WITH THE TYNESIDE IRISH
OVER THE HEIGHTS OF LA BOISELLE, THROUGH
BAILIFF'S WOOD TO CONTALMAISON
The men of the Tyneside Irish battalions stood to arms in the assembly
trenches by the Somme on the morning of July 1, 1916. Suddenly the
face of the country was altered, in their sight, as if by a frightful
convulsion of Nature. Their ears were stunned by shattering
explosions, and looking ahead, they saw the earth in two places
upheaving, hundreds of feet high, in black masses of smoke. The ground
rumbled under their feet, so that many feared it would break apart and
bring the parapets down on top of them. Two mines had been sprung
beneath the first line of the German trenches to the south-west and
north-east of the heap of masonry and timber that once had been the
pretty little hamlet of La Boiselle. It was the signal to the
Division, which included the Tyneside Irish, that the hour of battle
had come.
The part in the general British advance allotted to the Division was
first to seize the heights on which La Boiselle stood. This was a few
miles beyond the town of Albert, held by the Allies, on the main road
to the town of Bapaume, in the possession of the Germans. Thence they
were to move forward to Bailiff's Wood, to the north-west of
Contalmaison, and to a position on the cross-roads to the north-east
of that village. Contalmaison lay about four miles distant, almost in
ruins amid its devastated orchards, and with the broken towers of its
chateau standing out conspicuously at the back. One brigade had to
take the first line of German trenches, other battalions of the
Division had to take the second and third lines, after which the
Tyneside Irish were to push on over all these lines to the farthest
point of the Brigade's objective, the second ridge on which
Contalmaison stood, where they were to dig themselves in and remain.
The Tyneside Irish had already had their baptism of fire, and had
proved themselves not unworthy of the race from which they have
sprung. Captain Davey--formerly editor of the _Ulster Guardian_ (a
Radical and Home Rule journal)--records a stirring incident of St.
Patrick's Day, 1916. On the night of March 15-16 a German patrol
planted a German flag in front of the Tyneside Irish, half-way across
"No Man's Land." It was determined to wipe out the insult. During the
day snipers were allowed to amuse themselves firing at the flag, and
it was not long before a lucky shot smashed the staff in two, and left
the German ensign trailing in the dust. But the real work was reserved
for the night. There were abundance of volunteers, but Captain Davey,
with pride in his own province, selected an Ulsterman for the
adventure. The man chosen was Second-Lieutenant C.J. Ervine, of
Belfast. Mr. Ervine, supported by two Tyneside Irishmen, set out on
the eve of St. Patrick's Day, and entered the gloomy depths of "No
Man's Land." An hour passed and they returned--but without the flag.
The enemy was too keenly on the alert. But in the early hours of St.
Patrick's Day Lieutenant Ervine set off again--this time by himself.
What happened is thus described by Captain Davey--
"For an hour and a half we waited for his return, expecting each
minute to hear the confounded patrol and machine-gun making the
familiar declaration that 'We will not have it.' So keen were
the sentries that even when relieved they would not leave their
posts. After an hour had passed, Mr. Ervine's sergeant, getting
impatient, went over the parapet and crawled to our wire so as
to see better. Punctually at a quarter to three a German
star-light went up, and by it we could see a dark form making in
our direction. In five minutes it reached our wire, and in ten
it was over the parapet. The Germans had been caught napping. In
less than half an hour, while the spoiler of the Huns stood by
in the crude garb of a Highlander in trench boots--for he had
fallen into a ditch full of water on the way and we bring no
change of clothing to the trenches--another officer and myself
had erected a flagstaff in a firing-bay and nailed to it was the
German ensign, while ABOVE it floated a green flag with the harp
which had been presented to our company before we left home. And
so we ushered in St. Patrick's Day!"
