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.