THE BRIGADE'S POUNCE ON GUINCHY
GALLANT BOY OFFICERS OF THE DUBLIN FUSILIERS
Guinchy fell within the same week as Guillamont. It was stormed on the
following Saturday, September 9. The village had been taken two or
three times previously--some accounts say four--by the British and
recaptured each time by the Germans. But the grip of the Irish Brigade
could not be relaxed. Standing on a hill 500 feet high, Guinchy was
one of the most important enemy strongholds on the Somme, particularly
for artillery. It had been fortified with the accumulated skill of
eighteen months' labour by the German engineers. It was well protected
by guns. Picked troops--the Bavarians--defended it. The Germans,
according to a captured officer, believed that Guinchy could not be
taken. "But," he added, "you attacked us with devils, not men. No one
could withstand them." The capture of the place was therefore a good
day's work. It stands solely to the credit of the Irish Brigade. They
did it all by themselves.
The attack was mainly delivered from the direction of Guillamont. All
through the week, for five days and nights, most of the Irish
battalions had lain in the trenches--connected shell craters for the
most part--under heavy artillery fire. In these circumstances they
could get nothing hot to eat. They subsisted mainly on the iron
rations of bully beef and biscuit, which formed part of each man's
fighting equipment, and a little water. As for sleep, they were
unable to get more than disturbed and unrefreshing snatches. Yet they
were as full of spirit and had nerves as unshaken as if they had come
fresh from billets, and they were as eager for a fight as ever.
In preparation for the advance, a thunderstorm of British fire and
steel broke over the German trenches. The splitting, tearing crashes
of the mighty "heavies" lying miles back; their firing accuracy, the
penetrating power of their shells, had a heartening influence on the
men. "Ah, those guns," said an officer of the Royal Irish
Regiment--"their effect, spiritual and temporal, is wonderful. Your
own makes you defiant of the very devil; the enemy's put the fear of
God into you." The German lines were blotted out by smoke and flying
soil. The ground rocked and swayed. It was like a heavy sea, only the
waves were of earth.
The whistle sounded at four o'clock, and up and over went the men in a
mass. Like the country before Guillamont, the country before Guinchy
was slashed and gouged and seared, and the air had the sickening taste
of gunpowder, poison gas and the corruption of the body. The men
walked or ran, in broken array, in and out of the shell holes or over
the narrow ledges that separated them. Soon the enemy got the range.
Severed limbs, heads, arms and legs, and often the whole body, were
flung high into the air. It was a dreadful scene. The noise, too, was
appalling, what with the roaring of the guns, the bursting of the
shells, and, not less, the frenzied yells of the charging masses.
There is no shout in the melee of battle so fierce as the Irish shout.
Every man is like "Stentor of the brazen voice," whose shout, as Homer
says in the _Iliad_, "was as the shout of fifty men." So the Irish
shouted as they dashed forward, partly in relief of their feelings,
and partly in the hope of confusing and dismaying their adversaries.
It was an amazing martial feat, that charge of the Irish Brigade at
Guinchy. Within just eight minutes they had overrun the intervening
ground and captured the village. Nothing stopped nor stayed them. They
did not pause to lie down for a while and let the bullets and shrapnel
fly over them. Many were seen, as the advance proceeded, lying huddled
on the ground as if taking shelter. They had taken shelter, indeed,
but it was behind a stronger thing than a mound of earth--and that is
death.
The most graphic and thrilling narrative of the engagement is given in
a letter written home by a second lieutenant of one of the Irish
battalions. They were in reserve, five or six hundred yards behind the
first line, who were in occupation of the rising slope nearer to
Guinchy. It was about four o'clock when they were ordered to move up
so as to reinforce the first line. They got up in the nick of time,
just as the great charge had begun, and they saw a sight which the
officer says stirred and thrilled them to the depths of their souls.
"Mere words," he says, "must fail to convey anything like a true
picture of the scene, but it is burned into the memory of all those
who were there and saw it. Between the outer fringe of Guinchy and the
front line of our own trenches is No Man's Land, a wilderness of pits
so close together that you could ride astraddle the partitions between
any two of them. As you look half right, obliquely down along No Man's
Land, you behold a great host of yellow-coated men rise out of the
earth and surge forward and upward in a torrent--not in extended
order, as you might expect, but in one mass. There seems to be no end
to them. Just when you think the flood is subsiding, another wave
comes surging up the bend towards Guinchy. We joined in on the left.