Captain Davey proceeds--
"Proudly the green banner floated out, while, of course, we
flattered ourselves that the black, white and red of Prussia
hung its head in shame below. It was not long before the Germans
showed that they were wide awake at last, and the bullets began
to sing about our newly-erected monument to Ireland and
Ireland's patron saint. But it was a stout flagstaff, and though
dozens of bullets struck it, nothing short of a shell could have
shifted it. And there it stood all day with the Green above the
Black, White and Red. It was no longer a case of 'Deutschland'
but of 'Ireland Uber Alles.' I don't know if any similar sight
has been seen in a British trench. I know the green flag has led
Irish troops to victory in this war, but I think this is the
first time the spectacle has been seen of the Irish ensign
hoisted above a captured German flag. At any rate the spectacle
was sufficiently novel to cause us to have admiring visitors all
day long from other parts of the line."
Unfortunately there is a sad pendant to this story of St. Patrick's
Day at the Front. Lieutenant Ervine, the gallant hero of the exploit,
died from wounds.
The country which faced the Tyneside Irish on July 1, 1916, had been
an agricultural country, inhabited by peasant cultivators before the
war. The ravages of war had turned it into a barren waste. The
productive soil was completely swept away. Nothing remained but the
raw, elemental chalk. It was bare of vegetation, save where, in
isolated spots, the hemlock, the thistle, and other gross weeds,
proclaimed the rankness of the ground, and also that the processes of
Nature ever go on unchecked, even in a world convulsed by human hate.
Not only were the villages pounded into rubbish by gun-fire, but the
woods--also numerous in these parts--appeared, as seen from a
distance, to be but mere clusters of gaunt and splintered tree stumps
devoid of foliage. Not a human being was to be seen. Yet that
apparently empty waste was infested with men--men turned into
burrowing animals like the badger, or, still more, like the weasel, so
noted for its ferocious and bloodthirsty disposition. In every
shattered wood, in every battered hamlet, in all the slopes and dips
by which the face of the country was diversified, they lie concealed,
tens of thousands of them, in an elaborately and cunningly contrived
system of underground defences, armed with rifles, bombs,
machine-guns, trench-mortars, and ready to spring out, with all their
claws and teeth displayed, on the approach of their prey, the man in
khaki. But, as things turned out, the man in khaki pared the nails of
Fritz, and broke his jawbone.
"Before starting, and when our guns were at their heaviest, there was
a good deal of movement, up and down, and talking in the trenches. A
running fire of chaff was kept up, and there was many a smart reply,
for Irish wit will out even in the face of death," said Lieutenant
James Hately, who was wounded in that battle. "Some of the fellows
were very quiet, but none the less determined. Most of us were
laughing. At the same time I felt sorry, for the thought would
obtrude itself on my mind that many of the poor chaps I saw around me
would never see home again. As for myself, curiously enough, it never
occurred to me that I would even be hit. Perhaps that was because I am
of a sanguine or optimistic disposition. I started off, like many
another officer, with a cigarette well alight. Many of the men were
puffing at their pipes. Officers and men exchanged 'good-lucks,'
'cheer-ohs' and other expressions of comradeship and encouragement."
Many were, naturally, in a serious mood. They felt too near to death
for the chaff of the billets or trenches to be seemly. They thought of
home, of dear ones, of life in the workshops and offices of Newcastle
and Sunderland, and the gay companions of favourite sports and
amusements, and, more poignant still, some recalled the last sight of
the cabin in Donegal, before turning down the lane to the valley and
the distant station, on their way to try their fortune in England.
Thus there was some restlessness and anxiety, but the company officers
in closest touch with the men agree that the general mood was
eagerness to get into grips with the enemy, and relish for the
adventure, without any great concern as to its results to themselves
individually. When the command was given, "up and over," the Brigade,
in fact, was like a huge electric battery fresh from a generating
station, for its immense driving force and not less for the lively
agitation of its varied emotions. Up and over the battalions went, and
moved forward in successive waves, the men in single file abreast, the
lines about fifty yards apart. For about two hundred yards or so
nothing of moment happened. Then they came under heavy fire. Shells
burst about them, shrapnel fell from above, bullets from rifle and
machine-gun tore through the air, or caused hundreds of little spurts
of earth to leap and dance about their feet. One of the men told me
that the shrieking and hissing of these deadly missiles reminded him
of banshees and serpents, a confused and grotesque association
appropriate to a battlefield as to a nightmare.
