulder, and as an afterthought--“’Twas a
dud, though.” The ground was still hard, and, to the men’s joy, they
could not dig.

Captain R. J. P. Rodakowski arrived from the base on the 18th of the
month. The thaw caught them in camp at Maurepas, just as the enemy’s
withdrawal got under way, and their turn in trenches from the 23rd to
26th February was marked by barrages let down on them of evenings,
presumably to discourage curiosity. So they were ordered at short
notice to send out a couple of officer’s patrols from their left
and right companies to reconnoitre generally, and see if the enemy
were falling back. The first patrol, under 2nd Lieutenant Shears, an
N.C.O., three bombers, and three “bayonet-men,” spent a couple of
hours among the wire, were bombed but returned unhurt. The second,
also of seven men, under Lieutenant Browne, were seen by the enemy,
headed back to our lines, but made a fresh outfall, which carried
them to the wire where, “finding a weak spot, they cut their way
through it” and won within a few yards of the enemy’s parapet when
they were bombed. They used up their own supplies and came back with
a good report, and four men and Lieutenant Browne wounded. On their
information a raid was arranged for the next day to take over a
couple of hundred yards of the enemy’s trench, but it was cancelled
pending developments elsewhere. They lost two killed and thirteen
men and one officer wounded in this tour, and went back to routine
and “specialist” training in a camp near Billon on the last day of
February.

Their domestic items for the next fortnight, which, like the rest
of March, was cold and stormy, run as follows: 2nd Lieutenant A. L.
Bain went to the Fourteenth Corps School for a fortnight at Méaulte,
which, in that weather, was no special treat; and Lieutenant E.
H. Shears to Headquarters Lewis Gun School at Le Touquet, a much
superior place. Lieut.-Colonel R. C. A. McCalmont left on the 3rd
March to take over command of the 3rd Infantry Brigade just south of
the Somme, and had a tremendous send-off from the Battalion. He was
succeeded in the command by Major the Hon. H. R. Alexander, D.S.O.,
M.C., and Major G. E. S. Young came over from the 2nd Battalion
as second in command--as it proved for all too brief a time. The
specialist training continued, and “open warfare” was practised
by companies. There was an irreverent camp-jest just then that
whenever the enemy abandoned one quarter of a mile of trench, the
five nearest British army corps forsook every other game to practise
“open warfare.” The Battalion learned also attacks on triple lines of
trenches, the creeping barrage being personified by their drums and
those of the 2nd Coldstream. In this sort of work, men say, there is
a tendency to lean a little too heavily on such a barrage, which had
to be checked by taking the offender’s name. (“So, ye’ll understand,
ye catch it, both ways; for if ye purshue the live barrage ye’ll
likely to be killed; an’ if you purshue a dhrummy barrage too close,
your name’s in the book. That’s War!”)


THE SOMME ADVANCE

By the middle of March the German line was giving all along; and
when the Battalion moved up into Brigade Reserve on the 12th, they
understood an advance was close at hand. Their allotted and sketchy
stretch of trench, which they took over from the 4th Grenadiers (on
the 13th March), was at Sailly-Saillisel, of evil associations,
and on the 14th, on information received after patrolling under
Lieutenant E. Budd and Lieutenant Bagenal, the German front line
ahead was reported clear and at once occupied. Then they were
committed to a muddle of German works in the direction of Le
Mesnil-en-Arrouaise, which were named after the Idols of the Tribes.
There was nothing to see or to steer by except devastated earth,
mud, wire, scraps of sand-bags, heaped rubbish and carcases. The
whole line went forward on the 15th, the 1st Battalion Irish Guards
in touch by patrol with their 2nd Battalion on their right and on
the left with the 2nd Coldstream. No one knew exactly what was in
the enemy’s mind, or how far his retirement was extending, but an
hour after the Battalion had started they came under long-range
machine-gun and heavy artillery fire while they were consolidating
“Bayreuth” trench. Major G. E. S. Young was so badly wounded this
day by a shell, which came through a company headquarter’s dug-out
he was visiting, that he died in a hospital a fortnight later and
was buried at Grovetown cemetery, and Lieutenant Walter Mumford,
M.C., was slightly wounded in the leg. The next trench, “Gotha,”
was also under gun-fire. They simply moved forward, it seemed, into
registered areas, where they were held up, as by a hose of high
explosives, till the enemy had completed his local arrangements.
Then his artillery on that sector would withdraw across clean, hard
country; some long-range machine-gun or sniping work might continue
for a while; and then all would be silent, with the sudden curious
silences of the Somme, till the next step forward was made on our
side and dealt with as above. Thus the Battalion worked through the
emptied German trenches and dug-outs, and on the 20th March held
a line from Le Mesnil-en-Arrouaise to Manancourt on the Tortille
River. The German retreat was as orderly as an ebb-tide. In the
north, Bapaume had been taken on the 17th March by the First and
Second Australian Division, and Péronne was occupied on the 18th by
the Forty-eighth Division. Beyond Bapaume our troops entered the
third and last--Beugny-Ytres--line of German trench and wire-work
that lay between them and the Hindenburg defences four or five miles
behind it across open country. From Péronne southward to close upon
Germaine, where we were in touch with the French, our advance-parties
had crossed the Somme and spread themselves, as far as the state of
the ground allowed, in--it could hardly be called pursuit so much as
a heavy-footed following-up of the enemy, and making our own roads
and tracks as we moved. We found everything usable thoughtfully
destroyed, and had to reconstruct it from the beginnings, ere any
further pressure could be exercised.

The German front before Arras was unaffected by their withdrawal,
and here preparations of every conceivable sort were being piled up
against the approaching battle of the Ancre where from Croisilles
to Vimy Ridge our Third and First Armies broke through on a front
of fifteen miles on April 9, and after a week’s desperate fighting,
hampered as usual by the weather, carried that front four miles
farther eastward, captured 13,000 prisoners and 200 guns; and,
through the next month, fought their road up and into the northern
end of the Hindenburg Line near Bullecourt whose name belongs to
Australia.

On the 23rd of March the Battalion was taken out of its
unmolested German trenches and marched to Combles, where it was
used in road-making between Frégicourt, Bullet Cross-roads and
Sailly-Saillisel, till the 5th of April. There was just one day
in that stretch without rain, hail or snow, and when they were
not road-making they buried dead and collected salvage and were
complimented by the commanding officer of engineers on their good
work. As the men said: “It was great days for the Engineers--bad luck
to ’em--but it kept us warm.”

Their total losses for March had been one officer, Major G. E. S.
Young, killed and one, Lieutenant Walter Mumford, M.C., slightly
wounded; fourteen other ranks killed and forty wounded--fifty-six
in all or less than 10 per cent. of the Battalion’s strength at the
time. Second Lieutenant H. V. Fanshawe joined on the 30th March.

On the 6th April they changed over to railway construction on the
broad-gauge track between Morval and Rocquigny. The men camped at
one end of Le Transloy village and Battalion Headquarters in the
only house (much damaged) that still stood up. Here they stayed and
slaved for a week, in hail and snow and heavy frosts at night; and
were practically reclothed as their uniforms were not in the best
of condition. (“Ye could not have told us from--from anything or
anybody ye were likely to meet in those parts, ye’ll understand.
But--one comfort--we was all alike--officers an’ all.”) A village
that has not been too totally wrecked is a convenient dump to draw
up. The men “improved” their camp and floored their tents out of
material at hand, and were rewarded by finding usable German stores
among the ruins. One sees how their morale held up, in spite of
dirt, iron-rust and foul weather, from the fact that they went
out of their way to construct--even as they had done at Ypres--“a
magnificent Irish Guards Star of glass and stones all surrounded by
a low box-hedge.” Nor was it forgotten that they were soldiers; and,
in spite of the railway-work, and the demands of the Sappers, some
of the “specialists” and occasionally a company could be trained at
Le Transloy. Even training is preferable to “fatigues,” and on the
15th of April they were taken in hand in good earnest. They marched
twelve miles in pouring rain to a camp at Bronfay where “a very
strict course of platoon training for all ranks was undertaken.” It
began with twenty minutes’ walking or running (in the usual rain or
snow) before breakfast at 7.30, and it continued with a half-hour’s
break till half-past twelve. “Even after three days there was an
appreciable improvement in drill and smartness,” says the Diary, and
when their Brigadier inspected them on the 22nd April he was pleased
to compliment. Of afternoons, every one seemed to lecture to every
one else according to their seniority; the Brigadier on “Outposts”;
the commanding officer--Major R. Baggallay--on “Advance and Rear
Guards,” the officers to the platoon-sergeants on every detail of
life-saving or taking, and when their own resources failed, the C.O.
of the 2nd Coldstream lectured all officers and sergeants of the
1st Brigade on “the attack in open warfare.” It was a very thorough
shaking-up--foot and transport--from the “specialists” to the cook’s
mate; and it culminated in No. 5 Platoon (Lieutenant E. Budd) being
chosen to represent the Battalion at the Brigade Platoon competition
in Drill, Arms Drill, Musketry, Bayonet-fighting and a tactical
exercise. The 2nd Grenadiers platoon won, but No. 5 justified itself
by taking a very close second place. Survivors, who remember, assert
that the platoons of those days were in knowledge, strength, and
virtue immeasurably above all known standards of fighting men. (“And
in the long run, d’ye see, they went with the rest. All gone! Maybe
there’ll be one or two of ’em left--policemen or tram-conductors an’
such like; but in their day an’ time, ye’ll understand, there was
nothing could equal them.”)

The lighter side of life was supplied by the 3rd Coldstream’s
historic and unparalleled “Pantomime,” which ran its ribald and
immensely clever course for ten consecutive nights when the cars of
the Staff might be seen parked outside the theatre precisely as in
the West End.

On the 1st May they resumed work on the Etricourt-Fins railroad and
made camp among the ruins of the village for the next three weeks
in fine hot weather. The officers and N.C.O.’s were exercised
freely at map-reading (which on the Somme required high powers of
imagination), sketching reports and compass-work and occasionally
officers and N.C.O.’s made up a platoon and worked out small tactical
exercises--such as the rush-in and downing of a suddenly raised
machine-gun after a barrage had lifted. The men were kept to the
needs of railway and transport, but it was an easy life in warm,
grassy Etricourt after months of mud and torn dirt. A swimming bath
was dug for them; there were wild flowers to be gathered, and an
orchard in blossom to show that the world still lived naturally,
and their work was close to their parade-grounds. Men spoke
affectionately of Etricourt where shell-holes were so few that they
could count them.

A home-draft had brought the Battalion six pipers who on the 4th of
May “played at Retreat for the first time,” and thereafter followed
the Battalion’s fortunes. As everybody knows, Irish pipes have one
drone less than the Scottish, but it is not commonly understood that
the piper in his close-fitting saffron kilt plays them almost without
any movement of the body--a point of difference that has puzzled very
many Scots regiments. That immobility, as the Pipe Major observed on
an historic occasion, is “one of the secrets of the regiment.”

On the 20th of May they marched--not without some discomfort from an
artillery brigade which was trying to use the same road at the same
time--from Etricourt to Curlu on the Somme, where they were once
more billeted in houses. Here, after so many weeks of making their
own camps to their own minds, they were introduced to other people’s
housekeeping, and found the whole village “left in a filthy condition
by previous troops.” So they cleaned it up and trained and learned
from the Divisional Gas Officer of Transport how gas-helmets should
be adjusted on horses--to which some of the scared beasts hotly
objected; and they bathed by companies in the warm Somme, making
a picnic of it, while the long-drawn battle of the Ancre in the
north died down to mere bloody day-and-night war among the villages
covering the Hindenburg Line and its spurs. The talk in the camps
turned on great doings--everything connected with the front-line
was “doings”--against Messines Ridge that looks over the flat
shell-bitten Salient where there is more compulsory trench-bathing
than any man wants. It had commanded too much of that country for
too long. At its highest point, where Wytschaete village had once
stood, it overlooked Ypres and the British positions around, and was
a menace over desolate Plugstreet far towards Armentières. Rumour
ran that arrangements had been made to shift it bodily off the face
of the earth; that populations of miners had burrowed there through
months, for miles; that all underground was riddled with workings
where men fought in the dark, up and down tunnels that caved, round
the sharp turns of boarded and bagged galleries, and on the lips of
black shafts that dropped one into forty-foot graves. Yet, even were
Messines Ridge wiped out, the enemy had large choices of commanding
positions practically all round the Salient, and it seemed likely,
by what news sifted into their area, that the Guards might be called
upon before long to help in further big doings, Ypres way--perhaps a
“break-through” towards Lille.


THE SALIENT AND BOESINGHE

The Salient had been the running sore in our armies’ side since the
first. Now that we had men, guns, and material, it looked as if it
might be staunched at last. A battalion does not think beyond its
immediate interests--even officers are discouraged from trying to run
the war by themselves--but it did not need to be told that it had not
been fattened up the last few weeks for Headquarters’ pleasure in its
appearance. Men know when they are “for it,” and if they forget, are
reminded from the doors of crowded estaminets and canteens, or from
the tail-boards of loaded lorries as their comrades fleet by in the
dusk. They were not surprised when orders came for a shift.

On the evening of the 30th May they were taken by train from their
camp, _via_ Amiens, Abbeville, and Boulogne and St. Omer to Cassel
in thirteen or fourteen hours, and from Cassel marched back along
the well-known pavé nearly to St. Omer again and billeted between La
Crosse and the dingy wide railway-crossing at Fort Rouge. All the
country round was busy raising crops; every old man, woman, and child
working as long as light lasted. Their only available training-ground
was the Forest of Clairmarais, with its two characteristic wooded
hills that stand up behind St. Omer. Here they were taught
“wood-fighting” in addition to other specialties, and the mess
found time to give a dinner of honour to a friendly Field-Ambulance
(Irish in the main) to whom they had, on various occasions, owed
much. Scandal asserts that the guests departed, in the dawn, on
their own stretchers. Here, too, on the 6th June they entered for
the Brigade horse-show and won first prize for the best turned out
limber-and-pair, and seconds for water-cart and cooker-and-pair--no
small thing when one considers what is the standard of excellence in
Brigade transport.

On the next day (June 7), the nineteen mines of Messines went up
together in the dawn. The three army corps (Second Anzac and Ninth
and Tenth Corps) loosed behind them, broke forward over Messines and
Wytschaete, and the whole German line from Armagh Wood to Plugstreet
was wrenched backwards from a mile to two miles all along. Messines
was a singularly complete and satisfactory affair, including some
seven thousand prisoners and, better still, a multitude of dead,
killed off in counter-attacks. It opened the road for the Third
Battle of Ypres which was to win more breathing-space round the wreck
of the city. Unlike Arras, where there was almost unlimited space
for assembly in subterranean caves and cellars, every preparation
in the Salient had to be carried out under the enemy’s eyes on
known and registered ground lacking shelter above or below. Thus
the attack, which was to cover a front of fifteen miles, demanded
as much effort and pre-arrangement as any operation that had till
then been undertaken in the whole course of the war. Those were made
and carried through among, and in spite of, the daily demands of
continuous local operations, with the same thoroughness and fixedness
of purpose as when the Brigade competed for its little prizes and
trophies at Renescure horse-show.

On the 12th June the Battalion marched thirteen miles for musketry to
Moringhem in the bare, high down-country behind Acquin, where two men
collapsed with heat-stroke. A century ago the drill-book laid down
that unaimed battalion-fire from “Brown Bess” should never be opened
at over four hundred yards. They practised slow and rapid firing with
fixed bayonets at two and three hundred; company sharp-shooters using
figures at the same range.

On the 16th June the first drawing in towards the Salient began.
They camped that night at Ouderzeele north of Cassel, after such
heat as made several of the men fall out by the way, and on the 17th
bivouacked in sheds and shelters in the woods south-east of Proven
on the Poperinghe road, where the cultivation, all unaffected by the
war half a dozen miles off, was as thick as ever, and, except for
“specialist” training in the woods, it was difficult to find the men
work. The men bore this quite calmly.

As a sign of the times Lieutenant H. Hickie, who had been on leave,
arrived and “again took over his duties as Quartermaster” on the
20th June. Lieutenant J. H. Nash left on the same date for the Army
Central School, and on the 22nd Captain R. Rodakowski and Lieutenant
W. Joyce were detailed for courses of instruction at Le Touquet Lewis
Gun School.

On the 23rd June, Major-General Sir A. J. Godley, commanding the
Second Anzac Corps, came over on a visit to the Battalion and
inspected the men, and day by day the pieces required for the next
move on the chessboard of war were pushed into their places along
the Salient. The Fifth Army--of four corps and some divisions--under
General Gough was to take the weight of the affair between Klein
Zillebeeke and Boesinghe, while the First French Army--First and
Fifty-first Divisions--would relieve the Belgians from Boesinghe to
Noordschoote and extend the line along the Yser Canal north of Ypres
to Steenstraate. The Guards Division was to lie next them on the
extreme left of our line at Boesinghe.

On the 25th June, the Battalion moved from Proven into the edge
of the battle-area near Woesten, a couple of miles or so behind
Boesinghe itself, and came under the fire of a long-range German
naval gun which merely cut up the fields round them. Both sides were
now hard at work in the air, trying to put out each other’s eyes;
and a German aeroplane brought down one of our observation-balloons
hideously alight, close to Woesten camp. All the Salient hummed
with opposing aircraft, the bombing of back-areas was cruel and
continuous, and men had no rest from strain. But our batteries,
profiting by the help of our machines, hammered the enemy line as
it had not been hammered there since war began. Oil-drums, gas and
thermite shells were added to the regular allowances sent over, and,
whenever chance offered, raiding-parties dove in and out of the front
lines sharking prisoners for identification. The Battalion’s share
in this work was the usual fatigue--“unloading trucks” and the like,
beneath intermittent artillery-fire which, on the 29th June, ended in
three direct hits on the farm-house (Roussel farm) near Elverdinghe,
where they lay. One man was killed outright and three others wounded.
Their regular routine-work of death had begun again.

On the 1st of July they went into line on the Boesinghe sector,
relieving the 2nd Coldstream on the west or near sector of the Yser
Canal. Their trenches were of the usual built-up, sand-bagged type.
Headquarters were at Bleuet farm, well under fire of all kinds,
and though they managed their relief at night with little shelling,
early next morning, Lieutenant E. Shears was killed by shell. It
was a bad sector in every way, for not only did the Battalion link
on here to the Belgian army--later relieved by the French--on their
left, and any point of junction of Allied forces is always severely
dealt with, but the enemy were kept in tension by constant raids,
or the fear of them, all along the line. This meant that their SOS
signals went up on the least provocation and their barrages followed
with nervous punctuality. Added to this, fatigue-work was very heavy,
not only in repairs but in supply; and the necessary exposure of the
carrying-parties led to constant casualties.

On the 5th July, for instance, at two in the morning, gas shells
fired from projectors (the Germans were searching the line in earnest
that night) fell on a working-party of No. 4 Company. Nineteen men
were at once prostrated, of whom one died then and there, and two a
few days later; while Lieutenant Bagenal was slightly affected. (It
is difficult, especially in the dark, to keep working-parties, who
have to work against time, inside their gas-masks.) They were shelled
for the rest of the day with no further casualties.

On the 6th July Major Hon. H. R. Alexander, leaving for England to
attend the officers’ course at Aldershot, Captain R. R. C. Baggallay
took over the command, and on the 8th July they were relieved by
the 3rd Coldstream and bivouacked at Cardoen farm, where they spent
two days nominally resting--that is to say, supplying one hundred
and ten men each night for the detestable work of carrying-parties
to the front line. Lieut.-Colonel Rocke, D.S.O., commanding since
May 24, returned from leave on July 8, but unluckily on the 11th,
when the Battalion was in line, in the wreck of Boesinghe Village
(Headquarters at Boesinghe Château), slipped and broke his shoulder
while going round the trenches, and Captain Baggallay again took
over command. There was steady well-ranged shelling all that day,
particularly on Boesinghe Château, in the rear of which the aid-post
and headquarters of No. 1 Company lay. Battalion Headquarters were
shelled for half an hour separately. No. 3 Company’s Headquarters
in the support-line were wrecked by direct hits, and the entire
company shelled out, while the whole of the back lines were worked
over, up and down. All repairs had to be built up with sand-bags, for
the ground was too marshy to give useful dirt, and the labour was
unending.

On the 12th July they were shelled more heavily than the previous two
days on exactly the same places, and their transport, which till now
had had reasonable luck, was caught fetching up water and rations.
The four company quartermaster-sergeants and the mess-sergeant were
wounded, a horse and groom killed, and, later on, the transport
officer was slightly gassed. (“’Tis the Transport, ye’ll understand,
that has to take all Jerry’s back-chat after dhark, an’ no chance of
replyin’.”) By night they found carrying-parties to fill dumps--five
of them--each dump seeming to those serving it more exposed and
undesirable than the other four put together.

On the 14th of July there was a German raid, preceded by an hour’s
“box” barrage of trench-mortars, .77’s, and machine-guns, on two
platoons of No. 4 Company then in the front line behind the canal.
A shrapnel-barrage fell also on the supports. A “box” barrage is a
square horror of descending fire cutting off all help, and ranks high
among demoralising experiences. Luckily, the line was lightly held,
and the men had more or less of cover in dug-outs and tunnels in the
canal bank. A Lewis-gun post in a covered emplacement, almost on
the bed of the canal itself, was first aware, through the infernal
racket, of Germans crossing the canal, and fired at them straight
down the line of its bed. They broke and disappeared in the rank
weed-growth, but there was another rush over the parapet of the line
between two sentry groups in the firing-bays. The trenches were alive
by then with scattered parties stumbling through the black dark,
and mistaking each other for friends or enemies, and the ruin of
the works added to the confusion. As far as can be made out, one
officer, Lieutenant H. J. B. Eyre, coming along what was left of a
trench, ran literally into a party of the enemy. His steel helmet and
revolver, all chambers fired, were found afterwards near the wreck of
a firing-bay, but there was no other trace. It was learned later that
he had been mortally wounded and died that evening. In trench-raids,
when life, death, or capture often turn on a step to the left or the
right, the marvel was that such accidents were not more frequent.

A wounded German was captured. He had no marks of identification,
but said he belonged to a Schleswig regiment, and that the strength
of the raid was intended to be two hundred. It did not, as the
men said, “feel” anything like so many, though the wild lights of
explosion that lit the scene showed large enemy parties waiting
either in the bed of the canal or on the opposite bank. These, too,
vanished into the dark after their comrades in the trenches had been
turned out. Probably, it was but an identification fray backed by a
far-reaching artillery “hate” that troubled all the back-areas even
up to Elverdinghe.

Our front-line casualties in the affair were but one officer and one
man missing and one wounded. Yet the barrage blew the men about like
withered leaves, covered them with mud, plastered them with bits of
sand-bags, and gapped, as it seemed, fathoms of trench at a stroke,
while enemy machine-guns scissored back and forth over each gap. The
companies in the support-line who watched the affair and expected
very few to come out of it alive, suffered much more severely from
the shrapnel-barrage which fell to their share.

It was their last tour in the trenches for ten days, and it closed
with heavy barrages on the front and back lines, while they were
being relieved by the 1st Coldstream. This continued till our
guns were asked to reply, and after ten minutes made them cease.
The Battalion left the trenches in a steady downpour of wet and
entrained from Elverdinghe for Proven, whence they moved into the
training-area at Herzeele, where a representation of the ground to
be attacked on the day of battle, with its trenches and farms, was
marked out, and had to be studied by company commanders, N.C.O.’s,
and men according to their rank and responsibility. The officers’
mess at Herzeele was in the quaint old three-storied tower, built
when the Spaniards held rule in the Low Countries.

From the 16th to the 23rd July their mornings were spent at every
sort of drill--smoke-helmet drill, musketry, wiring, Lewis-gun, etc.,
and their afternoons in going over the training-ground and practising
attacks. All that time the weather was perfect. As soon as they moved
away to Proven and into the battle-area on July 25 heavy rain began,
which, as on the Somme, where the devil duly looked after his own,
was destined to baulk and cripple the battle. For an introduction to
their next month’s work, the Battalion, roused at 2 A. M. on that
day by gas-alarms from the front, provided over five hundred men for
working-parties to get stuff into the front line; lost ten men killed
by shell-fire and one officer, Lieutenant H. H. Maxwell (who had come
unscathed through the raid of the 14th), and seven men wounded; and
next evening moved to their own place, a distance of two and a half
miles, with two hundred yard intervals between the platoons, under
casual shell-fire.

They camped (July 27) in support near Bleuet farm, and, that evening,
had word that our aeroplanes reported no Germans could be seen in
the German front-line system, and that the 3rd Coldstream had sent
patrols forward who were already established across the canal. As a
matter of fact, the enemy was holding his front line in chains of
single posts, preferring rather to fight for it than in it; and was
relying on his carefully hidden ferro-concrete block-houses--later
known as “pill-boxes”--which, as he had arranged them in the torn
and marshy landscape, and along the line of the Ypres-Staden
rail, could hold up and dissipate any average infantry attack.
They were impervious to anything except direct hits of big stuff.
Their weakness was the small size of the slit through which their
machine-guns operated, and a certain clumsiness in the arrangement
of the gun itself, which made it difficult to depress. Consequently,
cool heads could crawl up and under, and rush the thing at close
quarters.

Whether the enemy believed there would be no serious attack at the
junction of the French and British arms in the Boesinghe sector, or
whether he drew his men out of the front line to give room for his
barrages, may never be known. It is certain, however, that he left
his front line immediately facing the Guards Division empty, and that
miscalculation enabled the Guards to launch their attack without
having first to fight their way across the canal. The Coldstream had
possessed themselves promptly of the evacuated trenches, and there
stayed for some time before the enemy realised what had happened,
sent aeroplanes to locate the raiders, and tried--without success--to
shell them back again. It was a quick, well-thought-out coup that
saved very many good lives.

On the 28th July the Battalion, after various contradictory orders,
was sent forward in the evening to relieve the left of the 3rd
Coldstream in the outpost-line. There was a report that the enemy
meditated an attack on that Battalion at their junction with the
Thirty-eighth Division on their right. (It must be remembered that
the French, who had had some difficulty in getting their guns
forward, were not in place, and their First Division lay on the left
of the Guards.) Up, then, went the Battalion in the evening and
took over the outpost-line from Douteuse House, to where it joined
the French forces. Two platoons of No. 2 Company, under Captain R.
Rodakowski, crossed the canal in the mud on improvised bridges of
slabs of wood nailed across rabbit-wire and canvas, and lay up in
an old German front line. The other two platoons occupied the old
British front line on the canal bank. Battalion Headquarters and
aid-post were at the Château, as usual. No. 1 Company (Captain W.
C. Mumford, M.C.) in support, and No. 4 Company (Captain Law, M.C.)
had a couple of platoons forward and two back. They were all shelled
equally through that night with gas and lachrymal shells, _plus_
barrages on headquarters and the various lines of support. The gas
was responsible for six casualties, chiefly among signallers and
orderlies, whose work kept them on the move. Nothing could be done to
strengthen the newly occupied trenches, as there was no wire on the
spot; for the R.E. parties, trying to bring it up, were pinned till
daylight by back-barrages.

On the 29th July a patrol was sent out to look at a concrete
blockhouse which our artillery reported they were unable to destroy
with the guns that were in use at the moment. The patrol drew fire
from the blockhouse, went on into the dark, and found that the
enemy’s line behind it was held by small posts only. Returning, it
would seem that they were fired at again, an N.C.O. and a man being
wounded, but they wounded and captured a prisoner, who said that
the post held twenty men. Whereupon that blockhouse was “kept under
observation” by small parties of our men, under Lieutenant Budd, M.C.
Next morning they observed five or six of the enemy lying out in
shell-holes round the blockhouse, which was too small for the whole
of its garrison. This overflow was all sniped in due course, till
the blockhouse, with fourteen unwounded prisoners, surrendered, was
absorbed into our outpost-line, and held against the enemy’s fire.
Considering that fire at the time--which included 5.9’s, 4.2’s, and
.77’s--it was a neatly expeditious affair. The Battalion was relieved
by the 1st Grenadiers and the Welsh, and went back to camp in the
Forest area to spend the 30th July preparing themselves and their
souls for the morrow’s work.

The Guards Division lay, as we know, between the First French
Division on its left and our Thirty-eighth Division on its right;
the line of the Ypres-Staden railway with its blockhouses marking
the limit between the two British divisions. This was an awkward
junction, which caused trouble later. Four objectives were laid
down. The first was the nearest German system of trenches, which had
lain under searching artillery-fire for some time, and would not be
difficult; the second, six hundred yards farther on, ran parallel to
the Pilckem road; the third an imaginary line a hundred yards beyond
the well-known Iron Cross Kortikaar-Cabaret road, beyond Pilckem
Ridge, and the last went up to the Steenbeek River. The total depth
of the run was about two miles from the canal bank.

