on the Ypres Canal bank, the meaning of that “naval party” at
Vlamertinghe became plainer. Three naval officers and twenty-five
petty officers on special leave appeared among them for the purpose
of spending a happy four days with them at their labours. They wore
the uniforms of private soldiers without pack or equipment, and were
first seen joyously walking and talking on a well-observed road,
which combination of miracles led the amazed beholders to assume
that they were either lunatics or escaped criminals of the deepest
dye; and it was a toss-up that the whole cheery picnic-party was
not arrested--or shot to save their lives. One officer, at least,
had the liveliest memories of chaperoning for several hours a naval
officer with a passion for professional souvenirs in the shape of
large-calibre shell fragments. “I’ve never been at the wrong end of
this size gun before,” the mariner would say as the German heavies
fell. “It’s tremendously interesting! I _must_ just make sure about
that fuse, if you don’t mind.” The host, to whom 5.9’s, and much
larger, were no novelty (for the Canal bank dug-outs did not keep
them out) had to feign an interest he did not feel till it dawned on
the sailor that if he pursued his investigations too far he would
be cut off by German patrols. The visitors all agreed that ships,
under normal circumstances, were the Hotel Ritz compared to the daily
trench-routine of the army. We vaingloriously fired several rounds
from a 9.2 to please the Senior Service who, naturally, had seen such
things before. The enemy replied with two days’ full “retaliation”
after the navy had left.
Yet, as things went in the Salient, it was, like their reserve
camp, “not too uncomfortable.” Though there was only one workable
communication-trench (The Haymarket) to their line, and that a bad
one, the main St. Jean road could be used after dark at reasonable
risks. No work was possible by daylight, but, except for general and
indiscriminate shelling, they lived quietly, even when, as happened
on the first night (March 23), No. 1 Company and Headquarters were
solemnly misguided down the Menin road in the dark _over_ Hell Fire
Corner to within a few hundred yards of Hooge and returned “without
even being fired at.” The regimental transport, too, managed to come
up as far as Potijze with supplies, on three of the four nights of
the Battalion’s first tour, and had no casualties, “though the woods
were regularly shelled.” This was an extraordinary stroke of luck for
the Battalion since other transports had suffered severely.
The outstanding wonder that any one in the Salient should be alive
at all, is not referred to in the Diary. Men who watched the shape
of that cape of death, raken by incessant aeroplanes and cross-cut
by gun-fire that fell equally from the flanks and, as it seemed, the
very rear, sometimes speculated, as did the French in the livelier
hells of Verdun, how long solid earth itself could hold out against
the upheavals of the attack. Flesh and blood could endure--that was
their business--but the ground on which they stood did not abide. As
one man said: “It ’ud flee away in lumps under the sole of your foot,
till there was no rest anywhere.”
Their first four days’ tour saw three men killed in the line by
a single whizz-bang in a dug-out; one wounded, and an officer,
Lieutenant R. J. P. Rodakowski, slightly hit by a piece of shrapnel.
They buried their dead by night at Potijze. Reliefs were the real
difficulty; for the line and the roads were continuously shelled,
and at any moment in the dusk they might find their only sound
communication-trench impassable. They watched it go up from end
to end, one dreadful night on the 29th of March, when they were
in support and the Grenadiers in the line, and the King’s Company
was wiped out almost to a man. It was a prelude to an attack that
never arrived--a suddenly launched, suddenly arrested, wantonness of
destruction. Coming, going, standing, or sitting still gave no minute
of guaranteed safety. A party returning from home-leave were caught
by a single shell in the streets of Ypres on April 2. Sergeant-Major
Kirk and a private were killed, and an N.C.O. and three men were
wounded. Men dropped, too, almost in the hour when they took their
leave. They worked up the line of nights, half the shift at a time
repairing damage, and the remainder standing by for attacks.
On the 3rd April, after an untouched turn of duty, eight men were
wounded by blind fire during the relief.
At Poperinghe, on April 4, they were billeted in the Convent which
supplied them with variety entertainments, cinemas, band concerts,
and performing troupes, all liable at any moment to be dispersed by
the enemy’s artillery or ’planes and therefore doubly precious.