It must not be supposed that everything was carried with a rush and a
shout, at point of the bayonet. An impetuous advance is what the men
would have liked best. It would be most in tune with the ardour of
their feelings, and less a strain on their nerves. But there were many
reasons why that was impossible. The country, in its natural
formation, was upward sloping, and all dips and swells. It was broken
up into enormous shell-holes and mine-craters, seamed with zigzag
lines of white chalky rubble marking the German trenches, and strewn
with the wire of demolished entanglements, fallen trees and the
wreckage of houses. The men were heavily equipped in what is called
fighting order. They carried haversacks, water-bottles, gas-helmets,
bandoliers filled with cartridges, as well as rifles and bayonets.
Some were additionally burdened with bombs and hand grenades. Behind
them came the working parties with entrenching tools, such as picks
and shovels. Accordingly, the physical labour of the advance alone was
tremendous. It would have been stiff and toilsome work for the
strongest and most active, even if there had been no storm of shot and
shell to face besides. There was, furthermore, the danger in a too
hasty progress of plunging headlong into the curtain of high
explosives which the artillery, firing from miles behind, hung along
the front of the infantry, lifting it and moving it forward as the
lines were seen to advance.
Nevertheless the men went on steadily, undaunted by the fire and
tumult; and the shuddering earth; undaunted even by the spectacle of
the dead and dying of the battalions which preceded them in the
attack; shaken only by one horror--a horror unspeakable--that of
seeing fond comrades of their own falling bereft of life, as in a
flash, by a bullet through the brain or heart; or, worse still, just
as suddenly disappearing into bloody fragments amid the roar and smoke
of a bursting shell. Now and then men stopped awhile, trembling at the
sight and aghast; and, under the sway of impulses that were
irresistible, put their right hands over their faces as a protection
to their eyes--an appeal, expressed in action rather than in words,
that they might be mercifully spared their sight--or else made a
sweeping gesture of the arm, as if to brush aside the bullets which
buzzed about them like venomous insects.
The pace, therefore, was necessarily slow. It was rather a succession
of short rushes, a few yards at a time, with intervening pauses behind
such shelter as was available in order to recover breath. The right
soldierly quality is not to be over rash, but to adapt oneself to the
nature of the fighting and its scene; the circumstances of the moment,
the ever-varying requirements of the action. Such an advance, whatever
precautions be taken, entails great sacrifices. Every life that is
lost should be made to go as far as possible in the gaining of the
victory. Foolhardy movements, due to unreflecting bravery, were
accordingly discouraged. Advantage was to be taken of any cover
afforded by the natural features of the country or the state into
which it had been transformed by the pounding of high explosives. The
influence of the officers, so cool and alert were they, so suggestive
of capability in direction, was most reassuring and stimulating to the
men. On the other hand, the officers were relieved by the
intelligence, the amenable character of the men and their fine
discipline, from the worry and annoyance which company commanders have
so often to endure in the course of an action by the casual doings,
and the lack of initiative on the part of those under their charge.
Simple, biddable, gallant and faithful unto death, it was the wish of
the Tyneside Irish that, if they were to fall, their bodies might be
found, not in the line of the advance, but at the German positions to
the north-west of Contalmaison, out of both of which they had helped
to drive the enemy.
But now the lines or waves of men which had left the trenches in
extended formation were broken up into separate little bodies, all
independently engaged in various grim tasks. They had mounted La
Boiselle hill, and moved down into the valley which still intervened
between them and Bailiff's Wood and Contalmaison. Thus they were in
the very centre of the labyrinth of the enemy's system of defences. An
air of intolerable mystery and sinister hidden danger hung over it.