The 2nd (Ponsonby’s) and the 3rd (Seymour’s) Brigades were to take
the first three objectives, after which the 1st (Jeffreys’s Brigade),
following close behind, was to come through and take the fourth.
The 2nd Brigade, which was on the right of the division, held
the front from the Ypres-Staden railway-bridge over the canal to
Boesinghe Bridge. The 3rd Brigade continued the line to the left for
six hundred yards. The 1st Brigade, less the 1st Irish and the 3rd
Coldstream, which were under the direct orders of General Feilding,
G.O.C. Guards Division, was in reserve.

Our barrages, conceived on a most generous scale, were timed to creep
at a hundred yards in four minutes. They were put down at 3.50 A. M.,
July 31, a dark, misty morning on the edge of rain, and the whole
attack went forward with satisfying precision so far as the Guards
Division was concerned. The various objectives were reached at the
given times, and level with the French advance. By eleven o’clock the
farthest was in our hands, and what difficulties there were arose
from the division on the Guards’ right being held up among unreduced
blockhouses enfilading them from the railway line.

Meantime, the 1st Battalion Irish Guards spent the day, after
breakfast at a quarter-past five, in reserve round the little
two-roomed, sand-bagged and concreted Chasseur farm, where there
was an apple-tree with all its leaves on; under half an hour’s
notice to move up if required. But no order came. They were shelled
intermittently all day, with a few casualties, and Captain F. S. Law
was slightly wounded. The evening, as pessimists prophesied, closed
in heavy rain, and the ground began to go. They stayed where they
were till the afternoon of the 1st August, when word came to take
over the line held by the 3rd Grenadiers and the 1st Coldstream on
the first, second, and third objectives.

They moved out in rain into the usual wilderness of shell-holes
filling with water, but for the moment were not shelled. No.
4 Company went by daylight to its positions on the first
objective--Cariboo Wood and some half-wiped-out German trench-systems
in a partly destroyed wood. The other companies waited till dusk
before distributing themselves on the Green line--the third
objective--which was about a thousand yards this side the Steenbeek
River. While the move was in progress, a brigade of the Thirty-eighth
Division reported that they had been shelled out of their advanced
positions on the river and were falling back, which, as far as
could be seen, would leave the right flank of the Guards Division
in the air. If this were so, and the dusk and the rain made it
difficult to judge, it was imperative to put everything else aside
and form a defensive flank along the railway line that separated
the two divisions. The companies were diverted accordingly, hastily
re-directed in the dark, and, when all was done, the brigade that had
made the trouble went back to its original position on the further
objective. There was small choice of sleeping-places that night.
Such German blockhouses as came handiest were used for battalion
and company headquarters while the companies lay out in the wet and
talked about the prospect of hot meals. They were not very severely
shelled, but when August 2 broke in heavy rain and the brigade on
their right continued to send up SOS’s at intervals, thereby obliging
them to maintain their flank on the railway line, they felt that
“conditions were becoming exceedingly trying,” as the Diary says.
Then came a relief, which was at least a change. The 1st Scots
Guards relieved the two platoons of No. 4 Company back in Cariboo
trenches, where the shelling was light; and later, as darkness fell,
set the other companies free to go forward and relieve the 2nd
Grenadiers at the front of things. The change-over took five hours,
and in the middle of it the brigade on their right once more sent up
SOS’s, which brought down a German barrage, and necessitated every
one “standing to” for developments. It proved a false alarm, and “no
action was taken by the enemy”--an omission which it is conceivable
the Guards Division rather regretted. Beyond question that Brigade
had been badly held up among the blockhouses, and had been savagely
shelled in and out of shell-holes that bewilder troops; but--till
their own trouble comes--no troops go out of their way to make
excuses for a nightmare of SOS’s. (“There’s enough fatigues, ye’ll
understand, when you’re _out_ o’ the line. Extra fatigues in action,
like defensive flanks, is outrageous.”)

They were shelled and rained upon throughout the whole of the night
of the 2nd August, and on the evening of the 3rd, still in ceaseless
rain, were relieved by the 1st Scots Guards and marched through
mud, water and darkness, over broken ground “beyond description” to
Elverdinghe Siding, where they were packed into trucks at five in the
morning and taken to Poll Hill Camp near Bandaghem for training.

Their casualties, all things reckoned, had been very light. They had
gone into action on the 31st July with 26 officers and 1002 other
ranks and had lost only 2 officers and 125 other ranks from all
causes.

The total casualties for the twelve battalions of the Guards Division
in the action had been 59 officers and 1876 men in two days; and rain
falling without a break for the next four days drowned out the sad
fight. The enemy’s line had been pushed back from Bixschoote, through
Frezenberg, Westhoek, Stirling Castle, and Shrewsbury Forest down
to Hollebeke. At that stage our armies, as had happened so often
on the Somme, were immobilised. The clay ground was cullendered and
punched by the shells into chains of pools and ponds. All valleys
and hollows turned into bogs where, if men wandered from the regular
tracks across them, they drowned or were mired to death. If they
stayed on the plankings the enemy’s guns swept them away. When all
had been done that man could do, the first phase of the Third Battle
of Ypres closed in a strengthened conviction that all the powers of
evil were in strict alliance with Germany. Our armies held off seven
counter-attacks along the line, settled themselves in it and then,
perforce, waited for the weather to clear.

It rained on and off till the 15th August, and, as most of the corn
in the fields round Poll Hill Camp had, owing to the wet, not been
cut, training-ground was limited just at the very time when the new
German system of holding a line with a chain of carefully camouflaged
posts called for a change in attack methods. So the Battalion was
practised in “surprise situations”--_i.e._ discovering invisible
enemies with machine-guns in shell-holes that turned the advancing
line into a ragged scattering “scrum.” Their dummy barrages were
slowed, too, as the Diary says, “to enable the surprise situations
to be dealt with and to give time for the line to re-form behind
the barrage after having dealt with these situations.” This was a
kind of work for which, like bombing, the Irish had considerable
natural aptitudes. It was summed up, unofficially, thus: “In the
ould days, a trench was a trench, ye’ll understand, an’ something
to lay hould upon. Third Ypres was failin’ into nothin’ and then
findin’ ’twas two pill-boxes an’ a fort on your flank.” Therefore,
the specialists in the shape of the Lewis-gunner and the “mopper-up”
who dealt with the débris of attacks were important persons and were
instructed accordingly when the Battalion was not indented upon for
working-parties on the gun-tracks and bridges round Boesinghe.


THIRD YPRES AND THE BROEMBEEK

On August 1 Lieutenant the Hon. P. J. Ogilvy joined the Battalion and
took over No. 1 Company from Acting Captain W. C. Mumford, who had
been appointed Town Major of the busy and occasionally battered town
of Elverdinghe; and Lieutenant E. Budd took over the 4th Company from
Acting Captain H. F. d’A. S. Law, wounded.

On the 15th August, the eve of the Langemarck attack, they were
put on one hour’s notice, which was withdrawn the next day, when
six divisions (the Forty-eighth, Eleventh, Fifty-sixth, Eighth,
Twentieth and Twenty-ninth) struck again along the line from the
Menin road to our junction with the French in the north. The weather
once more blinded our aeroplanes so that our artillery could not
deal effectively with the counter-attacks; the pill-boxes held up
our infantry, and though prisoners, guns, and a little ground round
Langemarck were gained, the line of the Salient from St. Julien
southwards stood as it had since the first. The Battalion was
peacefully at bomb-practice on that day, and by some oversight a live
bomb got mixed up with the dummies, and caused thirteen casualties,
luckily none of them very serious, and the training went forward. As
the crops were cut ground was gradually extended and every one was
worked hard at practice attacks; for they understood that their lot
would be cast in the Salient for some time.

On the 27th August medal ribbons were presented by the General of
the 1st Brigade to those who had won honour in the Boesinghe battle,
either by their cool-headedness in dealing with “surprise situations”
or sheer valour in the face of death or self-devotion to a comrade;
for there was every form of bravery to choose from. Lieutenant E.
Budd received the bar to his Military Cross, and Sergeant (a/C.S.M.)
P. Donohoe (No. 3056), No. 1910 Sergeant (a/C.S.M.) F. M’Cusker, No.
3224 Corporal E. M’Cullagh, No. 4278 Lance-Corporal J. Vanston, No.
7520 Private S. Nulty, No. 5279 Private J. Rochford (bar to Military
Medal), No. 10171 Lance-Corporal S. McHale, Military Medal; No. 10161
Lance-Corporal W. Cooper, D.C.M.

The following N.C.O.’s and men were unable to be present on parade,
but were awarded honours during the past month. No. 4512 Sergeant J.
Balfe, No. 3146 Lance-Corporal F. Coyne, No. 4386 Sergeant Macdonald,
No. 6078 Private J. Martin, Military Medal; No. 4884 Private D.
O’Brien, Croix de Guerre.

On the last days of August they marched to Proven Siding and
entrained for Elverdinghe and thence to Dulwich Camp, well known as
being “somewhat exposed and liable to long-range shell-fire.” They
were used at once by the greedy R.E.’s for burying cables and making
artillery-tracks preparatory to the next move in the interminable
Third Battle of Ypres.

From the 1st to the 4th September they, with the 1st Guards Brigade,
were in support to the 3rd Guards Brigade which was in the line,
and sent up about half their strength for carrying-parties every
night. The line, swampy and overlooked by the high ground under
Houthulst Forest to the north and north-east, consisted of posts in
shell-holes--the shell-holes being improved only just sufficiently
to make them “habitable.” The standard of comfort in the Salient
at that time was lower than on the Somme, where men were dying,
at least, dry. All posts were elaborately concealed from overhead
observation, for the enemy aeroplanes roved over them, bombing and
machine-gunning at large. Though the Battalion was lucky in its four
days’ turn, it lost on the night of the 4th September 2nd Lieutenant
G. P. Boyd and four men killed and twenty-three wounded. Some of the
other battalions in support suffered severely from bombing raids, and
all back-areas were regularly raked over so that the troops might be
worried by loss of sleep.

From the 5th to the 8th they lay in Rugby Camp, in reserve to the
2nd Coldstream and 2nd Grenadiers of their own Brigade in the front
line. Here they enjoyed a “fairly quiet time,” and had only to find
a hundred men or so per night for forward-area work. Rugby, Dulwich
and the other camps were all duly and regularly bombed, shelled and
gassed, but that was accepted as part of the daily and nightly work.

On the 9th they were up at the front among the “just sufficiently
habitable shell-holes” of the Green line beyond the Iron Cross
Kortikaar-Cabaret road from the Ypres-Staden railway to the junction
with the French. Their guides met them at Bois farm, fifteen hundred
yards back, and since, once among the holes, all food sent up risked
the life or mutilation of a man, they carried two days’ rations and
picked up their water from a Decauville railway that ran to the
terminus (daily bombed and bombarded) on the Wijden Drift road.
While the last two companies (Nos. 2 and 4) were getting their
tins at railhead, an hour and a half’s barrage was dropped on them
and twenty-seven men were killed or wounded. Relief was delayed in
consequence till one on the morning of the 10th, and, about an hour
later, a wandering covey of eight Germans, who had lost their way in
the dark, were rounded up by the forward platoons of No. 3 Company
(2nd Lieutenant Corry, D.C.M.). It was a small brisk fight, and it
came pleasantly after the barrage at railhead, and the shelling that
befell them from three to half-past five. They were annoyed, too, by
low-flying enemy aeroplanes who fired at the men in the posts but as
a rule missed them. A deserter came in and patrols were sent out to
see where the nearest enemy-post might be. One was located near the
railway line in front of the right company. Exploration work of this
sort in such a blind front as the enemy had arranged here, ends only
too often in patrols losing their way as the eight Germans had done;
and company officers do not like it.

On the 11th September, after some artillery work on our side, the
enemy guns carried out a shoot on the pill-boxes occupied by the
right (No. 1) company while their infantry were “unusually active,”
probably because the Thirty-eighth Division on the Guards’ right
was being relieved that night by the Twentieth. As a side-issue of
the fight the Battalion on their left was attacked, which, so far
as the Irish Guards were concerned, meant that the left company
(No. 2) swiftly manufactured a fresh post on their left to improve
communication with their neighbours, and prevent the enemy working
round their flank through the remnants of a wood. In this work they
had to disperse with rifle-fire several parties of the enemy who
might have interfered with their arrangements, and Captain T. F.
MacMahon was wounded. This bald record covers a long, tense night of
alarms and fatigues, and fatigue-parties dropping like partridges
where the barrage found them, to creep forward as soon as it was
lifted; and, somewhere on the left, the crackle and blaze of an
attack on a battalion which was entirely capable of taking care of
itself.

Their relief on the night of the 13th by the 1st Scots Guards was
“very much delayed.” Two detachments got lost, one through the guide
being killed and the other “through the guide losing himself.” Yet it
was a very dark, and, therefore, theoretically a safe, night, with
very little shelling--proof of the utter uncertainty of every detail
connected with war.

They had lost in that fortnight one officer (2nd Lieutenant Boyd)
and fourteen men killed; one officer (Captain T. F. MacMahon) and
seventy-eight other ranks wounded. For the rest of the month they
were training in camps--Cariboo and Poll Hill--of which the former
was not out of reach of shell-fire, and studied new methods of attack
to combat the enemy’s new methods of defence in his protected and
fortified shell-holes. These he now held in depth, one shell-hole
post covering or flanking the next, so that men fought their way
up a landscape of miniature redoubts, invisible to guns, almost
invisible to aeroplanes, and much more expensive to reduce than the
narrow-slotted pill-boxes.

On the 21st September their Brigadier-General Jeffreys saw the
Battalion on parade, near Proven, and bade them farewell on his
promotion to command the Nineteenth Division. He was succeeded in
command of the 1st Brigade by General C. R. C. de Crespigny. On the
27th Lieut.-Colonel R. V. Pollok commanding the Battalion, who had
been on leave, returned and took over from Captain A. F. L. Gordon
acting in his absence. On the 29th Lieutenant B. Reford who had been
Assistant Adjutant took over No. 3 Company _vice_ Captain T. F.
MacMahon, wounded on the 11th, and 2nd Lieutenant T. S. V. Stoney
joined for duty on the 25th.

Among the honours mentioned as awarded to the men that month for
gallantry and devotion to duty was the D.C.M. to 5279 Private J.
Rochford for “gallantry, devotion to duty and organizing ability”
when employed as a stretcher-bearer with a working-party on September
3, the night when Lieutenant Boyd and twenty-eight men were killed
or wounded by bombs. This, it may be noted, is that Rochford whose
presence steadied, and whose jests diverted, whole platoons upon the
Somme, and for whose health the men inquired first after the platoon
or working-party had been shelled.

And while they trained, with the utter self-absorption of men
concerned in the study of methods of taking man’s life, the Salient
heaved and flamed day after day with German counter-attacks as
our guns covered the adjustment and reinforcements and protection
of artillery troops and material in preparation for the battle of
September 20. As usual, the weather broke on the eve of it. Ten
Divisions (Nineteenth, Thirty-ninth, Forty-first, Twenty-third,
First and Second Australians, Ninth, Fifty-fifth, Fifty-eighth and
Twentieth) attacked from near Hollebeke in the south to Langemarck in
the north; pushed back the line on the whole length of their attack;
gained one mile outwards along the desperate Menin road, established
themselves in Polygon Wood, broke eleven counter-attacks, took over
3000 prisoners and left as many enemy dead. It was followed up
on the 26th September by another attack, on a six-mile front from
south of the Menin road to north-east of St. Julien, in which six
divisions (Thirty-ninth, Thirty-third, Fifth and Fourth Australians,
Fifty-eighth and Fifty-ninth) once more moved our line forward along
that frontage, in some places nearly half a mile. Our movement
clashed, almost to the minute, with German counter-attacks by fresh
divisions launched to recover the ground they had lost on the 20th
September, and the fighting was none the lighter for that coincidence.

The 3rd October saw the weather break again just as fighting was
resumed on a seven-mile front from the Menin road to the Ypres-Staden
railway. Twelve divisions went in here (the Thirty-seventh, Fifth,
Twenty-first, Seventh; First, Second and Third Australians; the New
Zealand; Forty-eighth, Eleventh, Fourth and Twenty-ninth). Reutel,
Nordemhock, and Broodseinde villages were taken, Abraham Heights
gained, the Gravenstafel spur cleared by the New Zealanders; three
fresh German divisions were caught by our guns almost in the act
of forming up for attack, and 5000 prisoners were passed back. The
enemy’s losses here were very satisfactory and mainly due to our
gun-fire.

On the 5th October, then, so far as the Guards Division was
concerned, the line of our working front ran through Poelcappelle
and thence back to the Ypres-Staden railway at a point some thousand
yards north of Langemarck. From that point it merged into the old
line gained on the 20th of September which followed the Broembeek
River at a short distance to the south of it, towards our junction
with the French, and thence lost itself in the flooded areas beyond
Noordschoote. No weight of attack had fallen on that sector of the
front since September 20 when Langemarck had been captured, and the
French line, with ours, advanced in the direction of Draibach and
Houthulst Forest.


THE BROEMBEEK

It was decided to renew the attack, in combination with the French
here, on the 9th October, from north-west of Langemarck across the
Ypres-Staden railway down to a point in the line gained on the 4th
October, east of Zonnebeke, on a front of six miles. The weather
prepared itself in advance. Rain began punctually on the 7th,
continued through the 8th, and made the going more than usually
unspeakable. It affected the Guards Division principally, since
their share of the work involved crossing the little valley of the
Broembeek River which, should it continue to flood, offered every
possible opportunity for holding up troops under fire, loss of
direction (since men never move straight across bogs) and engulfment
of material. The Broembeek was a stagnant ditch, from twenty to
thirty feet wide and from two to five deep, edged with shell-holes
and, in some parts, carrying vertical banks four or five feet deep.
There was, mercifully, no wire in it, but night-patrols sent out the
week before the battle of the 9th reported it could not be crossed
without mats.

The 1st Brigade of the division, which lay in reserve while the 3rd
Brigade held the front line, had trained for several days at Poll
Hill Camp over ground “marked” to represent the ground that the
Battalion would have to attack over. The certainty of being drenched
to the skin on a raw October night as a preliminary to tumbling from
shell-hole to shell-hole till dawn between invisible machine-guns and
snipers was left to the imagination of the men.

On October 6th, “the details to be left out of the attack departed
to join the Guards Division Reinforcement Battalion at Herzeele.”
Men say that the withdrawal of these reprieved ones on the eve of
action was as curious a sight as the arrival of a draft. (“For ye’ll
understand, at that time o’ the war, men knew ’twas only putting off
what was bound to happen.”)

Then, in foul weather, the Battalion entrained for Elverdinghe with
the 3rd Coldstream of their Brigade. The idea was that the 1st
Brigade (De Crespigny’s) would attack parallel to the line of the
Ypres-Staden railway on their right, about three hundred yards from
it, the 2nd Brigade (Sergison-Brooke’s) on their left next against
the French, with the 3rd Brigade (Seymour’s) in support. This last
brigade had been very heavily used in making arrangements for the
Division to cross the Broembeek, piling dumps and helping to haul
guns into fresh positions through the mud. The furthest objective
set, for the advance, was the edge of the Houthulst Forest, three
thousand yards across semi-fluid country with no landmarks other
than the line of smashed rail on their right, and whatever fortified
houses, farms, pill-boxes and shell-holes they might encounter during
their progress. When they had overcome all obstacles, they were
instructed to dig in on the edge of the forest.

At 9.30 on the night of the 8th, in heavy rain, the Battalion marched
from Abingley Camp to their assembly lines (these all duly marked
by tapes and white signboards, which, to the imaginative, suggest
graveyards) from Elverdinghe to Boesinghe road, up “Clarges Street”
to Abri Wood, and then to Cannes farm till they met the guides
for their assembly areas at Ruisseau farm. From here began the
interminable duck-boards that halt and congest the slow-moving line;
and it was not till four in the morning that the Battalion was formed
up and moved off. The rain had stopped a little before midnight and
a late moon came to their help.

The companies were commanded as follows: No. 1, Captain the Hon. P.
J. Ogilvy; No. 2, Lieutenant D. S. Browne; No. 3, Captain R. B. S.
Reford; No. 4, Lieutenant N. B. Bagenal.

There was some shelling as they got into their assembly positions
at 5.20 A. M., but casualties were few. The 2nd Grenadiers and 2nd
Coldstream led off under a few minutes’ blast of intense fire from
field-guns and Stokes mortars, crossed the Broembeek and were away.
At 6.20 the 1st Irish Guards and 3rd Coldstream followed them. The
Battalion’s crossing-place at the river, which, after all, proved
not so unmanageable as the patrols reported, had no bridges, but
there was wire enough on the banks to have made trouble had the enemy
chosen that time and place to shell. They went over in three-foot
water with mud at the bottom; re-formed, wet and filthy, and followed
the 2nd Grenadiers who had captured the first and second objectives,
moved through them at 8.20 and formed up on the right of the 3rd
Coldstream under the barrage of our guns for their own advance on the
final objective--the edge of the forest.

So far, barring a tendency to bear towards the right or railway side,
direction had been well kept and their losses were not heavy. The
companies deployed for attack on the new lines necessitated by the
altered German system of defense--mopping-up sections in rear of the
leading companies, with Lewis-gun sections, and a mopping-up platoon
busy behind all.

Meantime, the troops on the Battalion’s right had been delayed in
coming up, and their delay was more marked from the second objective
onward. This did not check the Guards’ advance, but it exposed the
Battalion’s right to a cruel flanking fire from snipers among the
shell-holes on the uncleared ground by the Ypres-Staden line. There
were pill-boxes of concrete in front; there was a fortified farm
buried in sand-bags, Egypt House, to be reduced; there were nests
of machine-guns on the right which the troops on the right had not
yet overrun, and there was an almost separate and independent fight
in and round some brick-fields, which, in turn, were covered by
the fire of snipers from the fringes of the forest. Enemy aircraft
skimming low gave the German artillery every help in their power,
and the enemy’s shelling was accurate accordingly. The only thing
that lacked in the fight was the bayonet. The affair resolved
itself into a series of splashing rushes, from one shell-hole to
the next, terrier-work round the pill-boxes, incessant demands for
the Lewis-guns (rifle-grenades, but no bombs, were employed except
by the regular bombing sections and moppers-up who cleared the
underground shelters), and the hardest sort of personal attention
from the officers and N.C.O.’s. All four companies reached the final
objective mixed up together and since their right was well in the
air, by the reason of the delay of the flanking troops, they had
to make a defensive flank to connect with a battalion of the next
division that came up later. It was then that they were worst sniped
from the shell-holes, and the casualties among the officers, who had
to superintend the forming of the flank, were heaviest. There was not
much shelling through the day. They waited, were sniped, and expected
a counter-attack which did not come off, though in the evening the
enemy was seen to be advancing and the troops on the Battalion’s
right fell back for a while, leaving their flank once more exposed.
Their position at the time was in a somewhat awkward salient, and
they readjusted themselves--always under sniping fire--dug in again
as much as wet ground allowed, and managed in the dark to establish
connection with a battalion of Hampshires that had come up on their
right.

They spent the night of the 9th October where they lay, in the
front line, while the enemy sniped them, shelled their supports,
or put down sudden wandering barrages from front to back. Every
company commander had been killed or wounded during the day; their
medical officer (Captain P. R. Woodhouse, M.C.) was wounded at duty
on the 10th, the men were caked with mud and ooze, worn to their
last nerves and badly in need of food and hot drinks. There was
no infantry action on their front, however, throughout the 10th,
and in the evening they were relieved by two companies of the 1st
Grenadiers; the other two companies of that battalion relieving the
2nd Grenadiers in the support-line. The battle, which counted as “a
successful minor operation” in the great schemes of the Third Battle
of Ypres, had cost them four officers killed in action on the 9th,
one died of wounds on the 11th, seven officers and their doctor
wounded in the two days; forty-seven other ranks killed; one hundred
and fifty-eight wounded, and ten missing among the horrors of the
swampy pitted ground. The list runs:

  Capt. the Hon. P. J. Ogilvy }
  Capt. R. J. P. Rodakowski   }
  2nd Lieut. A. L. Wells      } killed October 9.
  2nd Lieut. T. S. V. Stoney  }
  2nd Lieut. H. V. Fanshawe     died 11th October of
                                wounds received on
                                the 9th.

  Capt. R. B. S. Reford   }
  Lieut. N. B. Bagenal    }
  Lieut. D. S. Browne     } wounded October 9th.
  2nd Lieut. E. M. Harvey }
  2nd Lieut. T. Corry     }

  Capt. P. R. Woodhouse   }
  Lieut. H. H. Maxwell    } wounded October 10th.
  2nd Lieut. E. H. Dowler }

It took them eight hours along the taped tracks and the duck-boards
to get to Rugby Camp behind Boesinghe, where they stayed for the
next two days and drew a couple of officers and a hundred men from
the Divisional Reinforcement Battalion to replace some of their
casualties.

On the 13th October they, with their Brigade, took over the support
line on the old battle-front from various units of the 2nd and 3rd
Guards Brigade. The 2nd Grenadiers relieved the 1st Grenadiers
in the front line on the right and the 2nd Coldstream the Welsh
Guards on the left sector. The Battalion itself was scattered by
companies and half-companies near Koekuit-Louvois farm, Craonne
farm, and elsewhere, relieving companies and half-companies of the
other battalions, and standing by to attend smartly to the needs
of the forward battalions in case of sudden calls for more bombs,
small-arm ammunition, and lights. They were instructed, too, to be
ready to support either flank should the troops there give way.
But the troops did not give way; and they had nothing worse to
face than heavy shelling of the supports at night and the work of
continuing the duckboard-tracks across the mud. Most of the men
were “accommodated in shell-holes and small, shallow trenches,”
for water stopped the spade at a couple of feet below ground; but
where anything usable remained of the German pill-boxes, which
smelt abominably, the men were packed into them. It was in no way a
pleasant tour, for the dead lay thick about, and men had not ceased
speaking of their officers of the week before--intimately, lovingly,
and humorously as the Irish used to do.

More than most, the advance on Houthulst Forest had been an officer’s
battle; for their work had been broken up, by the nature of the
ground and the position of the German pill-boxes, into detached
parties dealing with separate strong points, who had to be collected
and formed again after each bout had ended. But this work, conceived
and carried out on the spur of the moment, under the wings of death,
leaves few historians.

They were relieved on the 16th October by the 20th Lancashire
Fusiliers of the 104th Brigade on their right, returned to
Elverdinghe through Boesinghe, and entrained for a peaceful camp at
Proven. During their three days’ tour, Lieutenant R. H. S. Grayson
and fourteen other ranks were wounded, mainly by shell and two other
ranks were killed.

They had begun the month of October with 28 officers and 1081 other
ranks. They had lost in sixteen days 252 other ranks and 14 officers
killed or wounded. Now they were free for the time to rest, refit,
and reorganise in readiness, men said, to be returned to the Somme.
(“Ye’ll understand that, in those days, we had grand choice of the
fryin’-pan or the fire.”)


THE RETURN TO THE SOMME AND CAMBRAI

The Salient, with its sense of being ever overlooked and constricted
on every side, fairly represents the frying-pan: the broad, general
conflagration of the Somme, the fire. They quitted the frying-pan
with some relief, entrained at Proven with the 3rd Coldstream and
the 1st Brigade Machine-gun Company, detrained at Watten between
the Bois du Ham and the Forêt d’Eperlecques, beyond St. Omer, and
marched to the pleasant village of Bayenghem-les-Eperlecques, where
they had the satisfaction of meeting the 6th Border Regiment just
marching out of the billets that they were to occupy. The place was
an intensive training-camp, specialising in all the specialties, but
musketry above all. The Somme was open country, where, since they had
left it, multitudes of tanks had come into use for the protection
of troops, and troops thus protected do not need so many bombers to
clear out shell-holes as they do in the Salient, where tanks stick
and are shelled to bits in the mud. The inference was obvious! They
enjoyed compulsory and voluntary musketry, varied with inspections
and route-marchings.

On the 21st October His Royal Highness the Duke of Connaught visited
them as senior Colonel of the Brigade of Guards, was introduced to
all the officers, spoke to most of the N.C.O.’s and the men who
had been decorated during the war. The Battalion was formed up in
“walking out” order in the streets of the village to receive him. It
is alleged by survivors that the sergeants saw to it that never since
the Irish Guards had been formed was there such rigorous inspection
of “walking out” men before they fell in. (“We looked like all
Bird-cage Walk of a Sunday.”)