The Battalion had its share of professional honour, too, in a
matter of ceremonial. As regards the outside world the Brigade of
Guards is one; as regards the various battalions of it, there are
allowable internal differences of opinion. Consequently when a
Russian General, late Chief of the Staff to the Grand Duke Nicholas
of Russia, visited Poperinghe, and the 1st Battalion of the Irish
Guards--out of five Guards Battalions within reach--was chosen as
the one for him to inspect, life smiled upon them, and they rose to
the occasion. Hear the words of an observer, experienced, if not
altogether disinterested: “The day (April 5) was lovely, and our
fellows, in spite of their months of trench-work, did magnificently.
The wonderful precision of their drill excited the admiration even of
officers belonging to some of the other regiments. The Huns missed a
grand opportunity.”
The Huns had their revenge a few days later when the Battalion’s
billets and Headquarters at Poperinghe were suddenly, on April 11,
shelled just as the Battalion was going into line at Ypres. The
thing began almost with a jest. The Regimental Chaplain was taking
confessions, as is usual before going up, in Poperinghe Church, when
the building rocked to bursts of big stuff obviously drawing nearer.
He turned to open the confessional-slide, and smelt gas--chlorine
beyond doubt. While he groped wildly for his gas-helmet in the
dusk, the penitent reassured him: “It’s all right, Father. I’ve
been to Divisional Gas School to-day. That smell’s off my clothes.”
Relieved, the Padre went on with his duties to an accompaniment
of glass falling from the windows, and when he came out, found
the porch filled with a small crowd who reported: “Lots of men
hit in an ambulance down the road.” Thither ran the Padre to meet
a man crazy with terror whom a shell-burst had flung across the
street, half-stripped and blackened from head to foot. He was given
Absolution, became all of a sudden vehemently sick, and dropped into
stupor. Next, on a stretcher, an Irish Guardsman crushed by a fallen
wall, reported for the moment as “not serious.” As the priest turned
to go, for more wounded men were being borne up through the dusk,
the lad was retaken by a violent hæmorrhage. Supreme Unction at once
was his need. Captain Woodhouse, R.A.M.C., the regimental doctor,
appeared out of the darkness, wounded in the arm and shoulder, his
uniform nearly ripped off him and very busy. He had been attending
a wounded man in a house near headquarters when a shell burst at
the door, mortally wounded the patient, killed one stretcher-bearer
outright and seriously wounded two others. The Padre, dodging shells
_en route_, dived into the cellars of the house where he was billeted
for the Sacred Elements, went back to the wayside dressing-station,
found a man of the Buffs, unconscious, but evidently a Catholic (for
he carried a scapular sewed in his tunic), anointed him, and--the
visitation having passed like a thunder-storm--trudged into Ypres
unworried by anything worse than casual machine-gun fire, and set
himself to find some sufficiently large sound cellar for Battalion
Mass next morning. The Battalion followed a little later and went
underground in Ypres--Headquarters and a company in the Carmelite
Convent, two companies in the solid brick and earth ramparts that
endure to this day, and one in the cellars of the Rue de Malines.
It was the mildest of upheavals--a standard-pattern affair hardly
noted by any one, but it serves to show what a priest’s and a
doctor’s duties are when the immediate heavy silence after a
shell-burst, that seems so astoundingly long, is cut by the outcries
of wounded men, and the two hurry off together, stumbling and feeling
through the dark, till the electric torch picks up some dim, veiled
outline, or hideously displays the wounds on the body they seek.
There is a tale of half a platoon among whom a heavy gas-shell
dropped as they lay in the flank of a cutting beside a road. Their
platoon-commander hurried to them, followed by the sergeant, calling
out to know the extent of the damage. No one replied. The question
was repeated. Then: “Speak up when the Officer’s askin’,” cried the
scandalized sergeant. But even that appeal failed. They were all dead
where they lay, and, human nature being what it is, the sergeant’s
words became a joke against him for many days after. Men cannot live
in extreme fear for more than a very limited time. Normal little
interests save them; so while they lay in cellars by candle-light
at Ypres and worked stealthily at night, the Battalion found time
to make a most beautiful Irish Star, four feet across, of glass and
pounded brick from the rubbish of the Convent garden. It was a work
of supererogation, accomplished while cleaning up the billets, which
drew favourable notice from high authorities.