Was it not possible that those brutes, those dirty fighters, the
inventors of poisonous gas, liquid fire and flame jets, who had
established themselves in the very vitals of the place, might not have
other devilish inventions prepared for the wholesale massacre of their
adversaries? The thought arose in the minds of many, and caused a
vague sense of apprehension. The Germans, however, had no further
hellish surprises. Even so, the place was baneful and noxious enough.
The Germans had suffered terrible losses and were morally shaken by
the artillery bombardment--gigantic, devastating, thunderous--which
preceded the British advance. It is the fact, nevertheless, that most
of the survivors had enough courage and tenacity left doggedly to
contest every inch of the way. They lay concealed in all sorts of
cunning traps and contrivances, apart from their demolished trenches.
Machinery on the side of the British--in the form of big guns--had
done its part. The time had come for the play of human qualities, the
pluck, the endurance and the stout arm of the British infantry man.
Snipers had to be dislodged from their burrows; hidden machine-gun
posts had likewise to be found out and silenced. So the men of the
Tyneside Irish were rushing about in small parties, shooting,
bayoneting, clubbing, bombing; and the triumphant yells which arose
here and there proclaimed the discovery of yet another lair of the
foe.
Many a stirring story of personal adventure could be told. Sergeant
Knapp of Sunderland, who won his stripes in the advance, gives this
account of his experiences--
"I had just taken the machine-gun off my mate to give him a rest
when 'Fritz' opened fire on us from the left with a machine-gun,
which played havoc with the Irish. Then I heard my mate shout,
'Bill, I've been hit,' and when I looked round I saw I was by
myself; he, poor chap, had fallen like the rest. Now I had to do
the best I could, so I picked up a bag of ammunition for the gun
and started across 'No Man's Land.' Once I had to drop into a
shell-hole to take cover from machine-gun fire.
"After a short rest I pushed on again and got into the German
second line. By this time I was exhausted, for I was carrying a
machine-gun and 300 rounds of ammunition, besides a rifle and
120 rounds in my pouches, equipment, haversack and waterproof
cape, so I had a fair load. I stopped there for a few minutes
picking off stray Boches that were kicking about. Then along
came a chap, whom I asked to give me a help with the gun, which
he did. We had scarcely gone ten yards when a shell burst on top
of us. I stood still, I don't think I could have moved had I
wanted to. Then I looked around for my chum, but alas! man and
gun were missing. Where he went to I don't know, for I have not
seen him or my precious weapon since."
Who that has talked with many wounded soldiers has not found that
often they are unable to give any coherent account of their own
actions and feelings during a battle. In some cases it is due to an
unwillingness to revive haunting memories, a wish to banish out of
mind for ever the morbid, terrible and grotesque, the ugly aspects in
which many experiences in battle present themselves, surpassing the
nightmares of any opium eater. In other cases there is an obvious
distaste for posing. All one gallant Irish Tynesider would say to me
was, "Sure I only went on because I had to. Didn't the officers tell
us before we left the trenches that there was to be no going back?" He
brushed aside everything he had done that terrible day which got him
the Distinguished Conduct Medal, with the jocose assumption that he
was but the most unheroic of mortals, that he went to a place where he
would not have gone if he had had any choice in the matter. The
incommunicativeness of the soldier is also due to the fact that he
cannot recall his sensations. During an engagement his mind is in a
whirl. He has no disposition to note his thoughts and feelings in the
midst of the fighting. In fact, few men can analyse the processes of
their emotions in such a situation, either at the time or afterwards.
As a rule, an overmastering passion possesses the soldier to stab,
hack and annihilate the foe who want to take that life which he so
greatly desires to preserve. All else is confused and blurred--a vague
sense of desperate happenings shrouded in fire and smoke, out of which
there emerges, now and then, with sharp distinctness, some specially
horrible incident, such as the shattering of a comrade into bits.