On the 24th there joined for duty a draft of six officers, Major
R. R. C. Baggallay, M.C., Lieutenant G. K. Thompson, M.C., and 2nd
Lieutenants C. E. Hammond, F. G. de Stacpoole, T. A. Carey, and E. C.
G. Lord. Lieutenant D. J. B. FitzGerald was transferred from the 1st
to the 2nd Battalion on the Twenty-fifth, which was the day chosen
for an inspection of the whole Division by Sir Douglas Haig, in cold
weather with a high wind.

On the 6th November General Antoine, commanding the First French Army
Corps, which had lain on the Division’s left at Boesinghe, was to
present French medals gained by the Division, but, thanks to the wet,
parade, after being drawn up and thereby thoroughly drenched, was
dismissed and the medals presented without review. Lieut.-Colonel R.
V. Pollok, commanding the Battalion, received the Croix de Guerre.
It is all a piece with human nature that the miseries of a week in
liquid mud among corpses should be dismissed with a jest, but a
wet parade, which ruins three or four hours’ careful preparation,
regarded as a grievous burden for every one except the N.C.O.’s, who,
by tradition are supposed to delight in “fatigues” of this order.

Their three weeks’ training came to an end on the 11th November,
when they moved thirteen miles, in torrents of rain, to the village
of Ecques, which was filled with Portuguese troops, and began a long
march. They did not know their destination, but guessed well where
they were going.

Some had all the reasons in the world to know that the Division would
relieve the French on half a dozen different named sectors. Others
were certain that it would attack independently quite elsewhere.
Even Italy, where the Caporetto disaster had just taken place, was
to the imaginative quite within the bounds of luck. But their line
of route--twelve or thirteen miles a day in fine weather--dropped
always south and east. From Ecques it crossed the Lys at Thérouanne;
held over the worn road between St. Pol and Béthune, till, at
Magnicourt-le-Comte, came orders that all kits were to be reduced
and sent in to St. Pol. Elaborate reasons were given for this, such
as lack of transport owing to troops being hurried to Italy, which
dissipated the idea of light wines and macaroni entertained by the
optimists, and deceived no one. If they turned left when they struck
the St. Pol-Arras road, it would not be the French whom they were
relieving. If they held on south, it would be the old Somme ground.
And they held on south to Beaufort, marching by daylight, till the
18th of October found them in a camp of huts outside Blaireville and
well in the zone of aeroplane observation. They moved under cover of
darkness that night to a camp of tents at Gomiecourt between wrecked
Bapaume and battered Arras.

The bare devastated downs of the Somme had taken them back again,
and they were in the Fifth Corps, Third (Julian Byng’s) Army. It
was revealed at Divisional Headquarters conference on the night of
the 19th that that army was on the eve of attack. There would be
no preliminary bombardments, but an outrush of tanks, with a dozen
infantry divisions on a six-mile front from Gonnelieu to the Canal du
Nord near Hermies.

The affair might be a surprise for an enemy whom our pressure on
the Salient had forced to withdraw a large number of troops from
the Somme front. If the tanks worked well, it ought to result in
the breaking through of the triple-trench system of the Hindenburg
Line, which had been immensely strengthened by the Germans since
their leisurely retirement thither in April. We might expect to
push on across their reserve system three or four miles behind the
Hindenburg Line. We might even capture Cambrai twelve thousand yards
from our jumping-off place, though that would be a side-issue; but,
with luck, our attack would win us more high ground towards the
north and the north-east, whence we could later strike in whichever
direction seemed most profitable. Secrecy and hard-hitting would
be of the essence of the contract, since the enemy could bring up
reinforcements in a couple of days. Meantime the Guards Division
would stand by at two hours’ notice, ready to be used as required.
If Cambrai were taken, they would be called upon to hold it and
make good. If it were not, then the battle would rank as a raid
on a big scale, and the Division might be used for anything that
developed. That same day Major Baggallay, M.C., carried out a road
reconnaissance of the front at Doignies and Demicourt north of
Havrincourt Wood. The situation there betrayed nothing. “Apparently
the whole of that front-sector was habitually very quiet.”

Twenty-four hours later, it was alive and roaring with our tanks
rooting through the massed wire of the Hindenburg Line, the clamour
of half-a-dozen divisions launched at their heels and the smashing
fire of our guns in advance of them and their covering smoke-screens;
while far to the north and south dummy attacks, gas and artillery
demonstrations veiled and confused either flank. The opening day was,
beyond doubt, a success. The German line went out under the tanks,
as breakwaters go out under the race of a tide; and from Gonnelieu
to north of Hermies three systems of their defence were overrun to
a depth of four or five miles. By the 21st November our attack had
punched out a square-headed salient, ten miles across the base, the
southerly side of which ran along the high ground of the Bonavis
Ridge, more or less parallel to the St. Quentin-Escaut Canal from
Gonnelieu to Masnières, which latter place we held. The easterly
side lay from Masnières through Noyelles-sur-l’Escaut and Cantaing
to Fontaine-Notre-Dame and Bourlon Wood. This latter, as the highest
point of command, was the key of the position on our north flank.
Thence, the northerly flank of the salient ran roughly westward from
the wood, south of Mœuvres till it joined our original front north of
Boursies. About one half of the salient was commanded by German guns
from the north of Bourlon Wood, and the other half from the south in
the direction of the Bonavis Ridge.

Besides these natural disadvantages there were large numbers of our
cavalry hopefully disposed on the main routes in readiness for the
traditional “break-through,” the harrying of enemy communications,
etc. November on the Somme is not, however, quite the best season for
exploits of horse, sabre and lance.

Meantime, the Battalion spent the 20th November, and till the evening
of the 21st, at two hours’ notice in camp near Barastre, and on the
23rd November moved to bivouac just west of the village of Doignies
behind Demicourt on the edge of the “habitually very quiet sector”
before mentioned. The 1st and 3rd Brigades Guards Division had been
detailed to relieve two brigades of the Fifty-first Division in the
line attacking Fontaine-Notre-Dame village at the extreme north tip
of the salient a dozen miles away; and on the evening of the 23rd
November they received verbal orders to get away from Doignies. At
the moment the Battalion was moving off, came written orders that the
whole of its first-line transport should accompany it; so a verbal
order was sent to the transport officer to bring it on in rear of the
Brigade column. That was the beginning of some not too successful
Staff work and some unnecessary wanderings in the dark, complicated
by the congestion of the roads and the presence of the ever-hopeful
cavalry. The Battalion, its transport all abroad, crossed the Canal
du Nord from Doignies and waited by the roadside till Lieut.-Colonel
Follett, commanding the Brigade, rode into Graincourt, picked up
guides from the 152nd Brigade, brought on the Battalion another
couple of thousand yards to the cross-roads at La Justice, found
fresh guides from the Gordons and Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
and moved downhill straight into line at Cantaing mill after “a good
and quiet relief,” at 3.20 A. M. on the morning of the 24th. Fighting
had been going on day and night since the 20th for the possession
of Bourlon Wood and village, where the Fortieth Division had been
worn to a skeleton in alternate attack and counter-attack, but there
was no trouble that dawn or day on the Cantaing sector where the
Battalion lay and listened to the roar of the battle a mile and a
half to the north. Their concern was to improve their line and find
out where on earth the Staff had lost their first-line transport.
It appeared that varying orders had been given to the transport for
the different battalions, complicated by general instructions to
follow their own units by the light of nature; and there the orders
stopped. Naturally, as the roads boiled with traffic, all transport
was promptly stood aside to let troops get ahead, with the result
that after many adventures in the dark, including the collapse of a
bridge over the Canal du Nord when half the loads had crossed, the
Battalion’s transport got into Ribecourt at five in the morning,
still without any orders, found that no one knew where Brigade
Headquarters might be, billeted themselves in a wrecked farm and
managed to get into touch with their Battalion in the afternoon of
the 24th. About this time, the Fortieth Division with the tanks
attacked Bourlon village, captured the whole of it, only to be fought
out by the enemy on the following day. The Wood had not at that time
gained its dark name in history. All that the waiting Battalion at
Cantaing reports on the 25th November, while wood and village fumed
like the infernos that they were, is “no fighting on the battalion
front, although there was heavy fighting on the left.”

It broke out again on the 26th towards evening (the fifth day of
continuous battle), when the 4th Grenadiers of the 3rd Guards Brigade
were sent up to support the Fortieth Division and, on the way
thither, went through a heavy German barrage as though they were on
parade.

But the high ground above Bourlon Wood and Fontaine-Notre-Dame gave
the enemy an artillery and observation command which enabled them to
sweep our front and back areas in the northern half of the salient
almost as they chose. Pressure, too, was beginning to develop on
the flanks. The forty-eight hours in which the enemy could bring up
fresh troops had grown to nearly a week, and they had used every hour
of it. In no way could the situation be called healthy, but were
the Bourlon Ridges won, at least our gain of ground might be held.
So it was decided that the 2nd Guards Brigade, 3rd Grenadiers, 1st
Coldstream, 2nd Irish Guards and 1st Scots Guards, together with the
4th Grenadiers and the Welsh Guards borrowed, should on the 27th
attack Fontaine village and Bourlon Wood. They did so attack; they
were cut to pieces with machine-gun fire in the advance; they were
shelled out of Bourlon Wood; they were counter-attacked by heavy
reinforcements of the enemy; they had no reinforcements; they fell
back on Fontaine village in the evening; they withdrew from it in
the darkness and fell back on La Justice. It was a full failure
with heavy casualties and the news went back, with the speed of all
bad news, to the 1st Brigade, which had been relieved on the 26th,
the 1st Irish Guards lying at Ribecourt in the ruined farm where
their transport had taken refuge. They should have been in a trench
outside the village, but a battalion of another division was found in
possession of it, and so was not disturbed.


GOUZEAUCOURT

There was no shelter against the driving snowy rain, and the men,
without great-coats or blankets, were “very cold, wet and miserable.”
The next day was no better, and on the 29th the Fifty-ninth
Division took over their area from them while the Guards Division
was rearranged thus: the 3rd Brigade at Trescault, the 2nd at
Ribecourt, and the 1st at Metz-en-Couture, a wrecked, red-brick
village, once engaged in the sugar-beet industry, lying on and under
a swell of the downs some four thousand yards west of Gouzeaucourt.
The Divisional Artillery was at Flesquières, more than four miles
away. The Battalion’s march to Metz was badly delayed by blocks on
the road and a general impression spread that trouble was not far
off. Individually, the soldier is easy to deceive: collectively, a
battalion has the sure instinct of an animal for changes in the wind.
There were catacombs in Metz village where one company was billeted
whereby it was nearly choked to death by foul gases.[8] This seemed
all of a piece with the bad luck of the tour, and the dawn of the
30th November was ushered in by single shells from a long-range gun
which found them during the night. Half an hour after they had the
order to move to Heudicourt and had digested a persistent rumour that
the enemy were through at Gonnelieu, telegrams and orders began to
pour in. The gist of them was that the line had undoubtedly cracked,
and that the Brigade would move to Gouzeaucourt at once. But what
the Brigade was to do, and under whose command it was to operate,
were matters on which telegrams and orders most livelily conflicted.
Eventually, the Division as a whole was assigned to the Third Corps,
the 3rd Brigade was ordered to come up from Trescault and help the
1st, and the various C.O.’s of the battalions of the 1st Brigade rode
forward to see for themselves what was happening. They had not far
to go. Over the ridge between Gouzeaucourt and Metz poured gunners,
carrying their sights with them, engineers, horses and infantry, all
apparently bent on getting into the village where they would be a
better target for artillery. The village choked; the Battalion fell
in, clear of the confusion, where it best could, and set off at once
in artillery formation, regardless of the stragglers, into the high
and bare lands round Gouzeaucourt. There were no guns to back them,
for their own were at Flesquières.

As was pointed out by an observer of that curious day--“’Tis
little ye can do with gunsights, an’ them in the arrums av men in
a great haste. There was men with blankets round ’em, an’ men with
loose putties wavin’ in the wind, and they told us ’twas a general
retirement. We could see that. We wanted to know for why they was
returnin’. We went through ’em all, fairly breastin’ our way and--we
found Jerry on the next slope makin’ prisoners of a Labour Corps
with picks an’ shovels. But some of that same Labour Corps they took
their picks an’ shovels and came on with us.”

They halted and fixed bayonets just outside Gouzeaucourt Wood, the
Irish on the left of the line, their right on the Metz-Gouzeaucourt
road, the 3rd Coldstream in the centre, the 2nd Coldstream on the
right, the 2nd Grenadiers in reserve in Gouzeaucourt Wood itself.
What seems to have impressed men most was the extreme nakedness
of the landscape, and, at first, the absence of casualties. They
were shelled as they marched to the Wood but not heavily; but when
they had passed beyond it they came under machine-gun fire from the
village. They topped the rise beyond the Wood near Queen’s Cross and
were shelled from St. Quentin Ridge to the east. They overran the
remnant of one of our trenches in which some sappers and infantry
were still holding on. Dismounted cavalry appeared out of nowhere in
particular, as troops will in a mixed fray, and attached themselves
to the right of the thin line. As they swept down the last slope to
Gouzeaucourt the machine-gun fire from the village grew hotter on
their right, and the leading company, characteristically enough,
made in towards it. This pulled the Battalion a little to the right,
and off the road which was supposed to be their left boundary, but
it indubitably helped to clear the place. The enemy were seen to be
leaving in some haste, and only a few of them were shot or bayoneted
in and out among the houses. The Battalion pushed in through the
village to the slope east of it under Quentin Mill, where they
dug in for the night. Their left flank was all in the air for a
while, but the 3rd Brigade, which had been originally ordered to
come up on the right of the 1st, was diverted to the left on the
Gouzeaucourt-Villers-Plouich line, and they got into touch with the
4th Grenadiers. There was no attempt to counter-attack. Tanks were
used on the right during the action, but they do not seem to have
played any material part in the Battalion’s area, and, as the light
of the short and freezing November day closed, a cavalry regiment or
“some cavalry” came up on the left flank.

The actual stroke that recovered Gouzeaucourt had not taken more than
an hour, but the day had cost them a hundred and thirty men killed,
wounded, and missing; Lieutenant N. F. Durant killed, Lieutenant
(Acting Captain) Joyce, Lieutenant G. E. F. Van der Noot, Lieutenant
G. K. Thompson, M.C., and 2nd Lieutenant P. M. Riley wounded. All the
casualties were from machine-gun fire; men dropping at the corners of
streets, across thresholds in cellars and in the angles of wrecked
walls that, falling on them, hid them for ever.

A profane legend sprang up almost at once that the zeal shown by the
Guards in the attack was because they knew Gouzeaucourt held the
supplies of the division which had evacuated it. The enemy had been
turned out before he could take advantage of his occupation. Indeed,
a couple of our supply-trains were found untouched on rail at the
station, and a number of our guns were recaptured in and around the
place. Also, the divisional rum-supply was largely intact. When this
fact came to light, as it did--so to say--rum-jar by rum-jar, borne
joyously through the dark streets that bitter night, the Brigade
was refreshed and warmed, and, men assert, felt almost grateful to
the division which had laid this extra “fatigue” on them. One grim
incident stays in the minds of those who survived--the sight of an
enormous Irishman urging two captives, whom he had himself unearthed
from a cellar, to dance before him. He demanded the jigs of his
native land, and seemed to think that by giving them drink his pupils
would become proficient. Men stood about and laughed till they could
hardly stand; and when the fun was at its height a chance shell out
of the darkness to the eastward wiped out all that tango-class before
their eyes. (“’Twas like a dhream, ye’ll understand. One minute
both Jerries was dancin’ hard to oblige him, an’ then--nothin’,
nothin’--nothin’--of the three of them!”)

The next day, orders came for the Guards Division to continue their
work and attack on a front of two miles along the line of the ridge
a thousand yards east of Gouzeaucourt, which ran south through
Gonnelieu village and Gauche Wood to Villers Hill. Tanks, they
were told, would help and the Divisional Artillery would put down
barrages. The Fifty-ninth Division would be on their left and the
Cavalry Division on their right. The 1st Guards Brigade were assigned
Gauche Wood; the 3rd Brigade had the much more difficult problem of
rushing Gonnelieu village in the event of another Division who were
attacking it that morning (1st December) failing to make headway.
The 1st Brigade’s attack on Gauche Wood was undertaken by the 2nd
Grenadiers on the right, the 3rd Coldstream, in reserve, in their
trenches. They assembled before dawn on the 1st December, waited a
while for a promised detachment of tanks and finally started off
without them. Their artillery support was meagre, and the troops had
to cover three-quarters of a mile over grassy land to the fringe
of the wood. The enemy’s first barrage fell behind them; the wood
itself was crammed with much more effective machine-guns, but, once
it had been entered, the issue became a man-to-man affair. Then
some tanks turned up and some cavalry, the latter an hour late. The
tanks were eventually withdrawn, as they found no trenches to crush
in the wood and drew much shell-fire in the open; but the cavalry,
which included Bengal Lancers, were of good use on the right flank
of the attack. The two Guards Brigades, one attacking Gonnelieu to
the north, the other Gauche Wood to the south, drew a little apart
from each other as the men closed in where the machine-gun fire
was hottest, and about nine o’clock the 1st Irish Guards sent up a
company (No. 1) to fill the gap which developed on both sides of the
Gouzeaucourt-Gonnelieu road, the boundary between the Brigades.

They do not seem to have been called upon to do more than sit, suffer
and be shelled till evening, when they were relieved by a company of
the 1st Coldstream and went back in the hard black frost to their
bivouac in Gouzeaucourt Wood. Gauche Wood was won and held, but
Gonnelieu, its houses and cellarages crammed with machine-guns, was
a hopeless proposition from the first, to troops lacking tanks or
adequate artillery aid. The sole excuse for attempting it was that
the enemy’s pressure was heavy and increasing on all three sides of
the Cambrai Salient (Bourlon Wood in the north was the point of most
actual danger) and had to be met by whatever offered at the times
and near the places. The 3rd Brigade was held up by the inevitable
machine-gun in trenches in front of Gonnelieu and round the cemetery
on its eastern outskirts; and there it stayed, under circumstances of
extreme misery, till the 3rd December, when the 1st Brigade came back
from Gouzeaucourt Wood to relieve. The 1st Irish Guards, numbering,
then, four hundred and fifty battle-strength, who took over the
2nd Scots Guards’ and half the 1st Grenadiers’ line, were allotted
what might be termed “mixed samples” of trench. No. 1 Company, for
instance, held six hundred yards of superior wired line, evidently
an old British reserve line, with the enemy dug in sixty yards away.
No. 3 Company on its right had a section mostly battered to bits and,
further weakened by an old communication-trench running up to the
enemy, which had to be blocked as soon as possible. No. 2 Company
was even less happily placed; for the enemy inhabited the actual
continuation of their trench, so that they worked with their right
flank grossly exposed. Two platoons of No. 4 Company lay close behind
No. 2 to cover a gap; while the other two platoons in Flag Ravine,
four or five hundred yards back, by the railway-line, were all the
reserve the Battalion possessed east of Gouzeaucourt Wood. By some
unexplained mercy of Providence that night, the next day and the
next day’s night were “quiet” in the sense that there was no actual
attack. The men sat in the trenches and froze; for the frost held
day and night, and the enemy shelled the line at their will, with
trench-mortars from near at hand and heavier stuff from the ridges
beyond. Just before dawn, on the 5th December, they put down a very
heavy mixed barrage behind the front line and a trench-mortar one
on the line itself, and then attacked the two weak spots--No. 2 and
No. 3 Companys’ position--with armoured bombers. The barricade to
the communication-trench of No. 3 Company was blown in by a direct
mortar-hit and a rush followed. No. 2 Company’s trench was also
rushed end-on from the right, and three or four bays of it were
taken. At this point, the Irish left the trenches all filling with
the enemy, got out into the open, where for the moment there was
no mortar-fire, and dealt with the invaders from outside, bombing
and shooting downwards into the heavily-moving queues. The Germans
wore their packs, “from which it may be inferred,” says the Diary
delicately, “that they meant to occupy our trenches.” This, and
their scientific armour, proved their undoing, and when--presumably
to make doubly sure--an infantry attack swarmed out in two lines
from Gonnelieu, it was broken up by our rifle and machine-gun fire,
till it turned round and fled. Hereupon, says the Diary, “they were
heavily bombed by their own side,” presumably as an example to His
Majesty’s Guards of Prussian discipline. The casualties in the
Battalion were one officer, 2nd Lieutenant Carey, and four other
ranks killed; and about thirty wounded, mainly by bombs and mortars.
But the affair was waste-work on both sides; for Gonnelieu was never
taken by our arms. Our line here, in the next day or so, fell back
on Gauche Wood; and of all the salient won at the Battle of Cambrai
between the 20th and the 23rd of November, all that remained by
the 7th of December was a stretch of country perhaps four thousand
yards deep running from the Gouzeaucourt-Cambrai road to north of
Demicourt. On the other hand, a cantle had been taken out of our
old front line from opposite Vendhuille to Gonnelieu. But in the
area that we held lay a sample of the great Hindenburg Line with
its support-systems, its ten-foot-deep concreted and camouflaged
trenches, covered gun-ways, machine-gun wells and shafts, and the
whole detail of its immensely advertised impregnability. Men saw it
with their own eyes, explored its recesses wonderingly, followed down
the terrible lanes that the tanks had cut in its hundred-yard-deep
beltings of wire, and settled themselves thankfully in its secure
dug-outs, not foreseeing the days next spring when they would be
swept out of it all like withered leaves. Cambrai was no success, but
it would be unjust to hold it, as some wearied and over-wrought souls
did, an unrelieved failure. The enemy had not achieved their purpose,
which was to cut off all our troops in the salient, and were quite
willing to break away and wait till the transfer of fresh divisions
from the collapsed Russian front should be methodically completed.
We, on our part, were equally ready to cut our losses, for we had no
men to spare. The Guards Division was moved out of the battle-area
on the 6th December, being relieved by troops of the Ninth Division.
On the evening of their own private battle the Battalion handed over
their none too pleasant trenches to the 5th Cameron Highlanders, and
went back to bivouac in Gouzeaucourt Wood after a “very good relief,”
which drew from the Diary the tribute that the Camerons were a “fine
Battalion.” Had they been an hour late, in that cutting wind across
the slopes, a cohort of angels with fiery swords would have been put
down as hopeless!

They moved from the Wood next day to Etricourt down the long road
through Fins, and at Etricourt entrained for Beaumetz-les-Loges on
the Arras-Doullens road which they reached late at night, cold and
empty, and were not billeted at Berneville, two or three kilometres
to the north-east, till midnight. They had lost, in November and
December, two officers killed; Lieutenant N. F. Durant on the 30th
November, who had joined on the 1st of that month, and 2nd Lieutenant
T. A. Carey, killed on the 5th December, joined on the 24th October.
(The average expectation of an officer’s life in those days on the
Somme was still about six weeks, though some were so lucky they
survived for months.) Four officers had been wounded in the same
period: Lieutenants G. K. Thompson, Lieutenant (Acting Captain)
Joyce; G. E. F. Van der Noot, and 2nd Lieutenant P. M. Riley, all
on the 30th November. The following officers joined in November and
December: Lieutenants Zigomala, B. F. Crewdson, D. J. B. FitzGerald
and J. N. Ward; and 2nd Lieutenants H. A. A. Collett, A. W. G.
Jamrack and C. A. J. Nicholson.

At Beaumetz-les-Loges they lay till the end of the year, cleaning
up, refitting, drilling, and not forgetting their football--the
2nd Scots Guards beat them in the third round of the Divisional
Football Competition at Arras--or their company Christmas dinners.
These were the fourth that the Battalion had eaten within sound of
the weary guns, but if any one had told them that their next would
be celebrated in stately steam-heated barracks at Cologne, hospital
would have been his portion. They could not have been called happy
or hopeful at that time; for they knew, as all our armies did, that
the year’s gain had been small, and the work ahead of them, now that
the German divisions, released from Russia were pouring westward,
would be heavy. But for the moment they were free of the Somme and
its interminable duckboards that led men to death or hard work; its
shell-holes floored with icy snow-water, the grave-like chill of its
chalk trenches, and the life-sapping damps of the uplands on which
they had lain out from nights till mornings.

Here is a memory of those days presented by the teller as a jest.
“Aye! Gouzeaucourt and Gonnelieu! _I_’m not like to forget ’em. I was
back from leave, ye’ll understand; no more anxious to die than the
rest of us. An’ there was some new men, too--new young lads just come
over. My kit was all new, too, me bein’ back from leave. Our C.S.M.
dhrew me attention to it one of those merry nights we was poachin’
about in No Man’s Land. ‘’Tis a pity,’ says he, ‘ye did not bring
the band from Caterham _also_,’ says he. ‘’Twould have amused Jerry.’
My new kit was shqueakin’ an’ clicking the way they could have heard
it a mile. Aye, Gouzeaucourt an’ the trenches outside Gonnelieu!
Jerry was usin’ trench-mortars at his pleasure on us those nights.
They was crackin’ on our heads, ye’ll understand. An’ I was in a bay
with two men. Wan was a new young man, an’ the trench-mortars was
new to him. Cowld? It was all of that! An’ Jerry crackin’ this dam’
trench mortar-stuff of his on our heads at will. It put the wind up
_me_! Did I tell you the other man in the bay was dead! He was. That
finished me new young man. He kep’ trying to make himself smaller an’
smaller against the trench-mortars. In the end of it, he laced his
arrums round his ankles--he did--an’ rocked to an’ fro, whishperin’
to the Saints. Shell-shock? Oh, yes, ’twas all that. Presintly I
heard Mr. ---- comin’ the rounds, walking outside the trench. Ye see
more where ye’re outside a trench, but ’tis no place I’m fond of
without orders. ‘An’ are ye all cozy down there, Sergeant?’ says he.
Yes, ‘cosy’ was his word! Knowin’ him well, ‘Why wud we not be cosy,
Sorr?’ says I, an’ at that he dhrops into the bay to have a look. We
was cosy enough, all three of us--the dead man dead an’ stiffenin’
in the frost, an’ this fine new young lad of ours embracin’ his own
ankles an’ rockin’ back an’ forth, an’ me _so_ sorry my leave was
up. Oh! we was the cosiest party in the whole dam’ front line that
night; and for to make it all the cosier, my new young man, as soon
as he set eyes on Mr. ----, he flung his arrums around his neck, an’
he let out a yell, an’ he hugged him like a gurrl. I had to separate
’em! I’ve laughed at it since, an’ so did Mr. ---- an’, begad, I
remember laughin’ at it at the time. Ay, ‘cosy,’ Mr. ---- said. That
_was_ the word! So I laughed. Otherwise there was not much laughin’,
ye’ll understand, at Gouzeaucourt an’ them ‘cosy’ trenches before
Gonnelieu.”




1918

ARRAS TO THE ARMISTICE


The lull lasted till the 2nd of January when they marched _via_
Warlus to Arras and were billeted in the prison there. Battalion
Headquarters were in a luxurious house in the Rue d’Amiens, with a
whole roof and all windows repaired with canvas. It was hard frosty
weather, binding everything tight--of the kind that must be paid for
when thaw comes.

At that moment our line, on the Somme side, ran from Lens just behind
Oppy, through Rœux, five miles east of Arras, south to Bullecourt,
south-easterly towards Boursies, round the Flesquières-Ribecourt
Salient that Cambrai fight had won for us, curved back between
Gonnelieu and Gouzeaucourt, and thence dropped, skirting St. Quentin
and the valley of the Oise, to the junction with the French at
Barisis, south of that river. This length, of close on seventy miles,
was held, from Barisis to Gouzeaucourt, by Byng’s Third Army, and
from Gouzeaucourt to Gavrelle, by Gough’s Fifth Army. North of this,
the First Army took on. The working and reserve strength of the Third
and Fifth Armies at the opening of 1918 was twenty-nine infantry
and three cavalry divisions. So far as our arms were concerned,
everything on the French and Belgian fronts was at a standstill.
The Somme had cost very heavily throughout the year, and there was,
or was said to be, a scarcity of men. The situation appears to have
been met by reducing the number of battalions in the brigades from
four to three apiece. This released the odd battalions to make what,
on paper, and in the journals, looked like additional brigades, but
threw extra work, which nowhere appeared as news, on the whole of
the army administration in the field. Sir Douglas Haig’s despatches
refer guardedly to the reorganization, which he hints “to some
extent affected” the fighting efficiency of the units concerned. The
sentiments of commanders more directly concerned were, perhaps, less
publishable; for it rarely improves an old army in the field to lace
it at the last moment, before a general attack, with new brigades
composed of battalions suddenly disassociated from the units with
whom they have been working. But thus was created the Fourth Guards
Brigade, by lopping off the 4th Grenadiers, the 2nd Irish Guards,
and the 3rd Coldstream from their respective brigades, and attaching
them to the Thirty-first Division. Further, it was necessary for
the British armies to take over another stretch of nearly thirty
miles from the French on the right--approximately from Barisis to
Vendhuille on the Oise--and this brought the British front up to one
hundred and twenty-five miles total length.

