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.