But I have met with cases still more strange, where the mind was a
blank during the advance through the showering bullets and shrapnel
and the exploding shells. Even the simplest process of the
brain--memory, or self-consciousness--was dormant. The soldiers in
this mental condition appear to have been like the somnambulist who
does things mechanically as he walks in his sleep, and when aroused
has an impression of having passed through some unusual experience,
but what he cannot tell, so vague and formless is it all. Suddenly
all the senses of these hypnotised soldiers became wide awake and
alert. This happened when they caught sight of figures in skirted grey
tunics and flat grey caps with narrow red bands, emerging from
cavernous depths into the light of day, or unexpectedly came upon them
crouching in holes or behind mounds of earth away from the trenches.
Germans! Face to face with the Bosche at last! The effect was like
that of a sudden and peremptory blast of a bugle in a deep stillness.
Each Irish Tynesider braced up his nerves for bloody deeds. "My life,
or theirs," was the thought that sprang to his mind. Thus it was a
scene of appalling violence. It resounded with the clash of bayonets;
the crackle of musketry; the explosion of bombs; the rattle of
machine-guns; and in that confusion of hideous mechanical noises were
also heard the shriek of human anguish and the cry of victory.
It was in a wood not far off Contalmaison that the fighting was most
desperate and sanguinary of all. The place was full of Germans. The
paths and glades were blocked or barricaded with fallen trees. Beneath
the splintered and blackened trunks that were still standing, the
undergrowth, freed from the attentions of the woodman in the two years
of the war, was dense and tangled. Right through the wood were
trenches with barbed wire obstructions. At its upper end were
peculiarly strong outposts, which poured machine-gun fire through the
trees and bushes. It was commanded by batteries on two sides--from
Contalmaison on the right and Oviliers on the left. The attackers had
to penetrate this dreadful wood, scrambling, tearing, jumping,
creeping in the sultry and stifling heat of the day. There were
ferocious personal encounters. The form of fighting was one of the
most terrible to which this most hideous of wars has given rise.
Probably there has been nothing like it since early man fought those
horrid and extinct mammoth animals, the skeletons of which are now to
be seen in museums, what time they were alive and savage and ruthless
in their haunts in the primeval forest.
The battle was marked by ever-varying vicissitudes of advance and
repulse. "The German Guardsmen fought like tigers to hold it," is a
phrase in one letter of an Irish Tynesider. Our own official
despatches relating to the Somme battle also show that this part of
the German front--Oviliers, La Boiselle, Bailiff's Wood, Contalmaison,
Mametz Wood--was held by battalions of the Guards, composed of the
flower of the youth of Prussia, and standing highest in the mightiest
army in the world. These were not the kind of men to put up their
hands and cry "Kamerad, mercy!" at the sight even of that pitiless and
unnerving thing--a bayonet at the end of a rifle in the hands of a
brawny Irishman, with the fury of battle flaming in his eyes. They
held on tenaciously, and gave blow for blow. A long bombardment, night
and day, by modern heavy guns, is a frightful ordeal. Its objects are,
first, to kill wholesale; and, next, to paralyse the survivors with
the fear of death, so that they could but offer only a feeble
resistance to the advancing troops. Shaken and despairing men were,
therefore, encountered--filthy, unshaven, vile-looking, and so
mentally dazed as to act and talk like idiots. But they were not all
like that. So well-designed and powerful were their subterranean
defences that large numbers were unaffected by the visitations of the
high explosives, and through it preserved their courage and their
rage. Conspicuous among these were the Prussian Guards. They made
furious efforts to stop the advancing lines of the Tyneside Irish, and
that they were overpowered is a splendid testimony to the martial
qualities of our men. Think of it! Two years ago, or so, these young
lads of various industrial callings--farm hands, railway porters,
clerks, drapers' assistants, policemen, carters, messenger boys,
miners--would have regarded as preposterous the idea that at any time
of what seemed to them to be their predestined humdrum existence, or
in any period even of a conceivably mad and topsy-turvy world, they
would not only be soldiers but would encounter the Germans on the
fields of France; and--most incredible phantasy of all--defeat the
renowned Prussian Guards--men whose hearts from their earliest years
throbbed high at the thought that they were to be soldiers; men highly
disciplined and trained, belonging to the proudest regiments in the
German Army, and always ready and eager for the call of battle.