Our enemy lay less under such burdens. His released divisions,
aeroplanes, and guns were decently entraining from the Russian front,
and arriving on the Somme in good order, a fact of which our Staff,
and in a very short time all our armies, were perfectly aware. (“We
could _feel_ Jerry pilin’ up and pilin’ up against us in those days,
ye’ll understand.”) So, as may have been pointed out, every one
stood by to prepare for the worst. The Guards Division, now of nine
battalions, instead of twelve, was assigned to the defences before
Arras, the hinge on which the coming trouble might be expected to
turn. Their trench and post system ran north and south across the
Scarpe with its lagoon and marshes, by Rœux--all old and much used
ground, but which had the advantage of being served both by canal and
a light rail from Arras.

The Battalion, which had trained and bombed in the town till the
8th January, relieved the 3rd Grenadiers in the reserve trenches of
the right sub-sector of this defence, on the 9th January, in heavy
snow. Lancer Avenue, which commanded a fine view of our own lines
and the enemy’s, and posts K, L, and M just off it (all south of the
river), took half the strength. The remainder garrisoned Crump and
Cordite Reserve trenches on the north, and supplied an isolated and
unpleasant post (F) between the river and the lagoon which could only
be reached with comfort after dark, when an officer, twenty men,
a Lewis-gun, and a couple of signallers watched there in case an
enterprising enemy should be minded to raid along the tow-path.

Next day it thawed and the old horrors of Ypres Salient were their
portion. The snow vanished, leaving terrible mud. The day passed
quietly. Nos. 1 and 3 Companies had to find “a carrying-party for
front companies in the evening.” The story behind the entry tells
itself. The enemy did not add himself to their burdens. A patrol,
under 2nd Lieutenant H. A. Collett, went out the next night (January
11) five hundred yards into No Man’s Land--from F post--saw and heard
nothing. F post was always a ghostly sort of place, where bullets
whistled by without explanation between the furred tree-trunks
along the tow-path; and the marshy ground behind it was filled with
shell-holes, rusty wire and the black dead of forgotten fights.
The ruins of Rœux across the river, suddenly leaping to shape in
the flare of Véry lights, looked down on it like the skeleton of
a fortress on a stage, and single unexpected shells spattered mud
across the cold waters.

On the 13th January they relieved the 2nd Grenadiers at the front
in a fresh assortment of decayed posts--Scabbard Alley, Scabbard
Support, Welford Reserve and the like, whose names even to this day
make men who served there shiver. As thaw and rain worked on them,
the trenches “all fell in great lumps.”

“Why troops who had held them all the summer had done nothing to
revet them and prepare for the winter, I cannot think,” one indignant
sufferer wrote. “But that is always the fault of the British army.
It _will_ not look ahead.” He prophesied better than he knew. Then
he went to visit his posts, where the men were already half buried
in mud. The enemy assisted our repairing parties with trench-mortars
at intervals, till orders went forth that, though our mortars were
nowise to stir up trouble, when once it began they would retaliate
for just five minutes longer than the enemy. By the misfortune of a
faulty shell, one of our Stokes guns burst on the 14th, killing or
wounding eight men. However, it was noted that the enemy transferred
his attentions for the next few days to a battalion of East
Lancashires on our right.

On the 15th all wiring and defence-work ceased--“employed solely on
trying to keep trenches passable.” In spite of which the mud gained.
Men’s boots were pulled off their feet, and it is on joyous record
that when Captain Gordon, the adjutant, tried to get up Johnson
Avenue, their only communication-trench, he stuck up to his waist
in mud and water and, lest he should be engulfed, had to wriggle
out of his gum-boots, which came up to his thighs, and continue in
his socks. The gum-boots, empty, sank out of sight like a wreck on
the Goodwins. They reconnoitred new tracks for the reliefs, across
duckboards running in full view of the enemy, who, luckily, had their
own conditions to fight, and let a couple of our patrols invade No
Man’s Land unmolested, prowl round two machine-gun posts and even
enter a German front line, “being too busy talking and hammering to
notice us.” The sodden sand-bags of the revetments bulged outwards
and met across the trenches. The men worked day and night, and
blessed every battalion’s remotest ancestry that had ever used, and
neglected, that accursed line.

On the 17th January they were relieved by the 2nd Grenadiers, which
merely meant their reverting to Crump Trench, Cordite Reserve, Ceylon
Avenue, etc., where, all being equally impassable, every movement had
to be effected in the open.

Our artillery chose the 18th to be very active from their positions
round Battalion Headquarters near the railway cutting behind,
whereby there was some enemy retaliation that the mired front line
could have spared. (“Every one is looking like the worst form of
tramp--standing, walking, sleeping and eating mud.”)

On the 19th they got it worse, and when No. 1 Company paraded in the
dawn dark (they were in dug-outs below the rail embankment) to go
to work, a shell which dropped at the entrance killed one (but he
was the cook), wounded two of their number, and destroyed the whole
cooking-outfit. Captain A. F. L. Gordon, M.C., was also slightly
wounded on that date, but not enough to send him to hospital. He was
riding into Arras with Captain Woodhouse, the M.O.--also a man of
charmed lives--and just behind the railway embankment came in for a
complete barrage of heavy stuff, intended for Battalion Headquarters.
Neither he, nor any one else, ever understood why they were not blown
to pieces. The doctor’s horse wounded was the only other casualty.

On the 22nd January the relieved 2nd Grenadiers, having handed over
news of the discovery of a German listening-post which seemed to
be used only by night, a scheme was arranged to occupy it while it
was empty, and astonish the enemy on their return. But the enemy
never came, though 2nd Lieutenant Stacpoole and a party of seven,
with blackened faces and smoked bayonets, lay out for them all
night. It was the same with a German working-party, fifty strong,
located by our patrols on the 22nd, sought on the 23rd, and found
missing. The enemy were anxious not to give any chances just then,
for identifications; and, though they raided generously in other
directions, left the Guards’ sector by the Scarpe unvisited. They
delivered mortar bombardments when reliefs were due, and were
attended to by our artillery at dusk with a desultory but at the
same time steady shelling, just enough to keep the five principal
offenders’ crews in their dug-outs. It worked admirably, and the
enemy mortars, as registered on the maps, were quiet for a whole
evening. After one such treatment (the night of the 25th January)
they drenched the Decauville railway, just when the Battalion had
railed back to Arras on relief by the 1st Grenadiers, with an hour’s
intense barrage of gas-shells, and a sprinkling of 5.9’s and 4.2’s.
Battalion Headquarters were waiting to follow: and all the men had
been sent down the line because rail-head was no healthy place to
linger at. A company of the 2nd Grenadiers, newly relieved, came up
and also waited for the little train in the still moonlight night,
and drank hot tea while a spare engine was being coupled up. Every
one thought (inevitable prelude to calamity!) that, after sixteen
days in the trenches, his troubles were over. Then a gas-shell
skimmed over the line which at this point had a cutting on one side
and an embankment on the other. All hands fled to the embankment
side and hugged it for precisely one hour while the air screamed to
the curious whiplash-like noise of the gas-shells splintering, and
filled with the fumes of them. The engine bolted down the line before
it should be blown up, and when, on the stroke of ten, shelling
ceased, Battalion Headquarters, Father Browne and the Doctor, Captain
Woodhouse, and the Grenadiers’ Company stumbled as best they could
along the sleepers towards Arras. Every one missed every one else in
the confusion, while the Irish orderlies raged through the crowd like
angry nurses, in search of their officers. But at last all hands were
accounted for, blind, coughing, and, thanks to the nose-clips of the
masks, mostly with sore noses. They got into Arras at midnight, and
a good many of the Grenadiers had to be sent down for gas injuries.

The month closed with the Battalion nominally at Arras, and actually
finding more than two thirds of its strength for working-parties in
the filthy front line--a favour which it had not received itself
while there. Its casualty list for January was extraordinarily low,
being only two men killed and twenty-six wounded, one officer,
Captain Gordon, wounded and one, 2nd Lieutenant D. A. B. Moodie in
hospital. During the month, 2nd Lieutenants A. S. Stokes and L. H.
L. Carver joined, and 2nd Lieutenant A. W. G. Jamrack rejoined from
the Reinforcement Battalion.

On the 1st February orders came that the line was to be held by
all three brigades of the Guards Division instead of two; for it
must be remembered that each brigade was short one battalion. The
rearrangement drew more heavily on the working-parties in the forward
area where a new, foul trench--Hyderabad Support--was under way. They
supplied from two to four hundred men as need was, and lived in Arras
prison in luxury--wire beds, and palliasses for every man!--till the
6th February, when they relieved the 2nd Coldstream in the front
line. The support-trenches here were the best they had found, being
deep, duck-boarded, well revetted and with plenty of dug-outs and an
enviable system of cook-houses delivering hot meals in the actual
trenches. They sent working-parties to the insatiable engineers and
the brigade at large; for fresh trenches were being sketched out, if
not built, against the impending German attack.

The front line from the 10th to the 13th February was remarkably
quiet but not easy. Their patrols found no enemy, nor any sign of
them in No Man’s Land; a little wiring of nights was possible; and
there were no casualties. But the trench-strength of the Battalion
was weak--16 officers and 398 ranks, and every one had to work
double-tides to keep the ways open.

They were relieved on St. Valentine’s Day, two days after the 4th
Guards Brigade, which took with them the 2nd Irish Guards, had been
formed under Lord Ardee, and added to the Thirty-first Division.

Three days in Arras prison saw them back again in support just in
time to get the full benefit of another day’s thaw. It was a quiet
tour. One man was killed by a trench-mortar, one badly wounded by a
rifle-grenade, seven by shell-splinters outside a dug-out, and five
men gassed. The enemy confined himself to long-range trench-mortars
and an “increase in aerial activity.” He was noticed to “object
very strongly to our air-craft crossing his lines.” Never was enemy
more anxious not to draw attention to his moves. And, far behind our
line at Arras and elsewhere, men dug and entrenched and sketched
works of defence to meet the German rush, while the front trenches
sat still and looked across deserts, apparently empty of life, till
a head moved in the open. It was a season without parallel in our
armies’ experience--this mere waiting for a certain blow to be dealt
at a certain time. No written history records the psychology of
those spring days. The Diary is concerned with the Battalion’s own
sorrow. Here is the story, as written: “During the month [February]
the Household Battalion was disbanded and eighty men were allotted
to the Battalion. This marks the beginning, and is the first
official recognition of the fact that the Irish Guards cannot keep
up the supply of Irish troops. A most regrettable epoch in the
history of the regiment.” On the heels of this comes, comically
enough, almost the sole personal expression of feeling in the entire
Diary. They went, on the last day of February, into rest at Gordon
Camp, christened after the 9th Gordons who made it. “It is without
exception the most comfortable and best-laid-out camp _I_ have ever
been in. Everything that one could possibly wish for is here--even an
officer’s bathroom with porcelain bath and hot and cold water laid
on.” It was an all-too-short interval in cold and dirty work; for
on the 2nd March the Scarpe trenches reclaimed them--Fampoux, Colt
Reserve, Pepper and Pudding--in snow, sleet, and unbroken monotony of
working-parties.

On the 6th March the Diary notes that the 2nd Grenadiers, whom they
relieved the next day, carried out a raid, successful in itself, and
doubly so as drawing no retaliation on their own line. It resulted in
two identifiable prisoners and a machine-gun. But battalions do not
approve of their neighbours raiding when the enemy is “nervous.”


THE MARCH PUSH

Their next front-line turn--6th to 10th March--was utterly
uneventful, and on the 12th they, being then in Stirling Camp, were
ordered to “stand to” for the expected German offensive. It proved
to be no more than a light shelling. So the still fine days, in line
or in support, ran out till the dawn of the 21st March when the
great shells suddenly descended on Arras, and rumours, worse than
any shelling, followed their tracks. Says the Diary: “The German
offensive has begun.”

The evacuation of the town, during the next two days, was a
nightmare of flying masonry, clouds of dust, the roar of falling
brick-work, contradictory orders, and mobs of drifting civilians,
their belongings pushed before or hauled after them; and no power to
order them where to go. Arras, always in the front line, had been
safe so long, it was inconceivable that there should be real danger
now. Might they not camp out and return to-morrow? But the enemy
were reported almost in sight, and ready to open on the town with
their field-guns. They had broken through, men said, under cover of
the heavy morning fog--broken through everywhere along the line of
all our old gains from Lens to St. Quentin, and their whole strength
was behind the blow. No one could understand it, though all men
argued; and while the refugees fled forth, expostulating, blaming,
but seldom weeping, that sunny day, eight hundred shells fell
purposefully on the dishevelled town. By evening word came that our
Somme line had not only broken but gone out--infantry, artillery and
uncounted stores--between Chérisy and Demicourt in the north. South
of that, the old Cambrai Salient, which had not been hardly tried,
was standing but would have to withdraw or be cut off, because, from
Gouzeaucourt to La Fère, ten miles and more south of St. Quentin, the
German tide had swept in from one to three miles deep, and was racing
forward. It is not difficult to imagine what manner of reports
the mere truth gave birth to, while the Battalion waited on in the
Communal College where it was billeted, and was not encouraged to
wander about the rocking, sliding streets.

By the evening of the 22nd March men began to understand it was no
mere break-through but a collapse such as had never befallen British
arms in the history of her people. Officers were sent out in the
morning to reconnoitre the support-line of a third system of defence
between Wancourt and Hénin-sur-Cojeul. But Hénin-sur-Cojeul was
already under the hand of the enemy, who had gained three more miles
in a few hours and, left and right, were widening the breach.

The morning of the 22nd March had been foggy again till noon and,
under that cover, the Germans had again broken in on our surprised
or withdrawing divisions. Report said that whole battalions and
even brigades had been cut off by the flood; their wireless working
faithfully so long as it stood, and the sound of their small-arm fire
continuing for a while after their last words had ceased. Late that
evening orders came for the Battalion to move at midnight from Arras
to Boisleux-St. Marc, some six miles due south of the town on a line
more or less prepared against eventualities, and, with their brigade,
to give what help they could to the divisions who might be falling
back on that front. This was all that could be made out of the mass
of contradictory orders that afflicted them, and the growing crop of
rumours and alarms that upset men almost more than any countermanded
orders.

The Battalion set to work on the 23rd March to dig a support-line
in rear of what was called the Army Line which ran in front of
Boisleux-St. Marc while the evacuation of Arras was being completed
and “all details and drummers marched to the Reinforcement Battalion
at Agnez-les-Duisans,” on the Scarpe well to the west of Arras. (“In
those days we was throubled the way a man is disthressed in dhreams.
All manner of things happening, ye’ll understand, and him the only
one able to do nothing. But I wisht _I_’d been a musicaner.”)

The Diary for the 24th March merely says, “remained in same
positions,” and refers to “repeated rumours.” They sent their
first-line transport back out of harm’s way, and went on digging. Yet
the 24th was a day no rumour could have painted much blacker than
it was. From directly in front of the Guards Division at Boisleux,
the line of the German gains in the past forty-eight hours dropped
straight south to the Somme at Cléry, and thence skirted its western
bank to Ham, where it broke across to the wide marshes of the Oise
below La Fère. Two thirds of the hard-bought ground of the Somme
campaign, the scores of villages whose names smelt of blood, were
lost, and the harvesting of the remainder was a matter barely of
hours.

Next day saw Béhagnies, Grévillers, Irles of the wired bastions,
Miraumont, Pys, Courcelette, Contalmaison, Thiepval and its myriad
dead, and Pozières of the Australians--the very hearts of the
deadliest of the first fightings--overrun; and the question rose
in men’s minds whether the drive would end, as was intended, in
the splitting apart of the French and British armies. For what was
happening north of the Somme was play to the situation south of it.
There the enemy’s swarms of aeroplanes harried the Amiens hospitals,
driving the civilians into the broadside of the country behind, where
the moonlight nights betrayed them to fresh hosts in the air.

By the 26th March the tongue of the advancing tide had licked past
Noyon and Roye and, next day, had encircled Montdidier. Meantime,
our old Somme base on the Ancre, whence the great fights were fed
and supplied from the hundred camps and dumps round Méaulte, and
the railway-sidings between Albert and Amiens, had passed into the
enemy’s hands. To all human appearance, the whole of our bitter
year’s effort was abolished, as though it had never been. The enemy
had prepared, brought together, and struck at the time that best
suited himself, with seventy-three divisions against thirty-seven
British divisions, and the outcome was appalling defeat of our arms.

It would thus seem that no amount of inspiring statesmanship at home,
or anxious readjustment of divisions at the front, will make troops
where troops are not. Therefore the battalions and batteries in the
full blast of the onset perished or were taken prisoners; and of the
stores captured or destroyed, lest they should benefit the enemy,
we may look to receive no account. Not the least depressing of the
sights that adorned the landscapes were the dumps lit by our own
hands, flaring to heaven when, as turned out afterwards, there was
really no need. Divisions were being raced up to reinforce the fluid
front as fast as might be, but no one knew for certain when or where
they would arrive, and Camp Commandants acted on their own judgments.
The battalions in the line swayed to conflicting storms of orders.


“STANDING-TO”

On the 25th, being still at Boisleux-St. Marc, the 1st Irish
Guards were detailed to relieve “several different units,” but
more specially the 1st Coldstream just east of Hamelincourt then
practically in possession of the enemy. (One found out where the
enemy were by seeing them come over the brows of unexpected slopes
in small groups that thinned out and settled down to machine-gunning
under cover of equally unexpected field-guns.) They spent the whole
day being “hit and held” in this fashion, and, close on midnight, got
definite instructions not to wait for any relief but to go off to the
sugar-factory near Boyelles, which they did, and bestowed themselves
in huts in the neighbourhood, and there were hotly shelled during
the night. The German attack was well home on that sector now, and
the German infantry might be looked for at any moment. They removed
from those unhealthy huts to an old trench next morning, where their
first set of orders was to relieve the 1st Scots Guards. (Order,
provisional, definite and cancelled all in two hours and a half!)
Later came orders--equally definite, equally washed out later--to
relieve the 2nd Coldstream in another sector, and finally just before
midnight they relieved the 1st Scots Guards after all. That battalion
had been in the army line between St. Léger and Hénin, but the
enemy’s advance had forced it back in the direction of Boisleux-St.
Marc near the Arras-Albert railway-line. The Battalion found it a
little before dawn, and lay out with all four companies in the front
line, as did the other battalions. By this time, though it would be
not easy to trace their various arrivals in the confusion, the Guards
Brigades had got into line between Boisleux-St. Marc and Ayette,
on a front of roughly three and a half miles, while battalions of
exhausted and withdrawing divisions, hard pressed by the enemy,
passed through them each with its burden of bad news. It was not an
inspiriting sight, nor was the actual position of the Guards Brigades
one to be envied. High ground commanded them throughout, and a number
of huts and half-ruined buildings gave good cover to the gathering
machine-guns. The German advance on that quarter resembled, as one
imaginative soul put it, an encompassment of were-wolves. They
slouched forward, while men rubbed tired eyes, in twos and threes,
at no point offering any definite target either for small-arm or
artillery, and yet, in some wizard fashion, always thickening and
spreading, while our guns from the rear raged and tore uselessly at
their almost invisible lines. Incidentally, too, our own gun-fire in
some sectors, and notably behind the Fourth Guards Brigade, did our
men no service. But the most elaborate of preparations have an end,
and must culminate in the charge home.

An intense barrage on the morning of the 27th March heralded the
crisis, but luckily went wide of all the Battalion except No. 2
Company on the left. The attack followed, and down the trenched
line from Ayette and Boisleux-St. Marc, the Brigade answered with
unbroken musketry and Lewis-guns. It was an almost satisfactory
slaughter, dealt out by tired, but resolute, men with their backs
to the wall. Except for occasional rushes of the enemy, cut down
ere they reached the wire, there was nothing spectacular in that
day’s work. The Battalion shot and kept on shooting as it had been
trained to do in the instruction-camps and on the comfortable ranges
that seemed now so inconceivably far away. The enemy, having direct
observation over the whole of our line, shot well and close. We
suffered, but they suffered more. They ranged along the front from
north to south as waves range down the face of a breakwater, but
found nothing to carry away or even dislodge. Night closed in with a
last rush at the wire on the Battalion’s front that left a wreckage
of German dead and wounded, and two machine-guns horribly hung up
in the strands. Our losses in officers were 2nd Lieutenant Stokes
severely wounded in the morning, and in the afternoon, Lieutenant
Nash killed, and Captain Derek FitzGerald wounded and sent down.
Lieut.-Colonel R. V. Pollok and Lieutenants Bence-Jones and Bagenal
were also slightly wounded but remained at duty. When an officer
dropped and could not get up again without help he was assumed to be
unfit for work--but not before.

(“Ye’ll understand, ’twas no question, those days, what ye could or
could not do. Ye _did_ it.”)

And so ended the 27th of March with the German front from Lens to
Albert held up, and destined, though men then scarce dared believe,
not to advance to another effective surge. The French and British
armies were perilously near forced asunder now and, the needs of the
case compelling what might have been done long ago, General Foch in
the little city of Doullens was, on the 26th March, given supreme
command of all the hard-pressed hosts. The news went out at once
into the front line where men received it as part and parcel of
the immense situation. Nothing could have astonished them then, or,
unless it directly concerned food or rest, have made them think.

The Battalion was placed where it was to endure, and was thankful
that the 28th was a “fairly quiet day” but for heavy shelling on
their right, and trench-mortars and shells on themselves. No. 2
Company, who had been unlucky with the big barrage the day before,
suffered once again.

Next day (29th March), which was another “quiet” occasion, Lieutenant
Zigomala was wounded and forty “of the most tired men” were relieved
by an equal number from the Reinforcement Battalion, which relief
became systematized, as it eased the strain a little to clear out
visibly finished men day by day. All were worn down but “remained
cheerful.” Those who have full right to speak affirm that, in
absolutely impossible situations, the Irish could be trusted to “play
up” beyond even a cockney battalion. The matter will always be in
dispute, but none know better than the men who saw the Push through
how superbly the mud-caked, wire-drawn platoons bore themselves.

On the 30th March the attack rolled up again from the south where it
had met no particular encouragement, and barraged the Battalion’s
sector with heavies for a couple of hours; causing forty-two
casualties among the men and wounding Lieutenants Stacpoole and
Bagenal. It then fell upon the 2nd Grenadiers and 1st Coldstream
immediately to the Battalion’s left and right, and was driven off
with loss. There were other attacks, but with less venom in them,
before the Hun could be induced to withdraw. Half the Battalion spent
the night digging a line of posts in support which they occupied by
dawn.

On the last of March “nothing of importance occurred.” Everything,
indeed, had occurred already. The old Somme salient which, English
fashion, had become an institution, was completely reversed on the
ominous newspaper maps. The Germans stood a-tip-toe looking into
Amiens, and practically the entire spare strength of the British
armies in France had been used and used up to bring them to that
stand. The French were equally worn down. The American armies were
not yet in place, and what reinforcing divisions were ready in
England somewhat lacked training.

The Battalion, a straw among these waves, had in the month lost,
besides officers, twenty-three other ranks killed and one hundred and
seven wounded and one missing. It is even reported that there had
been many days on which, owing to press of work, they had not shaved.
(“That, ye’ll understand, is being dirty, an’ a crime. Believe me,
now, there was times when we was _all_ criminals, even Mr. ---- an’
it disthressed him more than bloody war.”)

The fierceness of the enemy’s attack on the 28th March--ranging from
Puisieux to north-east of Arras--had been, to an extent, his own
undoing. For he had thrown his men in shoulder to shoulder in six
lines at some spots, and our guns had caught them massed, forming up.
But the check, severe as it was, did not choke off a final effort
against the strained British and French cordon, on the 4th and 5th
of April. The main weight of it, on the first day, fell south of
the Somme, and on the second, north, from Dernancourt below Méaulte
to Bucquoy which is on the same level as Gomiecourt. Except that
the eastern side of Bucquoy was carried for a time, the northern
attack was completely held, and so at last, after a heart-shattering
fortnight, the Somme front came to rest. The Battalion, with its
Headquarters under much too direct enemy observation near Boiry-St.
Martin, reverted to its ancient routine of trench-work and reliefs
under shell-fire.

The days included regular bursts of shelling, a large proportion of
which was blue or yellow-cross gas, and when the Battalion lay in
reserve they were kept awake by our energetic batteries on three
sides of them.

Their St. Martin camp was a scientifically constructed death-trap.
Most of it was under enemy observation and without ground-shelter.
What shots ranged over our forward batteries or short of our rear
ones, found their camp. When our 15-inch guns retaliated, from a
hundred and fifty yards behind them, the blast extinguished all
candles. The Diary observes: “The noise and the hostile retaliation
made proper rest difficult.” That was on the 4th April, when the
attack south of the Somme was in full swing.

On the 5th April their huts in Brigade-reserve were shelled for half
an hour, with six casualties, and when they went into the line on
a new sector, held by scattered posts, nearly every one of their
guides lost his miserable way in the dark. Headquarters here were
pitched in an old German trench and then--for they were not even
rain-proof--shifted to the edge of Boiry-St. Martin village. A cellar
had to be dug out and supported, and the rain descended on the
mud-pie that it was, and when Headquarters, and all their papers,
had established themselves, the enemy gas-bombarded the village
with perfect accuracy. The Commanding Officer, Lieut.-Colonel R. V.
Pollok, the Assistant Adjutant, Lieutenant J. N. Ward, and the M. O.,
Captain Woodhouse, had to be sent down suffering from yellow-cross
gas after-effects.

Consider for a moment the woes of a battalion headquarters in the
field. Late in January, Captain Gordon, the _pukka_ Adjutant, riding
to Arras for a bath, canters into a barrage of “heavies” and is
wounded in the hand--a vital spot for adjutants. This leaves only the
C.O. and the Assistant Adjutant, Lieutenant J. N. Ward, to carry on,
and whatever the state of the front, the authorities demand their
regular supply of papers and forms. No sooner has the Assistant
Adjutant got abreast of things, than all Battalion Headquarters are
knocked out in an hour. Luckily, they were only away for three or
four days. The enemy added a small and easily beaten off raid to the
confusion he had made in Orderly-Room; Major Baggallay took over the
command, and Captain Budd, adequate and untroubled as ever, who had
held the ghostly F Post on the Scarpe, acted as Adjutant. Officers
were beginning to wear out now. Three “of the most tired” were sent
down and replaced by substitutes from the Reinforcement Battalion.

The following officers joined for duty on the 10th April: Lieutenant
M. Buller, Lieutenant (Acting Captain) W. Joyce, Lieutenant Hon. B.
A. A. Ogilvy, and 2nd Lieutenants T. B. Maughan, P. R. J. Barry, H.
J. Lofting, G. C. MacLachlan and J. C. Haydon.

It was on the morning of the 9th April that the enemy opened his
second great thrust on the Lys, and the three weeks’ fighting that
all but wiped out the Ypres Salient won him Messines, Kemmel,
Armentières, Neuve Eglise, Bailleul, Merville, and carried him
towards the Channel ports, within five miles of Hazebrouck. That
the stroke was expected made it none the less severe. Spring on
that front had chosen to be unseasonably dry. The lowlands in the
Lys valley, normally their own best defences, gave passage to men
and guns when they should have been still impassable. Whatever else
may have betrayed them, the Germans had no cause to complain of the
weather throughout the war, or indeed of the foresight of their
adversaries. They had to deal chiefly with divisions that had been
fought out in the Somme Push, reinforced with fillings from England
and sent northward in a hurry. Sir Douglas Haig’s despatches give the
relative disparity thus:

  In the Lys battle, prior to the 30th April, the enemy engaged
  against the British forces a total of 42 Divisions, of which 33
  were fresh and 9 had fought previously on the Somme. Against these
  42 German Divisions, 25 British Divisions were employed, of which 8
  were fresh and 17 had taken a prominent part in the Somme battle.