On the 16th April they were shifted to relieve the 2nd Grenadiers at
Railway Wood north-west of Hooge. This was almost the most easterly
point of the Salient on the north of the Menin road by the Roulers
railway, and ranked as quite the least desirable stretch of an
acutely undesirable line. In addition to every other drawback, the
wood welled water at every pore, for the Bellewaarde Beck brought to
it all the drainage from the Bellewaarde ridge, and even the trenches
on high ground were water-logged. They were bombed from overhead as
soon as they moved in; Hell Fire Corner was shelled on the 17th April
and six men were wounded.
The 18th April was quiet, only two men wounded, and “except for
violent bombardments, north and south, and an attack on Wieltje and
other places,” so was the 19th. Wieltje was two thousand yards,
and the “other places” even farther away. The “disturbance” was
nothing more than principal German attacks on four different fronts
of the Salient among mud and mud-filled shell-holes and craters of
old mines where men sunk and choked where they fought waist-deep
in the dirt; where the clogged rifles were useless, and the bomb
and the bayonet were the only hope. From any reasonable point of
view the Salient was a particularly weak position, always worth an
attack in the intervals of its regular use as a gunnery school for
German artillery. The enemy knew that we were on the way to take the
pressure off the French at Verdun, which had been a factory of death
since February, and argued that it would be well to make trouble
anywhere they could. They chose the 1st and 2nd Canadian Divisions
round Ypres, and fought them for two days with very little profit
beyond filling more shell-holes with more dead.
At that date men had learned by experience the comparative values
of their flanking divisions and the battalions immediately beside
them. When a local attack fell on some of these, those unaffected
would rest as unconcernedly as the watch below takes its ease when
the watch on deck is struggling with the squall. The syren-like hoot
of the gas-horns, one or two miles off, might break their rest on
relief, but the division involved being known to be adequate, the
Battalion was not roused and “spent a quiet day.” Other divisions,
new to the line caused anxiety and interfered with regular routine,
till they had shaken into place; and yet others might be always
trusted to hoot and signal for help on the least provocation.
These peculiarities would be discussed in the cantonments and
coffee-bars of the rest-areas, or, later, out on the roadside
with an occasional far-ranging German shell to interrupt a really
pleasant inter-battalion or divisional argument where, if reports
be true, even the Military Police sometimes forget to be impartial.
And there were unambitious, unimproving units quite content to
accept anything that their predecessors had left them in the way of
openwork parapets, gapped sandbags, and smashed traverses. Against
these, experienced corps builded, not without ostentation, strong
flanks so that if their neighbours went of a sudden, they themselves
might still have a chance for their lives. The Irish had a saying
of their own--a sort of lilting call that ran down the trenches at
odd times--to the effect that God being in his Heaven and “the
Micks in the line, all was well. Pom-pom!” Every battalion, too,
had its own version of the ancient war-song which claims that they
themselves were in the front line with their best friends of the
moment immediately behind them, but that when they went to look for
such-and-such a battalion with whom they were unfriends for the
moment, they were blessed (or otherwise) if they could find them.