Bailiff's Wood and Contalmaison appear to have been the furthest
points reached on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. If they
did not then fall, the superb action of the Tyneside Irish made
breaches in these strongholds which, when widened and deepened by
subsequent assaults, led to their complete capture on July 10. As
Captain Downey, an officer of the Tyneside Irish says: "Our men paved
the way for various other British regiments who swept through some
days later." A few companies of one of these battalions which got into
Contalmaison on July 7, and were driven out, brought back some
Tyneside Irish and Scottish that were imprisoned in a German dug-out
in the village. They also found outside the village the bodies of
several Tyneside Irish, gallant fellows who died in the attempt to
push on to the point they had orders to reach.
The effectiveness of the attack by the Brigade on July 1 depended a
good deal upon the progress made by troops of other Divisions who were
co-operating on both sides. "On our left flank the parallel Division
was held up; on our right the Division moved slowly," says an officer
of the Irish Brigade. The difficulties of the advance would probably
have held up indefinitely any other troops in the world. But there is
never any danger of the momentum of an attack by Irish troops being
weakened through excessive caution against what is called "over
running." Indeed, it is a fault of their courage that they are
sometimes prone to act with too much precipitation, and, in fact, on
this occasion it was not so much that the Divisions to the right and
left were behind time as that the Irish Brigade were somewhat ahead of
it. The result, however, was that the Irish Tynesiders were exposed on
their right to a deadly enfilading fire that swept across from
Oviliers, which was not yet in British possession. Nevertheless, they
did not stop. "No matter who cannot get on, we must." That was the
order of the officers in command, and so dauntless was the response to
it that by one o'clock the men got to a point in front of
Contalmaison. Here what remained of the Brigade held on for some days
and nights, until the reserves came to their relief on July 4.
The casualties among all ranks were heavy. The officers, sharing every
hardship and being foremost in every danger, suffered most grievously.
"Our Brigadier, our colonels, our company commanders, were badly
wounded. Every officer, with the exception of two subalterns, was hit.
Some were hit in no less than three places. Yet they carried on. Those
too weak to walk crawled until they eventually gave up through loss of
blood. The losses among the N.C.O.s were just as large." This is the
testimony of Captain Downey. Lieut.-Colonel L. Meredith Howard of the
Tyneside Irish was severely wounded, and died two days afterwards.
Among the officers of the Brigade who fell in action was
Second-Lieutenant Gerald FitzGerald. A brother officer says, "He died
shouting to his men: 'Come on.'" His father was Lord Mayor of
Newcastle the year in which the Brigade was raised. Other officers
killed were Captain Kenneth Mackenzie of Kinsale, co. Cork, whose
father was formerly an Irish Land Commissioner; Lieutenant Louis
Francis Byrne of Newcastle, who was serving his articles as a
solicitor when war broke out; and Lieutenant J.R.C. Burlureaux, a
journalist.
The disappearance of so many of the officers was enough to have
dispirited and confused any body of men. Would it be possible for them
to extricate themselves from the fearful labyrinth in which they were
involved? Would there be any of them left for the final dash at their
objective? The non-commissioned officers rose splendidly to the
emergency. One battalion had not far advanced when all the officers
were shot down. Quartermaster-Sergeant Joseph Coleman took command and
continued onward. Soon he found himself with only three men left.
Everything seemed lost in his part of that scene of tumult and death
but for his coolness and gallantry. He went back, gathered up the
remnants of other scattered companies, and led a willing and eager
band to the capture of the position put down to the battalion in the
scheme of operations. For this Coleman got the Distinguished Conduct
Medal, and had it pinned on his breast by General Munro, the
Brigadier.