These were worn out, and as the days of fighting continued many of
them were so dead to the world that they laid them down and slept
where they dropped by battalions. When orders came, it was a matter
almost of routine that each senior, handing them on, should assault
his junior into some sort of comprehension. Officers dared not trust
themselves even to lean against walls for fear they should slide
down dead asleep; and as a private of the Line put it in confession,
“I don’t know what the men would have done but for standing sentry.
They got their sleep then.” There is a story of a tattered brigade,
eight days, or it might have been ten, without closing an eyelid,
which was flung back into the fight after assurance of relief,
and, what was much worse, a few hours’ rest. They returned, like
sleep-walkers, and laid them down in some shallow hen-scratchings
that passed for trench-work, where without emotion they resigned
themselves to being blown out or up in detail. While they watched
drowsily the descent and thickening of a fresh German shell-storm,
preluding fresh infantry attacks, it occurred to them vaguely that
there were high and increasing noises overhead--not at all like the
deep whoop of “heavies.” Then all the darkness behind the enemy lit
with a low outlining ground-flare--the death-dance of innumerable
.75’s. Foch had sent up very many guns behind them, almost wheel to
wheel, and when the French gunners at last shut off, the packed enemy
trenches that were waiting to continue their march to the Channel, as
soon as their own fire should have wiped up the few British bayonets
before them, lay as still as the graves that they were. Then what
remained of the brigade that had seen this miracle was relieved by
another brigade, and stretched itself out to sleep behind it. Experts
in miseries say that, for sheer strain, the Lys overwent anything
imagined in the war, and in this, many who have suffered much, are
agreed.

The 4th Guards Brigade, which had been in billets near
Villers-Brulin, after its heavy work on the Arras side, was
despatched on the 10th April to the flat country round Vierhoek, and
there--as will be told--spent itself in the desperate fighting round
La Couronne and Vieux-Berquin that gave time to bar the enemies’ way
to Hazebrouck and--wiped out the 2nd Battalion.

The 1st Battalion, sufficiently occupied with its own front near
Boiry, where the support-lines were targets by day and night,
and the front-posts holes in the ground that seemed to shift at
every relief, were told on the 12th April that a German attack was
imminent, which report was repeated at intervals throughout the day.
But their patrols found nothing moving in front of them, and their
regular allowance of hostile mortar-bombs was not increased. The
rumours from the Lys side were far more disturbing.

On the 13th April they were relieved by the 24th Lancashire
Fusiliers, marched to Blairville where they embussed for Saulty at
the head of the little river that runs in stone channels through
quiet Doullens, and there, “very cold, wet, and muddy,” found the
best billets taken by Corps and Labour troops whom they knew not. The
sentiments of men who have been digging and fighting without a break
for ten weeks when confronted with warmly billeted staffs and fat
back-area working-parties need not be recorded.

At Saulty they rested from the 15th to the 23rd April under perpetual
short notice: one hour from 8 A. M. till noon and three hours for the
rest of the day and night. Thus “means of training were limited,” and
the weather varied from wet to snow-showers.

On the 24th of April the enemy captured Villers-Bretonneux, staring
directly into Amiens, which ground, had they been allowed to hold
uninterruptedly even for a day, might have been made too strong to
reduce with the forces at our disposal then, and thus would have
become the very edge of the wedge for splitting the French and
English armies asunder. But that night, and literally at almost
an hour’s notice, a counter-attack by a Brigade of the Eighteenth
Division, and the 13th and 15th Brigades of the Fourth and Fifth
Australian Divisions, swept Villers-Bretonneux clear, and established
ourselves beyond possibility of eviction. Thus, the one last chance
that might have swung the whole war passed out of the enemy’s hands.

On that same day the 1st Irish Guards returned in lorries along the
cramped and twisting roads by Bienvillers to Monchy, to relieve a
battalion of the Royal Scots in the front line at Ayette, three
miles south down the line from Boiry. Ayette village had been
recaptured on the 3rd April by the Thirty-second Division, and had
removed a thorn in the side of troops in that sector. Once again,
their guides almost unanimously lost their way, and the multivious
relief took half the night to accomplish.

It appeared as though the enemy had skinned his line here to feed his
other enterprises in the north; for his outposts did nothing and,
beyond shelling Monchy village from time to time, his guns were also
idle.

So on the 29th April they arranged a battalion raid on a German
post (supposed to be held by night only) to occupy it if possible.
But the enemy were in occupation and very ready. The little party
returned with their officer, 2nd Lieutenant G. C. MacLachlan, and a
sergeant wounded. A few weeks later the Battalion worked out a most
satisfactory little ten-minute return-raid without a single casualty,
and so cleared their account.

April had been an inexpensive month for both men and officers. The
Commanding Officer, the Assistant Adjutant, and the Medical Officer
had, as we know, been slightly gassed at Headquarters, and 2nd
Lieutenants C. L. Browne and MacLachlan wounded only. Three men had
been killed and forty-one wounded. But no less than twenty-six were
sent down sick--proof that the strain had told.

The enemy showed a certain amount of imagination unusual on that
front. One of our forward posts, expecting the return of a patrol
on the dawn on the 3rd May, saw a party of five approaching and
challenged. “Irish Guards” was the reply, followed by a few bombs
which did some damage. This peculiarly irritating trick had not
been worked on the Battalion for some time, and they felt it--as
their amused friends to left and right in the line took care that
they should. Otherwise, the enemy devoted themselves to more and
heavier gunnery, which, in a five-day tour, caused twenty casualties
(wounded) and one killed. Brigade Reserve camps were outside
Monchy-au-Bois, whence tired men were sent to the Details camp at
Pommier (regularly bombed by aeroplane), and from Pommier were drawn
occasional working-parties. One of these included the Battalion
Drummers and Pipers, who enjoyed what might be called a “day out” in
some old trenches.

On the 5th May, Lieutenant Keenan arrived from the 2nd Battalion to
take over the Adjutancy in place of Captain Gordon, who had been
transferred to the 2nd Battalion as Second in Command, after almost
three years’ continuous service with the 1st Battalion.

On the 7th May they went up from Monchy, by the ever-hateful,
ever-shelled Cojeul valley, to the Ayette subsector, relieving the
2nd Coldstream. Next day the devil-directed luck of the front line,
after a peaceful, fine night, caused the only trench-mortar sent over
by the enemy that did not clean miss all our posts, to fall directly
in No. 3 Post, right front Company (No. 4), instantly killing Captain
Budd, M.C., commanding the Company, and with him 2nd Lieutenant E.
C. G. Lord and seven men. Captain Budd’s energy and coolness, proved
on many occasions, were a particular loss to his comrades. He was a
large silent man, on whom every one could and did lean heavily at all
times. He knew no fear and was of the self-contained, intensely alive
type, always in danger, but never by his friends connected with any
thought of death. Second Lieutenant Lord (“Rosy” Lord) was a keen and
promising young officer. Those were the only casualties of the tour.
They were buried in the little Military Cemetery near Ayette.

Our guns had been working steadily from behind, but till this
trench-mortar outburst, most of the enemy replies had been directed
on Ayette itself or our support-lines.

The shelling throughout the month grew more and more earnest and our
replies, roaring overhead, worried the dead-tired soldiery. The work
was all at night--wiring and improving posts, and unlimited digging
of communication-ways between them; for whether a trench-line held
till Christmas, went up bodily next minute, or was battered down
every hour, in the making there was but one standard of work that
beseemed the Battalion; and though divisional commanders might, and
as on the dreary Scarpe posts did, draw gratified commanding officers
aside and tell them that for quantity and quality their trench-craft
excelled that of other battalions, the Battalion itself was never
quite contented with what it had accomplished.

Their next turn--May 16 to 21--was fine and hot for a couple of
mornings and regular barrages were put down on the support-line when
they were standing-to. Four men were killed and thirteen, of whom two
died later, were wounded.

They were heavily shelled in Brigade-Reserve camp on the night of
the 24th. Four officers--Captain Bence-Jones, Lieutenants Riley and
Buller, and 2nd Lieutenant Barry--wounded, one other rank killed, and
five wounded.

When they went up to relieve the 2nd Coldstream on the 25th May,
they were caught in platoon-order at the corner of Adinfer Wood, a
place of no good name to marching troops, and Lieutenant Williams was
slightly wounded. Three-quarters of an hour’s intense barrage was put
down, on front and support lines, as soon as they were fairly in,
causing several casualties.

The dawn of the 28th May began with another sharp barrage on the
front line and the dinner-hour was a continuous barrage of 5.9’s and
4.2’s directed at Battalion Headquarters. They were missed, but a
direct hit was made on an aid-post of the 2nd Grenadiers less than a
hundred yards off on our left. As a distraction, orders came in from
Brigade Headquarters the same morning that the Battalion would carry
out a raid on one of the enemy’s posts in front of the Right Company.
They were given their choice, it would seem, of two--one without
artillery-help and by day; the other with an artillery-backing and
by night. The Second in Command, Major R. Baggallay, elected for
works of darkness--or as near as might be in spite of a disgustingly
bright moon. Lieutenant C. S. O’Brien was detailed to command, with
Sergeant Regan, a forceful man, as sergeant. Only twenty-nine hands
were required, and therefore sixty volunteered, moved to this, not
by particular thirst for glory, of which the trenches soon cure
men, as by human desire to escape monotony punctuated with shells.
Extra rum-rations, too, attach to extra duties. As a raid it was a
small affair, but as a work of art, historically worth recording
in some detail. F Battery R.H.A. and 400 Battery R.F.A. supplied
the lifting barrages which duly cut the post off from succour,
while standing-barrages of 18-pounders, a barrage of 4.5’s hows.
and groups, firing concentrations at left and right enemy trenches,
completed the boxed trap. In the few minutes the affair lasted, it
is not extravagant to estimate that more stuff was expended than the
whole of our front in 1914 was allowed to send over in two days.

The post had been reconnoitred earlier in the evening and was known
not to be wired. All the raiders, with blackened faces and bayonets
and stripped uniforms that betrayed nothing, were in position on the
forming-up tape five minutes before zero. The moon forced them to
crawl undignifiedly out in twos and threes, but they lined up with
the precision of a football line, at one-yard intervals and, a minute
before zero, wriggled to within seventy yards of their quarry. At
zero the barrage came down bursting beautifully, just beyond the
enemy post, and about two seconds ere it lifted the raiders charged
in. No one had time to leave or even to make a show of resistance,
and they were back with their five prisoners, all alive and quite
identifiable, in ten minutes. The waiting stretcher-parties were not
needed and--best of all--“retaliation was slight and entirely on
Ayette.” (One is not told what Ayette thought of it.) The motive of
the raid was “to secure identity alive or dead.” But when all was
over without hurt, one single shell at morning “stand-to” (May 28)
killed 2nd Lieutenant L. H. L. Carver in a front-line trench.

They held the raided post under close observation that day and the
next (May 29), and discovered that it had been reoccupied by a
machine-gun party. As they particularly did not wish it to put out
wire or become offensive, they dosed it with constant bursts of their
own machine-gun and were rewarded by hearing groans and cries, and
our listening-patrol in No Man’s Land saw a man being carried away.

On the 31st May the enemy set to, in earnest, to shell all
reserve-lines and back-area for six hours; as well as the first-line
transport in Adinfer Wood after dark, when wounded horses are not
easy to handle. Their relief by the 2nd Grenadiers was badly delayed
by heavy shelling all the way from the front line to Monchy, but
instead of any number of casualties, which might reasonably have been
expected, the Battalion got through unscathed.

The month’s list was heavy enough as it stood. Five officers had been
wounded and three killed in action; seventeen other ranks killed,
and forty-eight wounded, and all this in the regular wear-and-tear
front-line routine with nothing more to see than a stray German cap
here and there. Twenty-two men were sent down sick, and the Diary
begins to hint at the prevalence of the “Spanish fever,” which was in
a few months to sweep France and all the world.

June was a month of peace. It opened in reserve-trenches at the
south-west end of Monchy-au-Bois, and when they next went up into
line, a new route had been surveyed round the dreaded corner of
Adinfer Wood which saved some shelling of reliefs.

On the 4th June the C.O., Lieutenant-Colonel Pollok, left the
Battalion to take over command of Sixth Corps Army School, and Major
R. R. C. Baggallay assumed command. Likewise three stray Germans were
captured opposite one of our posts.

On the 5th Major Gordon arrived from the 2nd Battalion for duty as
Second in Command.

They were relieved by the 1st King’s Regiment on the 6th June--a
somewhat hectic performance, as the front-line track-ways were
intricate, needing guides at almost every turn of them, and, for
the run-up, one guide per platoon. After which, about one in the
morning, it was discovered that the King’s had come in without their
Lewis-guns. Some divisions were in the habit of leaving and taking
over the Lewis-guns _in situ_; but the Guards Division always went
in and out of the line with their very own weapons. One cannot
delay a clear June dawn and, as the relieved Battalion had to get
off in tightly packed and horribly conspicuous lorries, and as the
last platoon could not reach those lorries till 3 A. M., it was
touch-and-go whether daylight would not reveal them “like a Sunday
School treat” to the German guns. But luck held. The last lorry was
safe in Bavincourt Wood five miles behind Monchy before day had
stripped the landscape, and the 1st King’s were left to meditate on
the wealth and variety of the Irish tongue, as delivered on empty
stomachs in whispers down packed trenches.

The Battalion billeted at Bavincourt when the 2nd H.L.I. had got out
of their quarters, and since, like the other camps, Bavincourt was
regularly bombed, made earth walls round their Nissen huts, and slits
near them to be used against ’planes or too extravagant shell-fire.
Here they stayed till the end of the month, cleaning, refitting, and
training (in open warfare principally; and, this time, they were not
to be disappointed) at Lewis gunnery, bombing, and general physical
smartening-up. When the Brigade Sports took place at Saulty they won
every event but three, and when the Corps Commander, the following
week, inspected the different ways in the divisional methods of
carrying the eight Lewis-guns of each company all on one limber, “the
method employed by the Battalion was considered the best, and all
units were ordered to copy.” They had rigged a sort of false top on
a rear-limber which accommodated all eight guns together.

A Divisional Horse-show was held on the 22nd, but there the Battalion
did not get a single prize. They hammered on at their trainings and
Brigade field-days--all with an eye to the coming open warfare, while
the “Spanish fever,” which was influenza of the post-war type, grew
steadily worse among men and officers alike. When H.R.H. the Duke
of Connaught visited Divisional Headquarters at Bavincourt Château
on the 30th June, and the Battalion had to find not only the Guard
of Honour but 160 men to line the avenue to the Château, there were
seventy officers and men down with the pest, out of less than 900.
Thirty-one men had been sent down sick, two had been killed in action
presumably by overhead bombing, for the Diary does not mention any
trench casualties, and twenty-three wounded.

The following officers joined during the month of June: Lieutenant C.
A. J. Vernon, and 2nd Lieutenants E. B. Spafford, A. E. Hutchinson,
H. R. Baldwin, G. F. Mathieson, J. A. M. Faraday, E. M. Harvey, M.C.,
and A. E. O’Connor, all on the 2nd June; Captain A. W. L. Paget on
the 4th, and 2nd Lieutenant A. H. O’Farrell on the 10th June. Second
Lieutenant C. S. O’Brien, who was in command of the model raid
already mentioned, was awarded the Military Cross on the 9th of June.

After a sporting interlude on the 3rd July, when they met the 1st
Munster Fusiliers at athletics and won everything except the hundred
yards, they relieved the 15th H.L.I. in the intermediate line near
Hendecourt. As a matter of fact, they were a sick people just then.
All Battalion Headquarters except the Commanding Officer, and all the
officers of No. 2 Company, besides officers of other companies, were
down with “Spanish fever” on going into the line. A third of the men
were also sick at one time, and apparently the enemy too, for they
hardly troubled to shell by day and let the night-reliefs go without
attention. The only drawbacks were furious summer thunderstorms
which, from time to time, flooded the trenches and woke up more
fever. The front line held here by the Guards was badly knocked about
and battered, and instructions ran that, in event of serious attack,
it would not be contested.

There is no clear evidence of the state of the Battalion’s collective
mind at this time, but from home letters it might be gathered that
the strain of the Bush and its bewilderment had given place to the
idea that great things were preparing. Battalions are very often
told tales to this effect, but they suit themselves as to the amount
that they swallow. No power on earth, for instance, could have
persuaded the veterans of the Somme, after Cambrai, that there was
“anything doing”; but as the summer of 1918 grew warmer in the wooded
and orchard country behind the Amiens-Albert line, and our lines
there held and were strengthened, and those who had been home or
on the seas reported what they had heard and seen, hope, of a kind
not raised before, grew in the talks of the men and the officers.
(“Understand, I do _not_ say there was anny of the old chat regardin’
that the war would finish next Chuseday, the way we talked in ’16.
But, whatever they said acrost the water, _we_ did not hould ’twould
endure those two more extra years all them civilians was dishin’ out
to us. _What_ did we think? That ’19 would see the finish? ’Twud be
hard to tell what we thought. Leave it this way--we was no more than
waitin’ on mercies to happen an’--’twas mericles that transpired!”)

They relieved their own brigade battalions with the punctilio proper
to their common ritual, and for the benefit of over a hundred
recruits. It was their ancient comrades under all sorts of terrors,
the 2nd Coldstream, whose guides from Boiry-St. Martin one night lost
their way in the maze of tracks and turns to the front line. But, as
meekly set forth in the Diary, when it came the Battalion’s turn to
be relieved by the 2nd Grenadiers, “all tracks had been carefully
picketed by _this_ Battalion to assist grenadier companies coming in
and ours going out.” The occasions when the guides of the 1st Irish
Guards lost their way must be looked for in the reports of others.

“Little shelling and no casualties” were the order of the fine days
till, on the 29th July, taking over from the 2nd Coldstream, they
found six platoons of the 3rd Battalion, 320th Regiment, U.S.A.,
which had come into line the night before and were attached for
instruction. These were young, keen, desperately anxious to learn,
and not at all disposed to keep their heads down.

Next day the enemy opened on them, and “were rather offensive in
their shelling.” The front platoon of the Americans, attached to
the Battalion’s front company, caught it worst, but no casualties
were reported. Then things quieted down, and a patrol of Special
Battalion Scouts, a new organization of old, trusty No Man’s
Landers, under Lieutenant Vernon as Intelligence Officer, went out
on reconnaissance, across the Cojeul valley, and wandered generally
among ancient trench-lines in bright moonlight. They found a German
party working on fresh earth, but no signs of enemy patrols on the
move in the valley. This was as well. No one wished to see that dead
ground occupied, except by our own people at the proper time.

July’s bill of casualties was the lowest of all. No officer and
but one man had been killed, and two wounded. This last was when
the enemy shelled Boiry to celebrate the arrival of the American
platoons. Seventeen men were sent down sick. Fifty other ranks were
transferred to the 1st from the 2nd Battalion, now acting as a feeder
to its elder brother.

On the 1st of August the Battalion was still in the peaceful front
line watching the six American platoons being relieved by other
six platoons from the 2nd Battalion of the 320th Regiment. It was
observed, not without some envy--“They did not know enough to save
’emselves throuble, an’ they would not ha’ done it if they had. They
was too full of this same dam’ new ould war.” Even at this immense
distance of time, one can almost hear the veterans commenting on the
zeal and excitement that filled the stale lines where, to those
young eyes from across the water, everything was as shining-new as
death.

On the 3rd August the Battalion made a reconnaissance of a
post with the idea of raiding it, which was a complete though
bloodless failure. Some of our back guns chose the exact moment
when the raiders were setting out (on the sure information of a
scouting-party, who had just come in) to wipe up the unconscious
little garrison and their machine-gun, and woke the night with heavy
shell dropped _in_ our own wire and in front of our objective.
Naturally nothing could be done, and the affair was called off
till the next evening (4th August), when a “crawling-party,” under
Lieutenant Vernon, of a corporal and six men went out along the same
route that the scouts had taken the night before. They were expected
and welcomed with enthusiasm. A sentry gave the alarm, a little party
ran out to cut them off, the machine-gun (a heavy one), which had not
betrayed itself before, promptly opened fire, but wide of our prone
men, and a German, as promptly, hove bombs in the wrong direction.
All this, says the report, happened as soon as some one inside the
post gave “short, decisive orders.” Then Véry lights flared without
stint, and, being some way from home, with much unlocated wire
between, the raiders got away swiftly and safely. The tracks of the
scouts through the long grass the night before had put the enemy
on the alert. But if our guns had only held their tongues on that
occasion, our coup might have been brought off. Instead of which, the
enemy woke up and shelled a front company for a quarter of an hour
with 60-pounders before he could be induced to go to bed.


THE BEGINNINGS OF THE END

But all this was as light, casual, and unrelated as the throwing
of the ball from hand to hand that fills time before an innings;
and, by the latter part of July, men began half unconsciously to
speculate when our innings would begin. In the north, the enemy,
crowded into the Lys salient, which they had been at such pains to
hack out over the bodies of the 2nd Battalion, were enjoying some
of the pleasures our men had tasted round Ypres for so many years.
Our gathering guns, cross-ploughing them where they lay, took fresh
toll of each new German division arriving to make good the wastage.
In the south, outside Amiens, the Australians, an impenitent and
unimpressionable breed, had, on the 4th of July, with the help of
four companies of the Thirty-third American Division, and sixty
tanks, gone a-raiding round the neighbourhood of Hamel and Vaire
Wood, with results that surprised everybody except themselves. They
did not greatly respect the enemy, and handled him rudely. Meantime,
Amiens, raked over by aeroplanes almost every hour, was being wrecked
and strangled; and all the Labour Corps, which, from the soldier’s
point of view, could have been better used in saving poor privates
cruel fatigues, were working day and night at railway diversions and
doublings that, by some route or another, should bring the urgent
supplies of both French and British armies to their destinations.
Men argued, therefore, that the first job to be taken in hand
would be the deliverance of Amiens. There was talk, too, that all
French divisions in Flanders were withdrawn and concentrated behind
Amiens city. This might be taken for a sign that the Lys salient
was reckoned reasonably secure, and as confirming the belief that
upon the Lys, also, we had abundance of artillery. On the other
hand (these are but a few of the rumours of the time), away in the
unknown south-east of France, where few British troops had penetrated
in the memory of present fighting men, some five or six divisions,
making the Ninth British Corps, had been sent for a “rest” after the
March Push, and had been badly mauled by a sudden surprise-attack
on the Aisne where, together with the Fifth French Army, they had
been driven back towards the Marne, which all the world thought was
a river and a battle long since disposed of. The enemy there were
sitting practically outside the Forest of Villers-Cotterêts, a name
also belonging to ancient history. Much-enduring men, whom Fate
till now had spared, recounted how the 4th (Guards) Brigade, as it
was then, had first “caught it” there, among the beech-trees very
nearly four years back. Moreover, there was fresh trouble between
Montdidier and Noyon, where the enemy were again throwing themselves
at the French. Then, too, Foch, who was in charge of all, but who, so
far, had made no sign, had borrowed four more of our divisions--the
whole of the Twenty-second Corps this time--and they were off on some
French front, Heaven and Headquarters alone knew where. Likewise one
composite “Scrum” of French, American, English, and Italian troops
was holding, it might be hoped, a German capital attack near Rheims.
The old war-line that in the remote days of winter would have called
itself the Somme front discussed and digested these news and many
more. There was nothing doing on their beat to write home about,
even were they allowed to do so. The question was whether they would
be called on to repair to the Lys and free Hazebrouck, which was
undoubtedly still in a dangerous position, or stand still and await
what might befall at Amiens. There was no limit to speculation and
argument any more than there had been when the Somme front went in
March, and the more they argued the more confused men grew over the
confidential information that was supplied them. (“Them Gen’rals, and
their Staffs must ha’ done quite a little lyin’--even for them. They
had _us_ believin’ their word! I’ve heard since even Jerry believed
’em.”)

That would appear to have been the trouble with the enemy. It was
evident to the most hardened pessimist that a French counter-attack
launched out of the Villers-Cotterêts Forests, to begin with (and
in several other places at, apparently, the same time), was _not_
the flash-in-the-pan that some people foretold. For the second time
the enemy was withdrawing from the Marne, and, under pressure,
continuing his withdrawal. His great attack near Rheims, too, seemed
to have stuck. On the Lys, from time to time, sites of villages with
well-remembered names were occasionally returning to their lawful
trustees. Hopeful students of the war hinted that, with fresh troops
in vast numbers, more guns, and a share of luck, 1918 might see the
foundations laid for a really effective finish in 1919. A report
had come up from the south that the French down Amiens way had made
an experimental attack, or rather a big raid, on the enemy, and had
found him there curiously “soft” and willing to shift.

The air thickened with lies as the men, who moved about the earth
by night or under cover, increased, and our air-craft were told off
to circle low and noisily at certain points and drown the churn of
many tanks trailing up into their appointed areas. All the Canadian
divisions, men said, were moving off to recapture Kemmel Hill. All
our forces round Amiens were digging themselves in, said others,
preparatory to a wait-and-see campaign that would surely last till
Christmas. For proof, it was notorious that our guns in that sector
were doing nothing. (As a matter of fact they were registering on the
sly.) Everybody round Amiens, a third party insisted, would be sent
off in a day or two to help the French in Champagne. The weaknesses
of human nature in possession of “exclusive information” played into
the hands of the very few who knew, and young staff officers of
innocent appearance infernally bamboozled their betters.

So it happened, on the 4th August, on a misty dawn, that the Fourth
Army (Rawlinson’s) with four hundred tanks, backed by two thousand
guns, and covered by aeroplanes to a number not yet conceived in
war, declared itself as in being round Amiens at the very nose of
the great German salient. In twenty-four hours that attack had
bitten in five miles on an eleven-mile front, had taken twelve
thousand prisoners and some three hundred guns, and was well set to
continue. At the same time the French, striking up from the south,
had cleared their front up to the Amiens-Roye road from Pierrepont,
through Plessier to Fresnoy, and had taken over three thousand
prisoners and many guns. Caught thus on two fronts, the enemy fell
back, abandoning stores and burning dumps, which latter sight it
cheered our men to watch. But the work and the honour of the day, as
of the Fourth Army’s campaign from this point on, rested with the
Canadian and Australian divisions who made up the larger part of it.
The Australians Sir Archibald Montgomery describes in his monumental
“Story of the Fourth Army” as “always inquisitive and seldom idle.”
The Canadians had exactly the same failings, and between the two
dominions the enemy suffered. By the 12th August he had been forced
back on to the edge of the used, desolate, and eaten-up country where
he had established himself in 1916--a jungle of old wire, wrecked
buildings, charred woods, and wildernesses of trench. It was ideal
ground for machine-gun defence; with good protection against tanks
and cavalry. There he went to earth, and there, after a little
feeling along his line, was he left while the screw was applied
elsewhere. Our front at that time ran from Bray-sur-Somme due south
to Andechy, where we joined the French almost within machine-gun
range of Roye.

North of Bray, to the western edge of the town of Albert, the left
wing of the Fourth Army had the enemy held, worried and expectant.
Now was the Third Army’s turn to drive in the wedge, from north of
Albert up the line to Arras where the right of the First Army would
assist. What Headquarters knew of the enemy’s morale on that sector
was highly satisfactory. Moreover, he was withdrawing out of his Lys
salient as his divisions were sucked down south to make up wastage
there. But our men still expected that they would tramp their weary
way back across every yard of their battle-fields and burial-grounds
of the past two years, finishing up, if luck held, somewhere round
the Hindenburg Line by Christmas. That the wave, once launched, would
carry to the Rhine was beyond the wildest dreams.

The Battalion, after their little raid already mentioned, had spent
from the 5th to the 9th August in reserve-trenches at Ransart, doing
musketry and route-marching. They returned to the support-trenches at
Hendecourt-les-Ransart relieving the 2nd Coldstream, and stayed there
till the 16th August, when they relieved the same battalion in the
front line opposite Boiry-St. Martin.

They had to patrol the No Man’s Land in front of them a good deal
at night (because it would, later, be their forming-up area), but
suffered nothing worse than the usual shelling and trench-mortaring,
and their share in the work of the opening day, August 21, was small
and simple. “At 5 A. M. the 2nd Guards Brigade on our right attacked
Moyenville with their objective just east of the railway. The 1st
Coldstream was next on our right.” There was a thick fog when the
barrage opened, as well as a smoke barrage. The tanks forming up made
noise enough to wake a land full of Germans, but apparently drew
no fire till they were well away, lunging and trampling over the
enemy machine-gun-posts that had annoyed our folk for so long. The
only serious work for the Battalion was to secure a small trench,
cover the north side of the railway with their fire, and establish
a post at the railway crossing “as soon as a tank had passed over.”
The trench had been occupied early in the night after a small
bombing-brawl with the enemy. The tank detailed to pass by that way
in the morning was warned of the occupation and told not to fire into
it as it came along and all was well. There was an idea that a couple
of companies assisted by eight tanks should capture Hamelincourt,
a mile east of Moyenville, which latter had been taken, before the
fog lifted, by the 2nd Guards Brigade. But this was cancelled after
much waste of time, and the Battalion lay still under a shelling of
mustard-gas, and pleasantly watched prisoners being sent back.