There was no time for us any more than the others to get into extended
order. We formed another stream converging on the others at the
summit." He goes on to give a wonderful impression of the spirit of
the men--their fearlessness and exuberance which nothing could daunt.
"By this time we were all wildly excited. Our shouts and yells alone
must have struck terror into the Huns. They were firing their
machine-guns down the slope. Their shells were falling here, there and
everywhere. But there was no wavering in the Irish host. We couldn't
run. We advanced at a steady walking pace, stumbling here and there,
but going ever onward and upward. That numbing dread had now left me
completely. Like the others, I was intoxicated with the glory of it
all. I can remember shouting and bawling to the men of my platoon, who
were only too eager to go on."
The officer mentions a curious circumstance which throws more light on
that most interesting subject--the state of the mind in battle. He
says the din must have been deafening--he learned afterwards that it
could be heard miles away--and yet he had a confused remembrance only
of anything in the way of noise. How Guinchy was reached and what it
was like is thus described: "How long we were in crossing No Man's
Land I don't know. It could not have been more than five minutes, yet
it seemed much longer. We were now well up to the Boche. We had to
clamber over all manner of obstacles--fallen trees, beams, great
mounds of brick and rubble--in fact, over the ruins of Guinchy. It
seems like a nightmare to me now. I remember seeing comrades falling
round me. My sense of hearing returned to me, for I became conscious
of a new sound--namely, the pop, pop, pop, pop of machine-guns, and
the continuous crackling of rifle fire. By this time all units were
mixed up, but they were all Irishmen. They were cheering and cheering
like mad. There was a machine-gun playing on us near by, and we all
made for it."
Through the centre of the smashed and battered village ran a deep
trench. It was occupied by about two hundred Germans, who continued to
fire rifle and machine-gun even after the Irish had appeared on all
sides, scrambling over the piles of masonry, bent and twisted wood and
metal and broken furniture. "At this moment we caught our first sight
of the Huns," the officer continues. "They were in a trench of sorts,
which ran in and out among the ruins. Some of them had their hands up.
Others were kneeling and holding their arms out to us. Still others
were running up and down the trench, distracted, as if they didn't
know which way to go, but as we got closer they went down on their
knees, too." In battle the Irish are fierce and terrible to the enemy,
and in victory most magnanimous. "To the everlasting good name of the
Irish soldiery," the officer says, "not one of these Huns, some of
whom had been engaged in slaughtering our men up to the very last
moment, was killed. I did not see a single instance of a prisoner
being shot or bayoneted. When you remember that our men were worked up
to a frenzy of excitement, this crowning act of mercy to their foes is
surely to their eternal credit. They could feel pity even in their
rage." He adds: "It is with a sense of pride that I can write this of
our soldiers."
Many incidents in which smiles and tears were commingled took place in
the nests of dug-outs and cellars among the ruins of the village. The
Dublin Fusiliers lost most of their officers in the advance. Many of
them were the victims of snipers. In the village the direction of
affairs was in the hands of young subalterns. The manliness and
decision of these boys were wonderful. One of them captured, with the
help of a single sergeant, a German officer and twenty men whom they
had come upon on rounding the corner of a trench. The German officer
surrendered in great style. He stood to attention, gave a clinking
salute, and said in perfect English, "Sir, myself, this other officer
and twenty men are your prisoners." The subaltern said, "Right you
are, old chap!" and they shook hands. Hundreds of the defenders of
Guinchy had fled. "An' if they did itself, you couldn't blame them,"
said a wounded Dublin Fusilier to me. "We came on jumping mad, all
roaring and bawling, an' our bayonets stretched out, terribly fierce,
in front of us, that maybe 'tis ourselves would get up and run like
blazes likewise if 'twere the other way about."
Hot and impulsive in all things, the Irishmen were bent on advancing
into the open country beyond Guinchy in chase of the retreating
Germans. The officers had frantically to blow their whistles and shout
and gesticulate to arrest this onward rush of the men to destruction
in the labyrinth of the enemy supports which had escaped bombardment.
"Very frankly the men proclaimed their discontent," says the special
correspondent of _The Times_, "with what they called the 'diplomacy'
which forbade them to go where they wanted--namely, to hell and
beyond, if there are any Germans hiding on the other side."
The only cases of desertion in the Irish Division occurred on the
night before the storming of Guinchy. It is a deliciously comic
incident. Three servants of the staff mess of one of the brigades
disappeared. They left a note saying that, as they had missed
Guillamont, they must have a hand in the taking of Guinchy. "If all
right, back to-morrow. Very sorry," they added. Sure enough they were
found in the fighting line.