When the Brigade was relieved, their return to the haven behind the
lines was attended with almost as much danger as their advance to the
hell beyond the ridge had been. As the men ascended the slope of La
Boiselle, down which they had charged a few days before, the German
machine-guns were still rattling from the opposite hill, and snipers
were picking off the stragglers. The hideousness of the field of
action had also increased. The devastated ground, with its
shell-holes, its great gaping craters and its trenches, was now strewn
with the unsavoury litter of the wake of battle--discarded rifles,
helmets, packs, burst and unburst shells; boots, rags, meat-tins,
bottles and newspapers. Such of the wounded as could walk at all
limped along on the arms of comrades. Every one was inconceivably
dirty. Down their blackened faces were white furrows made by their
sweat. Thus they came back, the Irish Tynesiders, with bloody but
unbowed heads. "I saw our battalions file out from their bivouac under
cover of night, and, though each man knew of the deadly work before
him, the ready jest and witty retort were as abundant as ever," writes
Lieutenant F. Treanor, Quartermaster of one of the battalions of the
Tyneside Irish, and a native of Monaghan. "In the dressing-stations
afterwards I saw many of them, and there were still the same heroic
fortitude and the exchange of comments, many grimly humorous, as that
of one poor fellow who remarked, when asked if he had any souvenirs.
'Be danged, 'twas no place for picking up jewellery.'"
The Brigade received the highest praises from the Commander of the
Army Corps and the Commander of the Division, as well as from their
own General. The corps commander wrote: "The gallantry, steadiness and
resource of the Brigade were such as to uphold the very highest and
best traditions of the British Army." Major-General Ingouville-Williams,
who commanded the Division, wrote to the Tyneside committee--
"It is with the greatest pride and deepest regret that I wish to
inform you that the Division which included the Tyneside Irish covered
itself with glory on July 1, but its losses were very heavy. Every one
testifies to the magnificent work they did that day, and it is the
admiration of all. I, their commander, will never forget their
splendid advance through the German curtain of fire. It was simply
wonderful, and they behaved like veterans. Tyneside can well be proud
of them; and although they will sorrow for all my brave and faithful
comrades, it is some consolation to know they died not in vain, and
that their attack was of the greatest service to the Army on that
day."
Writing to his wife on July 3, 1916, Major-General Ingouville-Williams
said: "My Division did glorious deeds. Never have I seen men go
through such a hell of a barrage of artillery. They advanced as on
parade and never flinched. I cannot speak too highly of them. The
Division earned a great record, but, alas! at a great cost." On July
20 he also wrote to his wife: "Never shall I cease singing the praises
of my old Division, and I never shall have the same grand men to deal
with again." A few days later Major-General Ingouville-Williams died
for his country.
Seventy-three officers and men of the Tyneside Irish received
decorations. Four Distinguished Service Orders and twenty Military
Crosses went to the officers, eight Distinguished Conduct Medals and
forty Military Medals were received by the men, and a sergeant was
awarded the high Russian decoration of the Order of St. George. Among
the officers who received the Military Cross was Lieutenant T.M.
Scanlan, whose father, Mr. John E. Scanlan, Newcastle-on-Tyne, took a
prominent part in the raising of the Brigade. Lieutenant Scanlan
states that only eight men were left out of his platoon after July 1,
and six of them were awarded honours. All honour to the Brigade! Those
who helped to raise the battalions--Mr. Peter Bradley and Mr. N.
Grattan Doyle, the chairmen of the committee; Mr. Gerald Stoney and
Mr. John Mulcahy, the joint secretaries--have reason to be proud of
the magnificent quality of the men who responded to their call. Let it
stand as the last word of the story of their achievement that they
overthrew and trampled down the proud Prussian Guards, and relaxed the
grip which Germany had held for two years on a part of France.