The enemy’s front was giving before the attack of eight divisions,
but not without sudden and awkward resistances, due to the cut-up
and trenched state of the ground, that hid too many machine-guns for
comfort; and the gas-nuisance grew steadily worse.

The Battalion lay where they were the next day (August 22), but sent
out a patrol under 2nd Lieutenant Faraday to work up a trench near
Hamel Switch, to the north of Hamelincourt. After capturing four
Germans it came under machine-gun fire from Hamelincourt. A platoon
was sent to support it, but was withdrawn as the Hamelincourt attack
had been postponed till the next day. Then the patrol had to retire
across abominable shallow trenches, clogged with wire and lavishly
machine-gunned. The Germans tried to cut them off. They withdrew,
fighting. Their Lewis-gun was knocked out and five men wounded. While
these were being helped back, the Lieutenant and two men, Sergeant
Dolan and Private Tait, covered the retreat among the wire. Next,
Faraday was wounded badly in the foot, and the sergeant and private
carried him in turn, he being six feet long and not narrow, while the
rest of the party threw bombs at the Germans, and tried to close with
them. Eventually they all reached home safe. Dolan’s one comment on
the affair was: “’Tis heavy going out yonder.” Lieutenant Faraday was
awarded the M.C. and Dolan the D.C.M. Later on, in 1919, Dolan also
received the Médaille Militaire for gallantry on many occasions.

Seen against the gigantic background of the opening campaign, it was
a microscopical affair--a struggle of ants round a single grain--but
it moved men strongly while they watched.

For the reason that always leads a battalion to be hardest worked
on the edge of battle, they were taken out of the line on the 23rd,
cautiously, under gas and common shell, and marched back seven miles
in five hours to Berles-au-Bois behind Monchy-au-Bois in order to
be marched back again next day to Boiry-St. Martin, where they spent
the day in the Cojeul valley, and afterwards (August 25) moved up
into support in the Hamel Switch between Hamelincourt and St. Léger.
Hamelincourt had been taken on the 23rd by the 2nd Brigade, and as
the night came down wet, the “men made what shelters they could from
corrugated iron and wood lying about.” The trenches hereabouts had
every disadvantage that could be desired. Some were part of the Army
Line and had been dug a foot or two deep with the spade as lines to
be developed in case of need. Presumably, it was nobody’s business
to complete them, so when the trouble arrived, these gutters, being
officially trenches, were duly filled by the troops, and as duly
shelled by the enemy.

For example, when the Battalion moved forward on the 26th their
trenches were waist-deep, which, to men who had spent most of the day
in the dry bed of the Cojeul River, under gas and common shell, was
no great treat.

[Illustration:

  _THE FINAL ADVANCE_
  _August-November 1918_
  _Route of the First Battalion_

  _Emery Walker Ltd. del. et sc._]

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY EMERY WALKER LTD., LONDON

Since the 21st August the Guards Division had been well employed. Its
2nd Brigade, with the Second Division on its right, had captured the
Ablainzevelle-Moyenneville spur; and the Second Division had taken
Courcelles. By the night of the 23rd, when the 3rd Guards Brigade
relieved the 2nd, and the Second Division had captured Ervillers on
the Arras-Bapaume road, the Guards Division, with their 1st Brigade
in support, was within half a mile of St. Léger, and in touch with
the Fifty-sixth Division on their left, which was trying to work
round the head of the Hindenburg Line and turn in from the north. At
this point resistance stiffened. The hilly ground, cut and cross-cut
with old trenches and the beginnings of new ones, lent itself to
the stopping game of well-placed machine-guns equally from round
Croisilles, where the Fifty-sixth Division was engaged; from about
St. Léger Wood, where the 3rd Guards Brigade, supported by tanks,
was renewing its acquaintance with the German anti-tank-rifle;
and from Mory, where the Sixty-second Division was delayed by the
Division on its right being held up. An enemy balloon or two hung on
the horizon and some inquisitive, low-flying aeroplanes hinted at
coming trouble. The line expected as much, but they did not seem so
well informed farther back.


THE AFFAIR OF ST. LÉGER

On the 26th August orders arrived that the 1st Guards Brigade would
now take up the running from the 3rd, and advance eastward from
St. Léger towards Ecoust till opposition was met. There were, of
course, refinements on this idea, but that was the gist of it.
The 2nd Grenadiers and the 2nd Coldstream would attack, with the
Battalion in support. The men were in their trenches by tea-time on
the 26th, No. 1 Company in Jewel Trench just east of the entrance to
the little Sensée River valley, and the others disposed along the
line of Mory Switch, an old trench now only a foot deep. Battalion
Headquarters lay in an abandoned German stores dug-out. Final orders
did not arrive till after midnight on the 26th, and there was much
to arrange and link up between then and seven o’clock, barrage time.
The Grenadiers were on the right and the Coldstream on the left of
the Battalion, the latter following a quarter of a mile behind, with
Nos. 1 and 3 Companies to feed the Grenadiers and Nos. 4 and 2 for
the Coldstream. As the front was so wide, they split the difference
and kept as close as might be to the dividing line between the two
leading Battalions, which ran by Mory Switch and Hally Avenue. The
hot day broke with a gorgeous sunrise over a desolate landscape that
reeked in all its hollows of gas and cordite. A moment or two after
our barrage (field-guns only) opened, the enemy put down a heavy
reply, and into the smoke and dust of it the companies, in artillery
formation, walked up the road without hesitation or one man losing
his place. No. 1 Company leading on the right disappeared at once
after they had passed their jumping-off point at Mory Switch. Almost
the first shells caught the leading platoon, when Lieutenant J.
N. Ward was killed and Lieutenant P. S. MacMahon wounded. As soon
as they were clear of the barrage, they came under full blast of
machine-gun fire and saw the Grenadiers presently lie down enfiladed
on both flanks. Four of our machine-guns tried to work forward
and clear out the hindrances, but the fire was too strong. Both
battalions were finally held up, and the Grenadiers were practically
cut to pieces, with their reserve companies, as these strove to
reinforce the thinned line. After what seemed an immense time (two
hours or so) Captain Thompson, seeing that, as far as that sector
was concerned, the thing was hung up, ordered his men to dig in in
support, and they spent till nightfall “recovering casualties”--their
own, those of the battalions ahead, and of the Guards Machine-Guns.

No. 3 Company, which followed No. 1, suffered just as heavily from
the barrage. Very soon their commander, Captain Joyce, was wounded
and Lieutenant H. R. Baldwin killed. Second Lieutenant Heaton, who
took over, was gassed in the course of the afternoon, and C.S.M.
O’Hara then commanded. There was nothing for them to do either save
dig in, like No. 1, behind the Grenadiers, and a little to the right
of them.

No. 4 Company, under Captain Hegarty, following the Coldstream,
got the worst barrage of all as soon as they were clear of their
trenches, and found the Coldstream held up, front and flank, within
fifty yards of the sunken road whence they had started. No. 15
platoon of the Irish Guards was almost wiped out, and the remains of
it joined with No. 13 to make a defensive flank, while No. 14 crawled
or wriggled forward to reinforce the Coldstream, and No. 16 lay in
reserve in a sunk road. Sunk roads were the only shelter for such as
did not wish to become early casualties.

No. 2 Company (Captain A. Paget) following No. 4 had been held back
for a few minutes by the C.O. (Major R. Baggallay) on the fringe
of the barrage, to be slipped through when it seemed to lighten.
They also launched out into a world that was all flank or support,
of battalions which could neither be seen nor found, who were
themselves outflanked by machine-guns in a landscape that was one
stumbling-block of shallow trenches which suddenly faded out. They
crossed the St. Léger-Vraucourt road and bore east, after clearing
the St. Léger wood, till they reached the St. Léger reserve trench,
and held it from the Longatte road to where it joined the Banks
Reserve. Says one record: “At this time, Captain Paget was in
ignorance of the success or location of the attacking battalions, and
both of his flanks exposed as far as he knew.” The enemy machine-guns
were hammering home that knowledge, and one of the platoons had lost
touch altogether, and was out in the deadly open. So in the trench
they lay till an officer of the Coldstream came over and told Paget
the “general situation,” which, unofficially, ran: “This show is held
up.” He borrowed a section from No. 5 Platoon to help to build up
a flank to guard the east side of St. Léger and vanished among the
increasing shell-holes.

Well on in the morning a message arrived from Captain Hegarty, No.
4 Company, that he and his men were on the St. Léger-Vraucourt road
and held up like the rest. Captain Paget went over, in the usual way,
by a series of bolts from shell-hole to shell-hole, trying to clear
up an only too-clear situation. On the way he found a lost platoon,
sent it to dig in on the left of No. 2 Company, and also saw the
C.O. 2nd Coldstream and explained his own dispositions. They were
not made too soon, for in a short time there was an attack on No. 2
Company which came within sixty yards before it was broken up by our
small-arm fire. The Germans were followed up as they returned across
the Ecoust-Mory ridge by long-range shooting in which, for the sake
of economy, captured enemy rifles and ammunition were used.

By this time the whole front was split up into small or large
scattered posts in trenches or under cover, each held down by
machine-guns which punished every movement. Two Companies (2 and
4) were near the St. Léger Trees, a clump of nine trees on the St.
Léger-Ecoust road, mixed up with the Coldstream posts. The other
two were dug in behind the Grenadiers on the right. Battalion
Headquarters circulated spasmodically and by rushes, when it saw its
chance, from one point to the other of the most unwholesome ground.
Even at the time, some of its shell-hole conferences struck the
members as comic; but history does not record the things that were
said by dripping officers between mouthfuls of dirt and gas.

Every battle has its special characteristic. St. Léger was one of
heat, sunshine, sweat; the flavour of at least two gases tasted
through respirators or in the raw; the wail of machine-gun bullets
sweeping the crests of sunken roads; the sudden vision of wounded
in still-smoking shell-holes or laid in the sides of a scarp; sharp
whiffs of new-spilt blood, and here and there a face upon which the
sun stared without making any change. So the hours wore on, under a
sense of space, heat, and light; Death always just over the edge of
that space and impudently busy in that light.

About what would have been tea-time in the real world, Captain
Paget, a man of unhurried and careful speech and imperturbable soul,
reported to the C.O., whom he found by the St. Léger Trees, that
there were “Huns on his right--same trench as himself.” It was an
awkward situation that needed mending before dusk, and it was made
worse by the posts of the Coldstream and some Guards Machine-Guns’
posts, as well as those of our No. 4 Company, being mixed up within
close range of No. 2. The C.O. decided that if a barrage could be
brought to bear on the trench and its rather crowded neighbourhood,
No. 2 might attack it. A young gunner, Fowler by name, cast up at
that juncture and said it might be managed if the Battalion withdrew
their posts round the area. He had a telephone, still uncut, to
his guns and would observe their registration himself. The posts,
including those of the Guards Machine-Guns, were withdrawn, and
Fowler was as near as might be killed by one of his own registering
shots. He got his 18-pounders to his liking at last, and ten minutes’
brisk barrage descended on the trench. When it stopped, and before
our men could move, up went a white flag amid yells of “Kamerad,” and
the Huns came out, hands aloft, to be met by our men, who, forgetting
that exposed troops, friend and foe alike, would certainly be gunned
by the nearest enemy-post, had to be shooed and shouted back to cover
by their officers. The prisoners, ninety of them, were herded into
a wood, where they cast their helmets on the ground, laughed, and
shook hands with each other, to the immense amusement of our people.
The capture had turned a very blank day into something of a success,
and the Irish were grateful to the “bag.” This at least explains
the politeness of the orderly who chaperoned rather than conducted
the Hun officer to the rear, with many a “This way, sir. Mind out,
now, sir, you don’t slip down the bank.” They put a platoon into the
captured trench and lay down to a night of bursts of heavy shelling.
But the enemy, whether because of direct pressure or because they had
done their delaying work, asked for no more and drew back in the dark.

When morning of the 28th broke “few signs of enemy movement were
observed.” Men say that there is no mistaking the “feel of the
front” under this joyous aspect. The sense of constriction departs
as swiftly as a headache, and with it, often, the taste that was in
the mouth. One by one, as the lovely day went on, the patrols from
the companies made their investigations and reports, till at last
the whole line reformed and, in touch on either flank, felt forward
under light shelling from withdrawing guns. An aeroplane dropped some
bombs on the Battalion as it drew near to the St. Léger Trees, which
wounded two men and two gunner officers, one of whom--not Fowler,
the boy who arranged for the barrage--died in Father Browne’s arms.
On the road at that point, where the wounded and dying of the fight
had been laid, only dried pools of blood and some stained cotton-wads
remained darkening in the sun. Such officers as the gas had affected
in that way went about their routine-work vomiting disgustedly at
intervals.

Battalion Headquarters, which had nominally spent the previous day in
a waist-deep trench, set up office at the St. Léger Trees, and the
advance of the Guards Division continued for a mile or so. Then, on a
consolidated line, with machine-guns chattering to the eastward, it
waited to be relieved. As prelude to their watch on the Rhine, the
affair was not auspicious. The Grenadiers, on whom the brunt of the
fight fell, were badly knocked out, and of their sixteen officers but
four were on their feet. The Coldstream were so weakened that they
borrowed our No. 4 Company to carry on with, and the Irish thought
themselves lucky to have lost no more than two officers (Lieutenant
J. N. Ward and Lieutenant H. R. Baldwin) dead, and six wounded or
gassed, in addition to a hundred and seventy other ranks killed or
wounded. The wounded officers were Captain W. Joyce; Lieutenants P.
S. MacMahon and C. A. J. Vernon, who was incapacitated for a while
by tear-gas in the middle of action and led away blinded and very
wroth; also 2nd Lieutenants H. A. Connolly, G. T. Heaton, and A. E.
Hutchinson.

The Division was relieved on the night of the 28th: the Battalion
itself, as far as regarded No. 1 Company, by the 1st Gordons, from
the Third Division, Nos. 2 and 4 Companies by another battalion, and
No. 3 Company under the orders of the 2nd Grenadiers. They marched
back to their positions of the night before the battle “very glad
that it was all behind us,” and their shelters of bits of wood and
rough iron seemed like rest in a fair land.

On the 29th August, a hot day, they lay in old trenches over the
Moyenneville spur in front of Adinfer Wood facing Douchy and Ayette,
where “three weeks ago no man could have lived.” They talked together
of the far-off times when they held that line daily expecting the
enemy advance; and the officers lay out luxuriously in the wood in
the evening after Mess, while the men made themselves “little homes
in it.”

Next day they rested, for the men were very tired, and on the last
of the month the whole Battalion was washed in the divisional baths
that had established themselves at Adinfer. But the enemy had not
forgotten them, and on the first of September their shelters and
tents in the delightful wood were bombed. Six men were injured, five
being buried in a trench, and of these two were suffocated before
they could be dug out.


TOWARDS THE CANAL DU NORD

And that was all the rest allowed to the Battalion. On the 2nd
September the Canadian Corps of the First Army broke that outlying
spur of the Hindenburg System known as the Drocourt-Quéant Switch,
with its wires, trenches, and posts; and the Fifty-seventh and
Fifty-second Divisions, after hard work, equally smashed the
triangle of fortifications north-west of Quéant where the Switch
joined the System. The gain shook the whole of the Hindenburg Line
south of Quéant and, after five days’ clean-up behind the line, the
Guards Division were ordered to go in again at the very breast of
Hindenburg’s works. No one knew what the enemy’s idea might be, but
there was strong presumption that, if he did not hold his defence at
that point, he might crack. (“But, ye’ll understand, for all that, we
did _not_ believe Jerry would crack past mendin’.”)

The Battalion spent the night of the 2nd September, then, in shelters
in Hamel Switch Trench on their way back from Adinfer Wood to the
battle. The front had now shifted to very much the one as we held
in April, 1917, ere the days of Cambrai and Bourlon Wood. The 1st
Guards Brigade were in Divisional Reserve at Lagnicourt, three miles
south-west of Ecoust-St.-Mein, where the Battalion had to cross their
still fresh battle-field of less than a week back, as an appetizer to
their hot dinners. They occupied a waist-deep old trench, a little
west of Lagnicourt, and noticed that there was no shelling, though
the roads were full of our traffic, “a good deal of it in full view
of Bourlon Wood.” Going over “used” ground for the third time and
noting one’s many dead comrades does not make for high spirit even
though one’s own Divisional General has written one’s own Brigadier,
“All battalions of the 1st Guards Brigade discharged their duty
splendidly at St. Léger.”

Lagnicourt was shelled a little by a high-velocity gun between the
4th and the 6th of September, and seventeen bombs were dropped on the
Battalion, wounding two men.

By all reason there should have been a bitter fight on that ground,
and full preparation for it was made. But the enemy, after St. Léger,
saw fit to withdraw himself suddenly and unexpectedly out of all that
area. For one bewildering dawn and day “the bottom fell out of the
front,” as far as the Guards Division was concerned. It is a curious
story, even though it does not directly concern the Battalion. Here
is one detail of it:

On the 3rd September the 2nd Brigade toiled in from Monchy, in full
war-kit, and, tired with the long day’s heat, formed up west of
Lagnicourt before dawn, detailed to win, if they could, a thousand
yards or so of chewed-up ground. They “went over the top” under
a creeping barrage, one gun of which persistently fired short,
and--found nothing whatever in front of them save a prodigious number
of dead horses, some few corpses, and an intolerable buzzing of
flies! As they topped the ridge above Lagnicourt, they saw against
the first light of the sun, dump after German dump blazing palely
towards the east. That was all. They wandered, wondering, into a
vast, grassy, habitationless plain that stretched away towards
the Bapaume-Cambrai road. Not a machine-gun broke the stupefying
stillness from any fold of it. Yet it was the very place for such
surprises. Aeroplanes swooped low, looked them well over, and skimmed
off. No distant guns opened. The advance became a route-march, a
Sunday walk-out, edged with tense suspicion. They saw a German
cooker wrecked on the grass, and, beside it, the bodies of two
clean, good-looking boys, pathetically laid out as for burial. The
thing was a booby-trap arranged to move our people’s pity. Some
pitied, and were blown to bits by the concealed mine. No one made any
comment. They were tired with carrying their kit in the sun among
the maddening flies. The thousand yards stretched into miles. Twice
or thrice they halted and began to dig in for fear of attack. But
nothing overtook them and they installed themselves, about dusk, in
some old British trenches outside Boursies, four miles and more, as
the crow flies, from Lagnicourt! At midnight, up came their rations,
and the punctual home-letters, across that enchanted desert which had
spared them. They were told that their Brigade Artillery was in place
behind the next rise, ready to deliver barrages on demand, and in due
course the whole of our line on that sector flowed forward.

The Battalion relieved the 1st Scots Guards in the front line near
Mœuvres on the 7th--a quiet relief followed by severe gassing. Here
they passed two days in the delicate and difficult business of
feeling all about them among the mass of old trenches, to locate
enemy’s posts and to watch what points of vantage might offer. The
wreckage of the houses round Mœuvres, into which the trenches ran,
lent itself excellently to enemy activity; and men played blind-man’s
buff round bits of broken walls wherever they explored. Their left
was in the air; their right under the care of Providence; and their
supports were far off. No. 3 Company (Captain G. L. Bambridge,
M.C.), while trying to close a gap between the two front companies (3
and 1) by peaceful penetration with a bombing-party, found enemy in
the trench, drove him up it as far as they could, built a barricade,
and were then heavily counter-raided by a couple of officers and
twenty men whom they ejected after, as the Company justly owned, “a
good attempt.” The enemy “attempted” again about midnight on the 8th,
when he was bombed off, and again on the afternoon of the 9th in an
outlying trench, mixed up with smashed cellars and broken floors,
where he captured two unarmed stretcher-bearers and three men who
had not been in the line before. Though it does new hands no harm
to realize that front-line trenches are not Warley Barracks (and
stretcher-bearers, like orderlies, are prey to all the world), still
the matter could not be passed over. Our trench-mortars attended
vigorously to the enemy posts whence the raid had been launched, and
in the afternoon sent a strong patrol to make the outraged trench
secure. Later on, a platoon of No. 1 Company got into touch with
the battalion (8th King’s) on their left, and took part in a small
“bicker,” as it was described, but with no casualties.

They were relieved the same night, though they did not expect it, by
the 1/5th Battalion Loyal North Lancs who had not made sure of their
route beforehand, and so, in wet darkness, lost their way, failed
to meet the guides at the rendezvous, and were heavily shelled.
The relief dragged on till well towards dawn, when the battalions
straggled off into some drenching trenches without any sort of
accommodation. (“The whole thing the most appalling mess and agony
I have ever experienced.”) The worst was when a stray light went up
and showed the relieved Battalion under pouring rain playing “follow
my leader” in a complete circle like caterpillars, in the hopeful
belief that they were moving to their destination. They next took the
place of the 3rd Guards Brigade in reserve-trenches near Edinburgh
Support, where they stayed till the 14th September and were not even
once shelled. Salvage and cleaning up was their fatigue--a dreadful
job at any time, for the ground was filled with ancient offal as
well as new--lost French of ’14 mingled grotesquely with the raw
produce of yesterday’s bombing-raid. Yet men’s feelings blunt so by
use that they will scavenge yard by yard over the very clay of the
pit into which they themselves may at any instant be stamped, nor
turn a hair at shapes made last year in their likeness. The Battalion
was complimented by its Major-General on the extent and neatness of
its dump. No mere campaigning interferes with the Army’s passion
for elaborate economies. A little before this, the entire British
Expeditionary Force was exhorted to collect and turn in all solder
from bully-beef tins and the like. Naturally, the thing became a game
with betting on results between corps; but when a dark, elderly,
brooding private of the Irish spent three hours stalking a Coldstream
cooker with intent to convey and melt it down, every one felt it had
gone far enough.

On the 15th September they relieved the 1st Scots Guards in the old
trenches west of Lagnicourt. There they managed to put in a little
box-respirator drill which at the best is a dry fatigue, but, be it
noted with gratitude, “beer was obtained for the men and sent up from
transport-lines.” The whole area reeked of the various gases which
the enemy were distributing with heavies. They hung in the hollows
and were sucked up by the day’s heat, and no time or place was safe
from them. Gas-discipline had to be insisted on strongly, for even
veterans grow careless of a foe they cannot see; and the new hands
are like croupy babies.

On the 17th September they relieved the 2nd Scots Guards in support,
and No. 2 Company took over from a company of the Welsh Guards. Their
trenches were in what had been the British front line of the old
time--Fish Avenue, Sprat Post, Shark Support, Rat and Rabbit Avenue,
and so forth.

There was desultory shelling on the morning of the 18th, and
heavier work in the afternoon, causing six casualties, and slightly
wounding Captain Vernon, Intelligence Officer. Then the silence
of preparation for battle falls on the record. It was nothing to
the Battalion that on the 18th September the enemy “apparently
attacked south of the divisional front along the Bapaume-Cambrai
road.” The dead must bury their dead on the Somme. They had their
own dispositions to arrange and re-arrange, as men, for one cause or
other, fell out and no unit could afford to take chances, with the
Hindenburg Line ahead of them. (“An’ we knowin’ we was told off to
cross that dirty ditch in front of ’em all.”) Their world, as with
every other division, was limited to the Reserves behind them, who
should come up to make good their casualties; their trench-mortar
batteries alongside them; and their own selves about to be used in
what promised to be one of the bloodiest shows of the war.

Those who were for the front line enjoyed a week to work and think
things over. Those who were set aside for the second course were
bombed by night and--went mushroom-picking in back-areas between
parades, or played riotous cricket-matches with petrol-tins for
wickets!

Their Divisional Commander, Major-General Feilding, had left on
September 11 to succeed Sir Francis Lloyd in command of the London
District, and General T. G. Matheson, C.B., had been appointed to
the command of the Guards Division. The Battalion was full strength,
officers and men, for there had been little during the past month to
pull it down.


THE CROSSING OF THE CANAL DU NORD

Operations against the Hindenburg Line were to open on the 27th
September with the attack of fourteen divisions of the First and
Third Armies on a twelve-mile front from opposite Gouzeaucourt in
the south to opposite Sauchy-Lestrée, sister to Sauchy-Cauchy--under
the marshes of the Sensée River in the north. It would be heralded
by two days’ solid bombardment along the entire fronts of the First,
Third, and Fourth Armies, so that the enemy might be left guessing
which was to hit first. When the First and Third Armies were well
home, the Fourth would attend to the German position in the south,
and heave the whole thing backward.

The share of the Guards Division in the northern attack was to cross
the Canal du Nord at Lock Seven, north of Havrincourt, on a front of
a mile; then work through the complicated tangle of the Hindenburg
support line directly east along the ridge from Flesquières village
to Premy Chapel which stands at the junction of the roads from
Noyelles, Marcoing, and Graincourt, and to consolidate on the line
of the Marcoing-Graincourt road. Meantime, the Third Division on
their right would take the village of Flesquières; the Fifty-second
Division would take the Hindenburg Line that lay west of the Canal
in the bend of it, and would then let the Sixty-third through who
would swing down from the north and attend to Graincourt and Anneux
villages. The total advance set for the Guards Division was three
miles, but, if the operations were fully successful, they were to
push on to the outskirts of Noyelles; the Third Division to Marcoing;
while the Fifty-seventh, coming through the Sixty-third, would take
Cantaing and Fontaine-Notre-Dame. In the Guards Division itself, the
2nd Brigade was to move off first, and ferret its way through a knot
of heavily wired trenches that lay between them and the Canal, take
the Hindenburg support trenches, and then form a defensive flank to
the left of the next advance till the Fifty-second and Sixty-third
Divisions should have secured Graincourt. The 1st Brigade would pass
through them and capture the trenches across the Canal to the north
and north-east of Flesquières. If resistance were not too strong,
that brigade was to go on to the spur running from Flesquières to
Cantaing, and help the Sixty-third turn the Graincourt line. The 3rd
Brigade, passing through the 1st, would carry on and take the high
ground round Premy Chapel.

Enough rain fell the day before to grease the ground uncomfortably,
and when at 3.30 A. M. the Irish Guards moved off from their reserve
trenches west of Lagnicourt to their assembly positions along the
Demicourt-Graincourt road to Bullen Trench, the jumping-off place,
it was pouring wet. They were not shelled on the way up, but the
usual night-work was afoot in the back-areas, and though our guns,
as often the case on the eve of an outbreak, held their breath,
the enemy’s artillery threatened in the distance, and the lights
and “flaming onions” marked their expectant front. Just before the
Battalion reached the ruins of Demicourt, there was an explosion
behind them, and they saw, outlined against the flare of a blazing
dump, Lagnicourt way, a fat and foolish observation-balloon rocking
and ducking at the end of its tether, with the air of a naughty
baby caught in the act of doing something it shouldn’t. Since the
thing was visible over half a Department, they called it names, but
it made excuse for a little talk that broke the tension. Tea and
rum were served out at the first halt--a ritual with its usual grim
jests--and when they reached the road in front of Demicourt, they
perceived the balloon had done its dirty work too well. The enemy,
like ourselves, changes his field-lights on occasion, but, on all
occasions, two red lights above and one below mean trouble. “Up go
the bloody pawnbrokers!” said a man who knew what to expect, and, as
soon as the ominous glares rose, the German trench-mortars opened
on the Battalion entering the communication-way that led to Bullen
Trench. Our barrage came down at Zero (5.20) more terrifically, men
said, than ever they had experienced, and was answered by redoubled
defensive barrages. After that, speech was cut off. Some fifty yards
ahead of Bullen Trench--which, by the way, was only three feet
deep--lay the 1st Scots Guards, the first wave of the attack. On,
in front of, and in the space between them and the Irish, fell the
rain of the trench-mortars; from the rear, the Guards Machine-Guns
tortured all there was of unoccupied air with their infernal
clamours. The Scots Guards went over among the shell-spouts and
jerking wires at the first glimmer of dawn, the Irish following in a
rush. The leading companies were No. 3 (Lieutenant H. A. A. Collett)
on the left, and No. 4 (2nd Lieutenant C. S. O’Brien) on the right.
The 1st Guards Trench Mortar Battery (2nd Lieutenant O. R. Baldwin,
Irish Guards) was attached experimentally to No. 3 Company in the
first wave instead of, as usual, in support. No. 2 Company (Captain
C. W. W. Bence-Jones) supported No. 3, and No. 1 (Lieutenant the Hon.
B. A. A. Ogilvy) No. 4. They stayed for a moment in the trench, a
deep, wide one of the Hindenburg pattern, which the Scots Guards had
left. It was no healthy spot, for the shells were localised here and
the dirt flung up all along it in waves. Men scrambled out over the
sliding, flying edges of it, saw a bank heave up in the half-light,
and knew that, somewhere behind that, was the Canal. By this time one
of the two Stokes guns of the Mortar Battery and half the gunners
had been wiped out, and the casualties in the line were heavy; but
they had no time to count. Then earth opened beneath their feet,
and showed a wide, deep, dry, newly made canal with a smashed iron
bridge lying across the bed of it, and an unfinished lock to the
right looking like some immense engine of war ready to do hurt in
inconceivable fashions. Directly below them, on the pale, horribly
hard, concrete trough, was a collection of agitated pin-heads, the
steel hats of the Scots Guards rearing ladders against the far side
of the gulf. Mixed with them were the dead, insolently uninterested,
while the wounded, breaking aside, bound themselves up with the
tense, silent preoccupation which unhurt men, going forward, find so
hard to bear. Mobs of bewildered Germans had crawled out of their
shelters in the Canal flanks and were trying to surrender to any one
who looked likely to attend to them. They saluted British officers as
they raced past, and, between salutes, returned their arms stiffly
to the safe “Kamerad” position. This added the last touch of insanity
to the picture. (“We’d ha’ laughed if we had had the time, ye’ll
understand.”)

