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.