None recall precisely how they reached the bottom of the Canal, but
there were a few moments of blessed shelter ere they scrambled out
and reformed on the far side. The shelling here was bad enough, but
nothing to what they had survived. A veil of greasy smoke, patched
with flame that did not glare, stood up behind them, and through
the pall of it, in little knots, stumbled their supports, blinded,
choking, gasping. In the direction of the attack, across a long
stretch of broken rising ground, were more shells, but less thickly
spaced, and craters of stinking earth and coloured chalks where our
barrage had ripped out nests of machine-guns. Far off, to the left,
creaming with yellow smoke in the morning light, rose the sullen head
of Bourlon Wood to which the Canadians were faithfully paying the
debt contracted by the 2nd Battalion of the Irish Guards in the old
days after Cambrai.

At the crest of the ascent lay Saunders Keep, which marked the point
where the Scots Guards would lie up and the Irish come through.
Already the casualties had been severe. Captain Bence-Jones and
2nd Lieutenant Mathieson of No. 2 Company were wounded at the Keep
itself, and 2nd Lieutenant A. R. Boyle of No. 1 earlier in the rush.
The companies panted up, gapped and strung out. From the Keep the
land sloped down to Stafford Alley, the Battalion’s first objective
just before which Lieutenant Barry Close was killed. That day marked
his coming of age. Beyond the Alley the ground rose again, and here
the Irish were first checked by some machine-gun fire that had
escaped our barrages. Second Lieutenant O’Brien, No. 3 Company, was
hit at this point while getting his men forward. He had earned his
Military Cross in May, and he died well. The next senior officer,
2nd Lieutenant E. H. R. Burke, was away to the left in the thick of
the smoke with a platoon that, like the rest, was fighting for its
life; so 2nd Lieutenant O’Farrell led on. He was hit not far from
Stafford Alley, and while his wound was being bandaged by Sergeant
Regan, hit again by a bullet that, passing through the Sergeant’s
cap and a finger, entered O’Farrell’s heart. The officer commanding
the remnants of the Mortar Battery took on the company and his one
gun. Meantime, Collett and a few of No. 3 Company had reached Silver
Street, a trench running forward from Stafford Alley, and he and
Lieutenant Brady were bombing down it under heavy small-arm fire from
the enemy’s left flank which had not been driven in and was giving
untold trouble. No. 2 Company, with two out of three of its officers
down, was working towards the same line as the fragment of No. 3;
though opinion was divided on that confused field whether it would
not be better for them to lie down and form a defensive flank against
that pestilent left fire. Eventually, but events succeeded each other
like the bullets, Collett and his men reached their last objective--a
trench running out of Silver Street towards Flesquières. Here he,
Brady, and Baldwin drew breath and tried to get at the situation.
No. 4 Company lay to the right of No. 3, and when 2nd Lieutenant E.
H. R. Burke, with what was left of his platoon before mentioned,
came up, he resumed charge of it without a word and went on. No. 1
Company (Lieutenant the Hon. B. A. A. Ogilvy) had, like the rest,
been compelled to lead its own life. Its objective was the beet-sugar
factory in front of Flesquières ahead of and a little to the right
of the Battalion’s final objective, and it was met throughout with
rifle, bomb, and flanking fire. Lieutenant Ogilvy was wounded at
a critical point in the game with the enemy well into the trench,
or trenches. (The whole ground seemed to the men who were clearing
it one inexhaustible Hun-warren.) As he dropped, Lieutenant R. L.
Dagger and Sergeant Conaboy, picking up what men they could, bombed
the enemy out, back, and away, and settled down to dig in and wait;
always under flank-fire. The Sergeant was killed “in his zeal to
finish the job completely”--no mean epitaph for a thorough man. By
eleven o’clock that morning all the companies had reached their
objectives, and, though sorely harassed, began to feel that the worst
for them might be over. There were, however, two German “whizz-bangs”
that lived in Orival Wood still untaken on the Battalion’s left, and
these, served with disgusting speed and accuracy, swept Silver Street
mercilessly. The situation was not improved when one of the sergeants
quoted the ever-famous saying of Sergeant-Major Toher with reference
to one of our own barrages: “And even the wurrums themselves are
getting up and crying for mercy.” The guns were near enough to watch
quite comfortably, and while the men watched and winced, they saw
the “success” signal of the Canadians--three whites--rise high in
air in front of Bourlon Wood. Then No. 1 Company reported they were
getting more than their share of machine-gun fire, and the 1st Guards
Brigade Trench Mortar Battery, reduced to one mortar, one officer,
one sergeant, four men, and ten shells, bestowed the whole of its
ammunition in the direction indicated, abandoned its mortar, and
merged itself into the ranks of No. 3 Company. It had been amply
proved that where trench-mortars accompany a first wave of attack, if
men are hit while carrying two Stokes shells apiece (forty pounds of
explosives), they become dangerous mobile mines.

Enemy aeroplanes now swooped down with machine-gun fire; there seemed
no way of getting our artillery to attend to them and they pecked
like vultures undisturbed. Then Battalion Headquarters came up in
the midst of the firing from the left, established themselves in
a dug-out and were at once vigorously shelled, together with the
neighbouring aid-post and some German prisoners there, waiting to
carry down wounded. The aid-post was in charge of a young American
doctor, Rhys Davis by name, who had been attached to the Battalion
for some time. This was his first day of war and he was mortally
wounded before the noon of it.

The trench filled as the day went on, with details dropping in by
devious and hurried roads to meet the continual stream of prisoners
being handed down to Brigade Headquarters. One youth, who could not
have been seventeen, flung himself into the arms of an officer and
cried, “Kamerad, Herr Offizier! Ich bin sehr jung! Kamerad!” To
whom the embarrassed Islander said brutally: “Get on with you. _I_
wouldn’t touch you for the world!” And they laughed all along the
trench-face as they dodged the whizz-bangs out of Orival Wood, and
compared themselves to the “wurrums begging for mercy.”

About noon, after many adventures, the 2nd Grenadiers arrived
to carry on the advance, and Silver Street became a congested
metropolis. The 2nd Grenadiers were hung up there for a while
because, though the Third Division on the right had taken
Flesquières, the Sixty-third on the left had not got Graincourt
village, which was enfilading the landscape damnably. Orival Wood,
too, was untaken, and the 1st Grenadiers, under Lord Gort, were out
unsupported half a mile ahead on the right front somewhere near Premy
Chapel. Meantime, a battalion of the Second Division, which was to
come through the Guards Division and continue the advance, flooded up
Silver Street, zealously unreeling its telephone wires; Machine-Gun
Guards were there, looking for positions; the 2nd Grenadiers were
standing ready; the Welsh Guards were also there with intent to
support the Grenadiers; walking wounded were coming down, and severe
cases were being carried over the top by German prisoners who made
no secret of an acute desire to live and jumped in among the rest
without leave asked. The men compared the crush to a sugar-queue at
home. To cap everything, some wandering tanks which had belonged to
the Division on the right had strayed over to the left. No German
battery can resist tanks, however disabled; so they drew fire, and
when they were knocked out (our people did not know this at first,
being unused to working with them), made life insupportable with
petrol-fumes for a hundred yards round.

About half-past four in the afternoon a Guards Battalion--they
thought it was the 1st Coldstream--came up on their left, and under
cover of what looked like a smoke-barrage, cleared Orival Wood and
silenced the two guns there. The Irish, from their dress-circle in
Silver Street, blessed them long and loud, and while they applauded,
Lieut.-Colonel Lord Gort, commanding the 1st Grenadiers, came down
the trench wounded on his way to a dressing-station. He had been
badly hit once before he thought fit to leave duty, and was suffering
from loss of blood. The Irish had always a great regard for him, and
that day they owed him more than they knew at the time, for it was
the advance of the 1st Grenadiers under his leading, almost up to
Premy Chapel, which had unkeyed the German resistance in Graincourt,
and led the enemy to believe their line of retreat out of the village
was threatened. The Second Division as it came through found the
enemy shifting and followed them up towards Noyelles. So the day
closed, and, though men did not realize, marked the end of organized
trench-warfare for the Guards Division.

The Battalion, with two officers dead and five wounded out of
fifteen (killed: Lieutenant B. S. Close, and 2nd Lieutenant A. H.
O’Farrell; wounded: Captain the Hon. B. A. A. Ogilvy, Captain C. W.
W. Bence-Jones, and 2nd Lieutenants A. R. Boyle, G. F. Mathieson,
and C. S. O’Brien, M.C., died of wounds), and one hundred and eighty
casualties in the ranks, stayed on the ground for the night. It
tried to make itself as comfortable as cold and shallow trenches
allowed, but by orders of some “higher authority,” who supposed that
it had been relieved, no water or rations were sent up; and, next
morning, they had to march six thousand yards on empty stomachs to
their trench-shelters and bivouacs in front of Demicourt. As the last
company arrived a cold rain fell, but they were all in reasonably
high spirits. It had been a winning action, in spite of trench-work,
and men really felt that they had the running in their own hands at
last.

Back-area rumours and official notifications were good too. The
Nineteenth and Second Corps of the Second Army, together with the
Belgian Army, had attacked on the 28th September, from Dixmude to far
south of the Ypres-Zonnebeke road; had retaken all the heights to the
east of Ypres, and were in a fair way to clear out every German gain
there of the past four years. A German withdrawal was beginning from
Lens to Armentières, and to the south of the Third Army the Fourth
came in on the 29th (while the Battalion was “resting and shaving”
in its trench-shelters by Demicourt) on a front of twelve miles, and
from Gricourt to Vendhuille broke, and poured across the Hindenburg
Line, then to the St. Quentin Canal. At the same time, lest there
should be one furlong of the uneasy front neglected, the Fifth and
Sixth Corps of the Third Army attacked over the old Gouzeaucourt
ground between Vendhuille and Marcoing. This, too, without counting
the blows that the French and the Americans were dealing in their own
spheres on the Meuse and in the Argonne; each stroke coldly preparing
the next.

The Germans had, during September, lost a quarter of a million
of prisoners, several thousand guns, and immense quantities of
irreplaceable stores. Their main line of resistance was broken and
over-run throughout; and their troops in the field were feeling the
demoralisation of constant withdrawals, as well as shortage from
abandoned supplies. Our people had known the same depression in
the March Push, when night skies, lit with burning dumps, gave the
impression that all the world was going up in universal surrender.


TOWARDS MAUBEUGE

But work was still to do. Between Cambrai, which at the end of
October was under, though not actually in, our hands, and Maubeuge,
lay thirty-five miles of France, all open save for such hastily made
defences as the enemy had been able to throw up after the collapse
of the Hindenburg systems. There, then, the screw was turned, and
on the 8th October the Third and Fourth Armies attacked on a front
of seventeen miles from Sequehart, north of Cambrai, where the
Cambrai-Douai road crosses the Sensée, southward to our junction with
the French First Army a few miles above St. Quentin. Twenty British
divisions, two cavalry divisions, and one American division were
involved. The Battalion faced the changed military situation, by
announcing that companies were “at the disposal of their commanders
for open warfare training.” After which they were instantly sent
forward from their Demicourt trenches, to help make roads between
Havricourt and Flesquières!

On the 3rd October they had orders to move, which were at once
cancelled--sure sign that the Higher Command had something on its
mind. This was proved two days later when the same orders arrived
again, and were again washed out. Meantime, their reorganisation
after the Flesquières fight had been completed; reinforcements were
up, and the following officers had joined for duty: Lieutenants H.
E. Van der Noot and G. F. Van der Noot, and 2nd Lieutenants A. L. W.
Koch de Gooreynd, the Hon. C. A. Barnewall, G. M. Tylden-Wright, V.
J. S. French, and R. E. Taylor.

On the 4th October the Commanding Officer went on leave, and Major
A. F. L. Gordon, M.C., took command of the Battalion. Once more it
was warned that it would move next day, which warning this time
came true, and was heralded by the usual conference at Brigade
Headquarters, on the 7th October, when the plans for next day’s
battle in that sector of the line were revealed. The Second Division,
on the left, and the Third, on the right of the Guards Division, were
to attack on the whole of the front of the Sixth Corps at dawn of
the 8th October. The Guards Division was to be ready to go through
these two divisions on the afternoon of that day, or to take over
the line on the night of it, and continue the attack at dawn on the
9th. The 1st Guards Brigade would pass through the Third Division,
and the 2nd Brigade through the Second Division. As far as the 1st
Brigade’s attack was concerned, the 2nd Coldstream would take the
right, the 2nd Grenadiers the left of the line, with the 1st Irish
Guards in reserve. It was all beautifully clear. So the Battalion
left Demicourt, recrossed the Canal du Nord at Lock 7, and were
“accommodated” in dug-outs and shelters in the Hindenburg Line, near
Ribecourt.

On the 9th October the Battalion moved to Masnières, four miles or so
south of Cambrai. Here, while crossing the St. Quentin Canal, No. 3
Company had three killed and three wounded by a long-range gun which
was shelling all down the line of it. They halted in the open for
the rest of the day. A curious experience followed. The idea was to
attack in the general direction of Cattenières, across the line of
the Cambrai-Caudry railway, which, with its embankment and cuttings,
was expected to give trouble. The New Zealand Division was then on
the right of the Guards Division; but no one seemed to be sure, the
night before the battle, whether the Third Division was out on their
front or not. (“Everything, ye’ll understand, was all loosed up in
those days. Jerry did not know _his_ mind, and for that reason we
could not know ours. The bottom was out of the war, ye’ll understand,
but we did not see it.”) However, it was arranged that all troops
would be withdrawn from doubtful areas before Zero (5.10 A. M.), and
that the 2nd Coldstream and the 2nd Grenadiers would advance to the
attack under a creeping barrage with due precautions which included a
plentiful bombardment and machine-gunning of the railway embankment.

The Battalion, in reserve, as has been said, moved from Masnières
to its assembly area, among old German trenches near the village
of Seranvillers, in artillery formation at 2.40 A. M., and had its
breakfast at 5 A. M., while the other two battalions of the Brigade
advanced in waves, preceded by strong patrols and backed by the guns.
There was no shelling while they assembled, and practically none in
reply to our barrage; nor did the leading battalions meet opposition
till after they had cleared out the village of Seranvillers, and
were held up by screened machine-guns in a wood surrounding a
sugar-factory north of Cattenières. The Battalion followed on in due
course, reached the railway embankment, set up Headquarters in a
road-tunnel under it (there was no firing), and received telephonic
orders that at 5 A. M. on the 10th October they would pass through
the other two battalions and continue the advance, which, henceforth,
was to be “by bounds” and without limit or barrage. Then they lay up
in the railway embankment and dozed.

They assembled next morning (the 10th) in the dark, and, reinforced
by seven Corps Cyclists and a Battery of field-guns, went forth
into France at large, after a retiring enemy. Nothing happened
for a couple of miles, when they reached the outskirts of
Beauvais-en-Cambrensis, on the Cambrai-Le-Cateau road, where a single
sniper from one of the houses shot and killed 2nd Lieutenant V. J.
S. French, No. 4 Company. A mile farther on, up the Beauvais-Quiévy
road, they found the village of Bevillers heavily shelled by the
enemy from a distance, so skirted round it, and sent in two small
mopping-up parties. Here No. 4 Company again came up against
machine-gun and sniper fire, but no casualties followed. Their
patrols reported the next bound all clear, and they pushed on, under
heavy but harmless shelling, in the direction of Quiévy. At eight
o’clock their patrols waked up a breadth of machine-gun nests along
the whole of the front and that of the battalions to their left and
right. They went to ground accordingly, and when the enemy artillery
was added to the small-arm fire, the men dug slits for themselves
and escaped trouble. For some time past the German shell-stuff had
been growing less and less effective, both in accuracy and bursting
power, which knowledge cheered our troops. In the afternoon, as there
were signs of the resistance weakening, our patrols put forth once
more, and by five o’clock the Battalion had reached the third bound
on the full battalion front. Then, in the dusk, came word from the
New Zealand division on their right, that the division on _their_
right again, had got forward, and that the New Zealanders were
pushing on to high ground south of Quiévy. With the message came one
from No. 4 Company, reporting that their patrols were out ahead, and
in touch with the New Zealanders on their right. There is no record
that the news was received with enthusiasm, since it meant “bounding
on” in the dark to the fourth bound, which they accomplished not
before 10.30 that night, tired officers hunting up tired companies by
hand and shoving them into their positions. These were on high ground
north-east of Quiévy, with the Battalion’s right on a farm, called
Fontaine-au-Tertre, which signifies “the fountain on the little
hill,” a mile beyond the village. The 1st Scots Guards were on their
left holding the village of St. Hilaire-les-Cambrai. Then, punctual
as ever, rations came up; Battalion Headquarters established itself
in a real roofed house in the outskirts of Quiévy, and No. 1 Company
in reserve, was billeted in the village.

Next morning (11th October), when the 3rd Guards Brigade came through
them and attacked over the naked grass and stubble fields towards St.
Python and Solesmes, the Battalion was withdrawn and sent to very
good billets in Quiévy. “The men having both upstairs and cellar
room. All billets very dirty,” says the Diary, “owing to the previous
occupants (Hun) apparently having taken delight in scattering all the
civilian clothes, food, furniture, etc., all over the place.” Every
one was tired out; they had hardly slept for three nights; but all
“were in the best of spirits.” Brigade Headquarters had found what
was described as “a magnificent house” with “a most comfortable” bed
in “a large room.” Those who used it were lyric in their letters home.

The total casualties for the 10th and 11th October were amazingly
few. Second Lieutenant V. J. S. French was the only casualty among
the officers, and, of other ranks, but three were killed and nine
wounded.

The officers who took part in the operations were these:


_No. 1 Company_

  Lieut. H. E. Van der Noot.
  2nd Lieut. J. C. Haydon.
  2nd Lieut. R. E. Taylor.


_No. 2 Company_

  Lieut. E. M. Harvey, M.C.
  2nd Lieut. G. T. Todd.
  2nd Lieut. A. L. W. Koch de Gooreynd.


_No. 3 Company_

  Lieut. F. S. L. Smith, M.C.
  Lieut. G. E. F. Van der Noot.
  2nd Lieut. J. J. B. Brady.


_No. 4 Company_

  Capt. D. J. Hegarty.
  2nd Lieut. Hon. C. A. Barnewall.
  2nd Lieut. V. T. S. French (killed).


_Battalion Headquarters_

  Major A. F. Gordon, M.C.
  Capt. J. B. Keenan.
  Capt. G. L. St. C. Bambridge, M.C.

They lay at Quiévy for the next week employed in cleaning up dirty
billets, while the 3rd and 2nd Brigades of the Division were cleaning
out the enemy rear-guards in front of them from the west bank of
the Selle River, and roads and railways were stretching out behind
our armies to bring redoubled supply of material. One of the extra
fatigues of those days was to get the civil population out of the
villages that the enemy were abandoning. This had to be done by
night, for there is small chivalry in the German composition. Quiévy
was shelled at intervals, and no parades larger than of a platoon
were, therefore, allowed. The weather, too, stopped a scheme of
field-operations in the back area between Quiévy and Bevillers, and
a washed and cleanly clothed battalion were grateful to their Saints
for both reliefs.

On the 17th October the Sixty-first Division took over the Guards
area, and that afternoon the Battalion left Quiévy by cross-country
tracks for Boussières and moved into position for what turned out to
be all but the last stroke of the long game.

The enemy on that front were by now across the steeply banked Selle
River, but the large, straggling village of Solesmes, of which St.
Python is practically a suburb, was still held by them and would have
to be cleaned out house-to-house. Moreover, it was known to be full
of French civils and getting them away in safety would not make the
situation less difficult.


ST. PYTHON

It was given out at Brigade conference on the 17th that the
Sixty-first Division would take place on the right of the Guards
Division and the Nineteenth on its left in the forthcoming attack,
and that the Sixty-first would attend to Solesmes, while the Guards
Division pushed on north-east between St. Python and Haussy on a
mile-wide front through the village of Escarmain to Capelle, a
distance of some three and a half miles. The 1st and 3rd Brigades
would lead, the 2nd in reserve, and the passage of the Selle would be
effected in the dark by such bridges as the Sappers could put up.

The Battalion moved nearer their assembly areas to St.
Hilaire-les-Cambrai, on the night of the 18th after Company
Commanders had thoroughly explained to their men what was in store;
and on the 19th those commanders, with the Intelligence Officer,
Captain Vernon, went up to high ground overlooking the battle-field.
It was a closer and more crumpled land than they had dealt with
hitherto, its steep-sided valleys cut by a multitude of little
streams running from nor’-west to south-east, with the interminable
ruled line of the Bavai road edging the great Forest of Mormal which
lay north of Landrecies. The wheel was swinging full circle, and
men who had taken part in that age-ago retreat from Mons, amused
themselves by trying to pick out familiar details in the landscape
they had been hunted across four years before. But it was misty and
the weather, faithful ally of the Germans to the last, was breaking
again. Just as the Battalion moved off from St. Hilaire to their
area on the railway line from Valenciennes to Le Cateau, rain began
and continued till six next morning, making every condition for
attack as vile as it could. They dug them shallow trenches in case of
shell-fire, and sent down parties to reconnoitre the bridges over the
Selle. Four bridges were “available,” _i.e._ existed in some shape,
on or near the Battalion front, but no one had a good word to say for
any of them.

There is a tale concerning the rivers here, which may be given
(without guarantee) substantially as told: “Rivers round Maubeuge?
’Twas _all_ rivers--the Aunelle and the Rhônelle and the Pronelle,
an’ more, too; an’ our Intelligence Officer desirin’ to know the
last word concernin’ each one of ’em before we paddled it. Michael
an’ me was for that duty. Michael was a runner, afraid o’ nothing,
but no small liar, and him as fed as myself with reportin’ on these
same dam’ rivers; and Jerry expendin’ the last of his small-arm stuff
round and round the country. I forget which river ’twas we were
scouting, but he was ahead of me, the way he always was. Presently
he comes capering back, ‘Home, please, Sergeant,’ says he. ‘That
hill’s stinking with Jerries beyond.’ ‘But the river?’ says I. ‘Ah,
come home,’ says Michael, ‘an I’ll learn ye the road to be a V.C.!’
So home we went to the Intelligence Officer, and ’twas then I should
have spoke the truth. But Michael was before me. I had no more than
_my_ mouth opened when he makes his report, which was my business,
me being sergeant (did I tell ye?), to put in. But Michael was before
me. He comes out with the width of the river, and its depth, and the
nature of its bottom and the scenery, and all and all, the way you’d
ha’ sworn he’d been a trout in it. When we was out of hearing, I told
him he was a liar in respect to his river. ‘River,’ says he, ‘are
ye after calling _that_ a river? ’Tis no bigger than a Dickiebush
ditch,’ he says. ‘And anyway,’ says he, ‘the Battalion’ll rowl across
it in the dark, the way it always does. Ye cannot get wetter than
wet, even in the Micks!’ Then his conscience smote him, an’ when his
company went down to this river in the dark, Michael comes capering
alongside whishpering between his hands: ‘Boys!’ says he, ‘can ye
swim, boys? I hope ye can _all_ swim for, Saints be my witness, I
never wint near the river. For aught I know it may be an arrum of
the sea. Ah, lads, _thry_ an’ learn to swim!’ he says. Then some
one chases him off before the officer comes along; an’ we wint over
Michael’s river the way he said we would. Ye can not get wetter than
wet--even in the Micks.”

It was a quiet night, except for occasional bursts of machine-gun
fire, but there was no shelling of the assembly area as the 2nd
Grenadiers formed up on their right, with the 2nd Coldstream in
reserve. Nos. 1 and 2 Companies (Captain A. W. L. Paget, and
Lieutenant E. M. Harvey, M.C.) moved off first, No. 3 in support
(Captain Bambridge), and No. 4 (2nd Lieutenant O. R. Baldwin) in
reserve. The barrage opened with a percentage of demoralising
flame-shells. There was very little artillery retaliation, and beyond
getting rather wetter than the rain had already made them, the
Battalion did not suffer, except from small-arm fire out of the dark.
The first objective, a section of the Solesmes-Valenciennes road,
was gained in an hour, with but eight casualties, mainly from our
own “shorts” in the barrage, and several prisoners and machine-guns
captured. The prisoners showed no wish to fight.

The companies had kept direction wonderfully well in the dark, and
reached the second and last objective under increased machine-gun
fire, but still without much artillery. The 3rd Guards Brigade on
their left had been hung up once or twice, which kept No. 2 Company,
the left leading company, and Nos. 3 and 4 (in support) busy at
odd times forming defensive flanks against sniping. By half-past
five, however, they were all in place, and set to dig in opposite
the village of Vertain. Then dull day broke and with light came
punishment. The enemy, in plain sight, opened on them with everything
that they had in the neighbourhood, from 7 A. M. to 10 P. M. of the
20th. The two front companies were cut off as long as one could see,
and a good deal of the stuff was delivered over open sights. It was
extremely difficult to get the wounded away, owing to the continuous
sniping. But, through providence, or the defect of enemy ammunition,
or the depth of the slits the men had dug, casualties were very few.
Battalion Headquarters and the ground where No. 4 Company lay up
were most thoroughly drenched, though an officer of No. 3 Company,
whose experience was large, described his men’s share as “about the
worst and most accurate shelling I have been through.” They were,
in most places, only a hundred yards away from a dug-in enemy bent
on blessing them with every round left over in the retreat. During
the night, which was calmer, our Artillery dealt with those mixed
batteries and groups so well that, although no man could show a
finger above his shelter in some of the company areas, the shelling
next day was moderate. The forward posts were still unapproachable,
but they sent out patrols from Nos. 1 and 2 Companies to “report on
the River Harpies,” the next stream to the Selle, and to keep it
under observation. This was an enterprise no commander would have
dreamed of undertaking even three months ago. The enemy sniping went
on. The 2nd Coldstream, who had been moved up to protect the right
flank of the 2nd Grenadiers (the Sixty-first Division, being delayed
some time over the clearing up and evacuation of Solesmes, was not
yet abreast of them), were withdrawn to billets at St. Hilaire in the
course of the afternoon; but word came that neither the Grenadiers
nor the Irish need look to be relieved. It rained, too, and was
freezing cold at night. Another expert in three years of miseries
writes: “One of the worst places I have ever been in. Heavy rain all
day and night.... More shelling if we were seen moving about. Heavy
rain all day.... Soaked through and shivering with cold.” The Diary
more temperately: “The men were never dry from the time they left
their billets in St. Hilaire on the evening of the 20th, and there
was no shelter whatever for any of the companies.” So they relieved
them during the night of the 21st, front Companies 1 and 2 returning
to the accommodation vacated by their supports, 3 and 4.

Battalion relief came when the 24th Battalion Royal Fusiliers (Second
Division) took over from them and the Grenadiers and got into
position for their attack the next morning. An early and obtrusive
moon made it difficult to fetch away the front-posts, and though
the leading company reached the Selle on its way back at a little
after five, the full relief was not completed till half-past nine,
when they had to get across-country to the main road and pick up the
lorries that took them to “very good billets” at Carnières. Their
own Details had seen to that; and they arrived somewhere in the
early morning “beat and foot-sore,” but without a single casualty in
relieving. Their losses for the whole affair up to the time of their
relief were one officer (Captain and Adjutant J. B. Keenan) wounded
in the face by a piece of shell, the sole casualty at Battalion
Headquarters; ten other ranks killed; forty-two wounded, of whom two
afterwards died, and two missing--fifty-five in all.

The companies were officered as follows:


_No. 1 Company_

  Capt. A. W. L. Paget, M.C.


_No. 2 Company_

  Lieut. E. Harvey, M.C.


_No. 3 Company_

  Capt. G. L. St. C. Bambridge.


_No. 4 Company_

  2nd Lieut. O. R. Baldwin.


_Battalion Headquarters_

  Major A. F. Gordon, M.C.
  Capt. J. B. Keenan.
  Capt. C. A. J. Vernon.

Cleaning up began the next day where fine weather in “most delightful
billets” was cheered by the news that the Second Division’s attack
on Vertain had been a great success. In those days they looked no
further than their neighbours on either side.

Every battle, as had been pointed out, leaves its own impression. St.
Python opened with a wild but exciting chase in the wet and dark,
which, at first, seemed to lead straight into Germany. It ended, as
it were, in the sudden rising of a curtain of grey, dank light that
struck all the actors dumb and immobile for an enormously long and
hungry stretch of time, during which they mostly stared at what they
could see of the sky above them, while the air filled with dirt and
clods, and single shots pecked and snarled round every stone of each
man’s limited skyline; the whole ending in a blur of running water
under starlight (that was when they recrossed the Selle River), and
confused memories of freezing together in lumps in lorries, followed
by a dazed day of “shell-madness,” when all ears and eyes were
intolerably overburdened with echoes and pictures, and men preferred
to be left alone. But they were washed and cleaned and reclothed
with all speed, and handed over to their company officers for the
drill that chases off bad dreams. The regimental sergeant-major got
at them, too, after their hair was cut, and the massed brigade drums
played in the village square of Carnières, and, ere the end of the
month, inter-company football was in full swing.

A draft of ninety-one other ranks joined for duty on the 22nd
October. Lieutenant-Colonel Baggallay, M.C., came back from leave
and, in the absence of the Brigadier, assumed command of the
Brigade, and Captain D. W. Gunston joined.


THE BREAK-UP

On the last day of October they moved from Carnières to St. Hilaire
and took over the 3rd Grenadiers’ billets in the factory there, all
of which, house for house, officers and men, was precisely as before
the attack on the 20th, ten days ago. But those ten days had borne
the British armies on that front beyond Valenciennes in the north to
within gun-shot of Le Quesnoy in the centre, and to the Sambre Canal,
thirty miles away, in the south. Elsewhere, Lille had been evacuated,
the lower half of western Flanders cleared, from the Dutch frontier
to Tournai, while almost every hour brought up from one or other of
the French and American armies, on the Meuse and the Argonne, fresh
tallies of abandoned stores and guns, and of prisoners gathered in
rather than captured. Behind this welter, much as the glare of a mine
reveals the façade of a falling town-hall, came word of the collapse
of Bulgaria, Turkey, and Austria. The whole of the herd of the Hun
Tribes were on the move, uneasy and afraid. It remained so to shatter
the mass of their retiring forces in France that they should be in
no case to continue any semblance of further war without complete
destruction. Were they permitted to slink off unbroken, they might
yet make stand behind some shorter line, or manufacture a semblance
of a “face” before their own people that would later entail fresh
waste and weariness on the world.[9]

The weather and the destruction they had left in their wake was, as
on the Somme, aiding them now at every turn, in spite of all our
roadmen and engineers could do. Our airmen took toll of them and
their beasts as they retreated along the congested ways; but this was
the hour when the delays, divided councils and specially the strikes
of past years had to be paid for, and the giant bombing-planes that
should have taught fear and decency far inside the German frontiers
were not ready.

A straight drive from the west on to the German lateral
communications promised the quickest return. It was laid in the hands
of the First, Third, and Fifth Armies to send that attack home, and
with the French and American pressure from the south, break up the
machine past repair.

Men, to-day, say and believe that they knew it would be the last
battle of the war, but, at the time, opinions varied; and the
expectations of the rank and file were modest. The thing had gone
on so long that it seemed the order of life; and, though the enemy
everywhere fell back, yet he had done so once before, and over
very much the same semi-liquid muck as we were floundering in that
autumn’s end. “The better the news, the worse the chance of a
knock,” argued the veterans, while the young hands sent out with
high assurance, at draft-parades, that the war was on its last legs,
discovered how the machine-gun-fenced rear of retirements was no
route-march. (“There was them that came from Warley shouting, ye’ll
understand; and there was them that came saying nothing at all, and
liking it no more than that; but I do not remember any one of us
looked to be out of it inside six months. No--not even when we was
dancing into Maubeuge. We thought Jerry wanted to get his wind.”)

On the 4th November, one week before the end, twenty-six British
divisions moved forward on a thirty-mile front from Oisy to north of
Valenciennes, the whole strength of all their artillery behind them.

The Guards’ position had been slightly shifted. Instead of working
south of Le Quesnoy, the Division was put in a little north of the
town, on the banks of the river Rhônelle, between the Sixty-second
Division on their right and the Forty-second on their left. The
Battalion had marched from St. Hilaire, in the usual small fine rain,
on the 2nd November to billets in Bermerain and bivouacs near by.
It meant a ten-mile tramp of the pre-duckboard era, in the midst of
mired horse- and lorry-transport, over country where the enemy had
smashed every bridge and culvert, blocked all roads and pulling-out
places with mine-craters, and sown houses, old trenches, and dug-outs
with fanciful death-traps. The land was small-featured and full
of little hills, so heavily hedged and orcharded that speculative
battalions could be lost in it in twenty minutes. There were coveys,
too, of French civils, rescued and evacuated out of the villages
around, wandering against the stream of east-bound traffic. These
forlorn little groups, all persuaded that the war was over and that
they could return to their houses to-morrow, had to be shifted and
chaperoned somehow through the chaos; but the patience and goodwill
of our people were unending.

The wet day closed with a conference at Brigade Headquarters, but
the enemy had thrown out our plan for action on that sector by
thoughtlessly retiring on both flanks of the Division, as well as a
little on the front of it, and final orders were not fixed till after
midnight on the 3rd November.

The 1st and 2nd Guards Brigade were to attack, the 3rd in reserve.
Of the 1st Brigade, the 2nd Coldstream would take the line as far as
the first objective; the 2nd Grenadiers would then come through and
carry on to the next line, the Irish Guards in support. The Brigade’s
assembly area was across the Rhônelle River, east of the long and
straggling village of Villers-Pol, on the Jenlain-Le Quesnoy road.
Zero was fixed for 7.20. The Battalion marched from Bermerain, and
met its first enemy shell as it was going under the Valenciennes
railway embankment. What remained of the roads were badly congested
with troops, and one gets the idea that the Staff work was casual.
To begin with, the Battalion found the 3rd Grenadiers and the 1st
Scots Guards between themselves and the 2nd Grenadiers, which was not
calculated to soothe any C.O. desirous of keeping his appointment.
Apparently they got through the Scots Guards; but when they reached
the Rhônelle, its bridge being, of course, destroyed, and the R.E.
working like beavers to mend it, they had to unship their Lewis-guns
from the limbers, tell the limbers to come on when the bridge was
usable, and pass the guns over by hand. While thus engaged the Scots
Guards caught them up, went through them triumphantly, made exactly
the same discovery that the Irish had done, and while they in turn
were wrestling with their limbers, the Irish, who had completed their
unshipping, went through them once more, and crossed the Rhônelle
on the heels of the last man of the 3rd Grenadiers--“one at a time,
being assisted up the bank by German prisoners.” By the mercy of the
Saints, who must have been kept busy all night, the shelling on the
bridge and its approaches ceased while that amazing procession got
over. They were shelled as they reformed on the top of the steep
opposite bank, but “by marvellous good-luck no casualties”; got into
artillery formation; were shelled again, and this time hit, and
long-range machine-gun fire met them over the next crest of ground.
It was all ideal machine-gun landscape. The 2nd Grenadiers, whom
they were supporting, had been held up by low fire from the village
of Wagnies-le-Petit on their left, a little short of the first
objective, which was the road running from Wagnies, south to Frasnoy.
The Battalion dug in behind them where it was, and after an hour
or so the enemy opened fire with one solitary, mad trench-mortar.
Not more than a dozen rounds were sent over, and these, very
probably, because the weapon happened to lie under their hands, and
was used before being abandoned. And luck had it that this chance
demonstration should kill Lieutenant A. L. Bain (“Andy” Bain), who
had joined for duty not a week ago. He was the last officer killed in
the Battalion, and one of the best. Lieutenant F. S. L. Smith, M.C.,
also was wounded. They stayed in their scratch-holes till late in
the afternoon, as the troops of the Forty-second Division on their
left were held up too, but the 2nd Guards Brigade on their right
gradually worked forward. Some of their divisional field-guns came
up and shelled Wagnies-le-Petit into silence, and at half-past four
orders arrived for the Battalion to go through the 2nd Grenadiers
and continue at large into the dusk that was closing on the blind,
hedge-screened country. There was no particular opposition beyond
stray shells, but the boggy-banked Aunelle had to be crossed on
stretchers, through thick undergrowth, in a steep valley. Everything
after that seemed to be orchards, high hedges, and sunk and raised
roads, varied with soft bits of cultivation, or hopelessly muddled-up
cul-de-sacs of farm-tracks. The companies played blind-man’s buff
among these obstacles in the pitch-dark, as they hunted alternately
for each other and the troops on their flanks. There was “very
heavy shelling” on the three most advanced companies as well as on
Brigade Headquarters throughout the night. The men dug in where they
were; and casualties, all told, came to about twenty. Very early
on the 5th November the 3rd Guards Brigade passed through them and
continued the advance. Preux-au-Sart, the village behind them, had
been taken by the 2nd Brigade the evening and the night before, so
the Battalion “came out of its slits” and went back to billet in its
relieved and rejoicing streets, where “the inhabitants on coming out
of their cellars in the morning were delighted to find British troops
again, and showed the greatest cordiality.” If rumour be true, they
also showed them how easily their Hun conquerors had been misled
and hoodwinked in the matter of good vintages buried and set aside
against this very day. “The men were very comfortable.”

The fact that Austria was reported out of the war did not make the
next day any less pleasant, even though it rained, and “all the
windows in the Battalion Headquarters were broken by one shell.”
Battalion Headquarters had come through worse than broken glass in
its time, but was now beginning to grow fastidious.

On the afternoon of the 7th November the Battalion marched to Bavai
over muddy roads in a drizzle. Even then, men have said, there
was no general belief in the end of Armageddon. They looked for
a lull, perhaps; very possibly some sort of conference and waste
of time which would give the enemy breath for fresh enterprise.
A few, however, insist that the careful destruction of the roads
and railway-bridges and the indifference of the prisoners as they
poured in warned them of the real state of affairs. (“It looked as
if the Jerries had done all the harm they could think of, and were
chucking it--like boys caught robbing an orchard. There wasn’t an
atom of dignity or decency about any of ’em. Just dirt and exhausted
Jerrydom.”) What the Battalion felt most was having to make detours
round broken bridges, and to dig ramps in mine-craters on the roads
to get their Lewis-guns across. They jettisoned their second-line
transport at a convenient château outside Bavai on this account;
found that there were no arrangements for billeting in the town, so
made their own, and, while Bavai was being shelled, got into houses
and again were “very comfortable.” The 2nd Brigade were in the front
line on the railway, and next day the 1st Brigade were to lead and
capture Maubeuge, seven miles down a road which cut across the line
of their earlier stages in the retreat from Mons, and three miles, as
a shell ranges, from the village of Malplaquet.

They began their last day, half an hour after midnight, marching
“as a battalion” out of Bavai with their Lewis-gun limbers. Twice
they were slightly shelled; once at least they had to unpack and
negotiate more mine-craters at cross-roads. It was a populous world
through which they tramped, and all silently but tensely awake--a
world made up of a straight, hard road humped above the level of the
fields in places, rather like the Menin road when it was young, but
with untouched tiled houses alongside. Here and there one heard the
chatter of a machine-gun, as detached and irrelevant as the laugh
of an idiot. It would cease, and a single field-gun would open as
on some private quarrel. Then silence, and a suspicion, born out of
the darkness, that the road was mined. Next, orders to the companies
to spread themselves in different directions in the dark, to line
ditches and the like for fear of attack. Then an overtaking, at
wrecked cross-roads, of some of the 2nd Brigade, who reported patrols
of the 3rd Grenadiers had pushed on into Maubeuge without opposition,
and that the rest of that battalion was gone on. Just before dawn,
No. 4 Company of the Irish, marching on a road parallel to the
highway, ran into a company of Germans retiring. The Diary says: “A
short sharp fight ensued in which five of the enemy were wounded
and twelve captured, the rest getting off in the dark.” But there
is a legend (it may have grown with the years) that the two bodies
found themselves suddenly almost side by side on converging tracks,
and that the Irish, no word given, threw back to the instincts of
Fontenoy--faced about, front-rank kneeling, rear-rank standing, and
in this posture destroyed all that company. It was a thing that might
well have come about darkling in a land scattered with odds and
ends of drifting, crazed humanity. No. 2 Company solemnly reported
the capture of two whole prisoners just after they had crossed the
railway in the suburbs of Maubeuge, which they passed through on the
morning of the 9th, and by noon were duly established and posted,
company by company, well to the east of it. No. 2 Company lay in
the village of Assevant, with pickets on the broken bridge over the
river there, an observation-line by day and all proper supports; No.
4 Company in posts on the road and down to the river, and Nos. 1 and
3 in reserve; Yeomanry and Corps Cyclists out in front as though the
war were eternal.


AFTER THE ARMISTICE

And, thus dispersed, after a little shelling of Assevant during the
night, the Irish Guards received word that “an Armistice was declared
at 11 A. M. this morning, November 11.”

Men took the news according to their natures. Indurated pessimists,
after proving that it was a lie, said it would be but an interlude.
Others retired into themselves as though they had been shot, or went
stiffly off about the meticulous execution of some trumpery detail
of kit-cleaning. Some turned round and fell asleep then and there;
and a few lost all holds for a while. It was the appalling new
silence of things that soothed and unsettled them in turn. They did
not realize till all sounds of their trade ceased, and the stillness
stung in their ears as soda-water stings on the palate, how entirely
these had been part of their strained bodies and souls. (“It felt
like falling through into nothing, ye’ll understand. Listening for
what wasn’t there, and tryin’ not to shout when you remembered for
why.”) Men coming up from Details Camp, across old “unwholesome”
areas, heard nothing but the roar of the lorries on which they had
stolen their lift, and rejoiced with a childish mixture of fear as
they topped every unscreened rise that was now mere scenery such
as tourists would use later. To raise the head, without thought of
precaution against what might be in front or on either flank, into
free, still air was the first pleasure of that great release. To lie
down that night in a big barn beside unscreened braziers, with one’s
smiling companions who talked till sleep overtook them, and, when
the last happy babbler had dropped off, to hear the long-forgotten
sound of a horse’s feet trotting evenly on a hard road under a full
moon, crowned all that had gone before. Each man had but one thought
in those miraculous first hours: “I--even I myself, here--have come
through the War!” To scorn the shelter of sunken roads, hedges, walls
or lines of trees, and to extend in unmartial crowds across the whole
width of a pavé, were exercises in freedom that he arrived at later.
“We cannot realize it at all.” ... “So mad with joy we don’t feel yet
what it all means.” The home letters were all in this strain.

The Battalion was relieved on the 12th November by the 2nd Grenadiers
and billeted in the Faubourg de Mons. All Maubeuge was hysterical
with its emotions of release, and well provided with wines which,
here as elsewhere, had somehow missed the German nose. The city
lived in her streets, and kissed everybody in khaki, that none should
complain. But the Battalion was not in walking-out order, and so had
to be inspected rigorously. Morning-drill outside billets next day
was in the nature of a public demonstration--to the scandal of the
grave sergeants!

On the 14th a great thanksgiving-service was held in the Cathedral
for all the world, the Battalion providing the Guard of Honour at the
Altar, and lining the Place d’Armes at the presentation of a flag
by the Mayor of Maubeuge to the Major-General. The massed drums of
the Division played in the square in the afternoon, an event to be
remembered as long as the Battalion dinner of the evening. They were
all route-marched next morning for an hour and a half to steady them,
and on the 16th, after dinner, set off in freezing weather for the
first stage of their journey to Cologne. It ran _via_ Bettignies and
then to Villers-Sire-Nicole, a matter of five and a half miles.

On the 17th they crossed the Belgian frontier at Givet and reached
Binche through a countryside already crowded with returning English,
French, Italian, and Belgian prisoners. One Diary notes them like
migrating birds, “all hopping along the road, going due west.” Binche
mobbed the drums as one man and woman when they played in the town
at Retreat, but it was worse at Charleroi on the 19th, where they
could hardly force their way through the welcoming crowds. The place
was lit from end to end, and the whole populace shouted for joy at
deliverance.

Now that they had returned as a body to civilization, it was needful
they should be dressed, and they were paraded for an important
inspection of great-coats, and, above all, gloves. That last, and the
fact that belts, when walking out, were worn _over_ the great-coats
were sure signs that war was done, and His Majesty’s Foot Guards
had come into their own. But they found time at Charleroi, among
more pleasant duties, to arrest three German soldiers disguised as
civilians.

On the 23rd they left for Sart-St.-Laurent, whose Mayor, beneath a
vast Belgian flag, met and escorted them into the town. The country
changed as they moved on from flat coal-districts to untouched hills
and woods. On the 24th they picked up a dump of eighty-four guns of
all calibres, handed over according to the terms of the Armistice;
passed through a tract of heavily wired country, which was “evidently
intended for the Meuse Line that the Germans were to have fallen back
on”; and a little later crossed (being the first of the Division to
do so) the steeply banked, swiftly running Meuse by a pontoon bridge.
Next their road climbed into Nanine, one of the loveliest villages,
they thought, they had ever seen. But their hearts were soft in those
days, and all that world of peace seemed good. They dared not halt
at Sorinne-la-Longue the next day, as the place was infected with
influenza (“Spanish fever”), so pushed on to Lesves, and on the 26th
November to Sorée, where was another wayside dump of thirty or forty
Hun guns. It is noteworthy that the discarded tools of their trade
frankly bored them. Where a Hun, under like circumstances, would have
re-triumphed and called on his servile Gods, these islanders (of
whom almost a half were now English) were afflicted with a curious
restlessness and strong desire to get done with the work in hand. All
their world was under the same reaction. They had to wait at Sorée
for three days, as supplies were coming up badly. Indeed, on the
28th November, the Diary notes bitterly that “for the first time in
the war the supplies failed to arrive. The Quartermaster managed to
improvise breakfasts for the Battalion.” It was not all the fault of
bad roads or the dispersion of the troops. The instant the strain was
taken off, there was a perceptible slackening everywhere, most marked
in the back-areas, on the clerical and forwarding sides. Every one
wanted to get home at once, and worked with but half a mind; which,
also, is human nature.

They were on the road again by December 5 with the rest of their
brigade, and reached Méan in the afternoon over muddy roads. By the
6th they were at Villers-St.-Gertrude hill-marching through beautiful
scenery, which did not amuse them, because, owing to the state of
communications, supplies were delayed again. So, on the 8th December
at Lierneux, fifteen miles from Villers-St.-Gertrude, another halt
was called for another three days, while company officers, homesick
as their men, drilled them in the winter dirt. On the 11th they
crossed the German frontier line at Recht, and the drums played the
Battalion over to the “Regimental March.” (“But, ye’ll understand,
we was _all_ wet the most of that time and fighting with the mud
an’ our boots. ’Twas Jerry’s own weather the minute we set foot in
his country, and we none of us felt like conquerors. We was just
dhrippin’ Micks.”) At Vielsalm, almost the last village outside
Germany, they picked up a draft of sixty men to share with them the
horrors of peace ahead, and a supply-system gone to bits behind them.

Their road wound through small and inconspicuous hamlets among wooded
hills, by stretches of six or seven hours’ marching a day. The people
they had to deal with seemed meek and visibly oppressed with the fear
of rough treatment. That removed from their minds, they stepped aside
and looked wonderingly at the incomprehensible enemy that tramped
through their streets, leaving neither ruin nor rape behind. By the
18th December the advance had reached Lovenich, and, after two days’
rest there, they entered Cologne on the 23rd December with an absence
of display that might or might not have been understood by the
natives. They had covered more than two hundred miles over bad roads
in bad boots that could not be repaired nor thrown away, and but one
man had fallen out. The drums played “Brian Boru” when they entered
the Hohenzollern Ring; their Major-General beheld that last march,
and they were duly photographed in the wet; while the world that
saw such photographs in the weekly illustrated papers was honestly
convinced that the Great War and all war was at an end for evermore.

Then really serious trouble overtook them, which was, in some sort,
a forecast of the days to come. Their billets at Nippes, in the
suburbs of Cologne, were excellent and clean, though, of course,
in need of the usual “improvements” which every battalion of the
Brigade is bound to make; but on Christmas Day, owing to transport
difficulties, the men’s Christmas dinner did not arrive! This thing
had never happened in the whole history of the war! Pressure of work
in the front line had delayed that dinner, as on the Somme; enemy
attentions had caused it to be eaten in haste, a sort of Passover,
as in the dread Salient, but complete breakdown was unheard of.
The Battalion, rightly, held it mortal sin, and spoke their minds
about the transport which was fighting mud and distance across
the hills as loyally as ever. It was the back-areas that had been
caught unprepared by the peace. But, on Christmas night (superb and
unscrupulous staff-work went to secure it), a faithful lorry ploughed
in from Paris with what was wanted, and on Boxing Day the full and
complete Christmas dinner was served, and for the fifth and last time
their Commanding Officer performed the sacred ritual of “going round
the dinners.”

They sat them down, twenty-two officers and six hundred and
twenty-eight other ranks, and none will know till Judgment Day how
many ghosts were also present. For the first time since August,
’14, the monthly returns showed no officer or man killed, wounded,
or missing. The two battalions had lost in all two thousand three
hundred and forty-nine dead, including one hundred and fifteen
officers. Their total of wounded was five thousand seven hundred and
thirty-nine. Of both these the 1st Battalion, by virtue of thirteen
months longer in the field, could reckon more than a generous half.

They were too near and too deeply steeped in the war that year’s end
to realize their losses. Their early dead, as men talked over the
past in Cologne, seemed to belong to immensely remote ages. Even
those of that very spring, of whom friends could still say, “If
So-and-so had only lived to see this!” stood as far removed as the
shadowy great ones of the pre-bomb, pre-duckboard twilight; and, in
some inexpressible fashion, they themselves appeared to themselves
the only living people in an uncaring world. Yet Cologne was alive
with soldiery; roads were roaring full, as communications were
restored; men stood guard over visible gun- and ammunition-dumps;
the Battalion joined in marches to the bridge-heads, attended
football matches, saw hosts of new faces belonging to new troops of
all breeds; and watched about them, in the wet, grey weather, the
muddy-faced Hun-folk, methodically as usual, trying to find out just
how far it was expedient to go with the heralds of the alleged new
order.

“But ye’ll understand, when everything was said and done, there
was nothing _real_ to it at all, except when we got to talking and
passing round the names of them we wished was with us. We was lonely
in those days. The half of us was Church of England by then, too. But
we were lonely, ye’ll understand, as units. And our billets, mind ye,
ma-agnificent, with walls and lockers and doors and all. The same for
the officers! And there was Mr. ---- that I’d known well any time
these last two winters, freezing and swearing alongside of me in any
shell-hole we could find, and glad to be out of the wind--and now,
him cursin’ in his quarters because he had not the Jerry-talk for the
German for: ‘Turn off that dam’ steam-heat!’ And that’s war _al_so.

“But ye might tell that we was lonely, most of all. Before God, we
Micks was lonely!”


COMMANDING OFFICERS 1st BATTALION

FROM AUGUST 12, 1914

  -----------+---------------------------------+-------------+----------
     Rank    |               Name              | From B.E.F. |     To
  -----------+---------------------------------+-------------+----------
  Lt.-Col.   | Hon. G. H. Morris               |   12.8.14   |   1.9.14
  Major      | H. H. Stepney                   |    2.9.14   |  17.9.14
  Lt.-Col.   | Lord Ardee, C.B.E.              |   18.9.14   |  3.11.14
   “ (temp.) | Hon. J. F. Trefusis, D.S.O.     |    4.11.14  |  15.8.15
   “   “     | G. H. C. Madden                 |   16.8.15   |  1.11.15
   “   “     | R. C. A. McCalmont, D.S.O.      |    2.11.15  |   2.3.17
   “ (actg.) | H. R. Alexander, D.S.O., M.C.   |    3.3.17   |  23.5.17
   “   “     | C. E. Rocke, D.S.O.             |   24.5.17   |  11.7.17
   “   “     | R. V. Pollok, C.B.E., D.S.O.    |   12.7.17   |  19.6.18
   “   “     | R. R. C. Baggally, D.S.O., M.C. |   20.6.18   | To return
             |                                 |             |to England.
  -----------+---------------------------------+-------------+-----------


END OF VOL. I


FOOTNOTES:

[1] About this time, on a distant flank of the war, there was a very
young French Lieutenant of Artillery who, in his first action, when
evening came, telephoned to his superior officer as to dispositions
for the night, in the sincere belief that, following the custom of
all wars up to date, the guns would stop as the darkness closed. His
answer was: “This will be a war in which no one ever goes to bed.”

[2] “ ... and the next time I saw Zillebeke it was a deserted ruin,
and the small house whose inmates had been so kind to my subalterns
and me was a heap of debris.”--_Extract from a Company Commander’s
Diary._

[3] “At the cross-roads near Klein Zillebeke we halted, lying down
on each side the road as shells were coming over. In the centre of
the road lay a dead trooper of some British Cavalry Regiment, his
horse also half dead across him. A woman passed by.... She had all
her household treasures strapped on her back and held the hands of
two very small children. She took no notice of any one, but I saw the
two little children shy away from the dead man.”--_Diary of a Company
Officer._

[4] Their Brigadier, Lord Cavan, wrote on the 20th November to
Captain N. Orr-Ewing, commanding the Battalion: “I want you to convey
to every man in your Battalion that I consider that the safety of
the right flank of the British section depended entirely upon their
staunchness after the disastrous day, Nov. 1. Those of them that were
left made history, and I can never thank them enough for the way in
which they recovered themselves and showed the enemy that the Irish
Guards must be reckoned with, however hard hit.”

[5] Brigade Reserve means in readiness to move at short notice in
any direction to support; all wagons standing packed day and night,
except that the blankets may be used by the men. Corps Reserve takes
a battalion definitely out of the line for the time being and out of
reach of all except air-bombing.

[6] “I saw him slip back over the parapet in the mornin’ mist, the
way he always did, just behind the officer going the rounds. An’ his
pockets was bulgin’. I had been layin’ for him a long while because
I knew he had something I wanted. So I went up behind him and I said
quite quiet, ‘C----, I’ll take your night’s pickin’s if it’s the same
to you.’ He knew it had to be, an’ to do him justice he bore it well.
‘Well, anyway, Sergeant,’ says he, ‘’tis worth five francs to you, is
it not?’ ‘Yes,’ says I and I gave him the five francs then an’ there,
an’ he emptied his pockets into my hands. ’Twas worth all of five
francs to me, C----’s work that night. An’ he never bore me malice
thereafter.”--_A Sergeant’s Tale._

[7] He was succeeded by Major-General Feilding in command of the
Guards Division; Brigadier-General Pereira commanding the 1st Guards
Brigade.

[8] These were vast cellars reached by a hundred steps, and at the
bottom of them resided a very old soldier, who did little more than
“boil the hot water for the officers’ baths” and look after a certain
mascot-goat which had been given them by a French Corps. When the
order to move at once came, the parting words of the Officer in
Charge of the Goat to the aged man were: “Now you look after the goat
_and_ our blankets, and don’t walk about upstairs. _You_ needn’t
worry about yourself. If you’re taken prisoner we’ll send you lots of
parcels. Look after the goat and hang on to our blankets.” He did.

[9] This, be it remembered, gives roughly the idea at the close of
1918.




      *      *      *      *      *      *




Transcriber’s note:

  Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
  corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within
  the text and consultation of external sources.

  Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text,
  and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained. For example:
  duckboard, duck-board; aircraft, air-craft; blockhouses, block-houses;
  unregarded; perforable; incuriousness; builded; unkeyed.

  Pg 124: ‘young soliders were’ replaced by ‘young soldiers were’.
  Pg 139: ‘a N.C.O. and’ replaced by ‘an N.C.O. and’.
  Pg 165: ‘undistinguishable in’ replaced by ‘indistinguishable in’.
  Pg 177: ‘undistinguishable landscapes’ replaced by
          ‘indistinguishable landscapes’.
  Pg 200: ‘in Divisonal Reserve’ replaced by ‘in Divisional Reserve’.
  Pg 206: ‘from Croiselles to’ replaced by ‘from Croisilles to’.
  Pg 213: ‘and thermit shells’ replaced by ‘and thermite shells’.
  Pg 219: ‘a N.C.O. and’ replaced by ‘an N.C.O. and’.