Theirs was the misfortune to be the only battalion of the division
available for fatigues during their sixteen days’ tour; so they
supplied parties without intermission, both to the trenches round
Railway Wood, and in battered Ypres in the cellars where they rested
by candle-light to the accompaniment of crashing masonry and flying
pavement blocks. A fatigue-party, under Lieutenant T. K. Walker,
carrying Engineers’ stuff to near Railway Wood, was caught and
shelled on the 24th, on the last two hundred yards or so of utterly
exposed duckboards, every piece of which the enemy guns had taped to
a yard. The water-logged soil made any sort of trenches here out of
the question. Men slid, and staggered across the open under their
loads till the shells chose to find them, or they reached Railway
Wood and found some cover in the mine which was always being made
there and always pumped out. Lieutenant Walker and four men were
killed at once and seven men were wounded, of whom two afterwards
died. It was as swift as the shelling of Headquarters at Poperinghe
on the 11th; and Captain Woodhouse, the M.O., had to get forward to
the wreckage under a heavy fire of shells and aerial torpedoes. With,
or not far from him, went, crawled, ran or floundered the priest; for
if by any means the body could be relieved, repaired or eased, so
could the soul. It is true that both these men more or less respected
direct orders not to expose themselves too much, but they suffered
from curious lapses of memory.
Then Spring came to the Salient in one swift rush, so warm and so
windless that, at the end of April, when they were in rest under
leafing trees at Poperinghe, it was possible to dine in shirt
sleeves in the open by candle and starlight. The gentle weather
even softened the edge of war for a day or two, till Ypres and the
neighbourhood were vigorously shelled on the 5th May. The Battalion
was then in Ypres prison and the cellars beneath it, where some
unloved enthusiast had discovered that there was plenty of room for
drill purposes in the main gaol-corridor, and drilled they were
accordingly to the music of the bombardments. On such occasions
men were sometimes seen to “budge,” _i.e._ roll their eyes in the
direction of plaster and stones falling from the ceiling, for which
heinous “crime” their names were justly taken.
On the 9th May they relieved the 2nd Grenadiers on the left sector of
their Brigade’s front at Wieltje, where what were once trenches had
been bombed and shelled into a sketchy string of bombing-posts--or
as a man said, “grouse-butts.” It was perhaps one degree worse than
their stretch at Hooge and necessitated companies and posts being
scattered, as the ground served, between what was left of Wieltje,
St. Jean, and La Brique. The enemy opened by shelling the Reserve
Company (No. 4) at St. Jean and wounding eight men, while their
machine-gun fire held up all work in the front line where No. 1
Company was trying to dig a communication-trench through old dirt and
dead to No. 2 Company in support.
The demonstration might have meant anything or nothing, but to be on
the safe side and to comply with Brigade orders, regular observation
and snipers’ posts were posted henceforward, and Lieutenant
Rodakowski was struck off all trench duties as “Intelligence (and
Sniping) Officer.” The arrangements and supervision of a dozen or so
snipers, imaginative, stolid or frankly bored, as the case might be,
and the collation of their various reports based (for very little
could be actually seen) on the Celtic imagination operating at large;
the whole to be revised and corrected from hour to hour by one’s own
faculties of observation and deduction; make Intelligence work a
little strenuous.
On the 12th May St. Jean, which included Battalion Headquarters, half
way between St. Jean and Wieltje, was heavily shelled for eight hours
of the night with heavy stuff--but no casualties beyond a couple of
men wounded.
On the 18th May, when they were in the line once more, the enemy
who had recently been remarkably quiet made an attempt to rush a
bombing-post, but, says the Diary, “Lieutenant Tisdall and 4182
Private A. Young came upon them unexpectedly, and owing to the
former’s coolness and the latter’s vigorous offensive action with
rifle and bombs, the hostile party, about twenty, fled.” The Diary
is never emotional in such little matters as these, and the officers
concerned say less than nothing. It is the old-timers among the men
who cherish memories of the “vigorous offensive” action. No pen dare
put on paper the speech of the orderly who, with rifle and bomb,
erupts along the trench or over the edge of the shell-crater either
in deadly silence or with threatenings and slaughter in his own
dialect, and, when the quick grisly business is over, convulses his
associates with his private version of it.
The orderly got the D.C.M. and the officer the Military Cross.
The enemy retaliated next night by shelling the support line and
wounded seven men just as the Battalion was going into rest and
was relieved late, which they noticed with deep displeasure, by a
battalion of the Twentieth Division.
The 20th May saw them in the clean back-area at the pleasant
well-treed village of Longuenesse, three miles south-west of St.
Omer, all together in good billets and plenty of clean straw at one
farm; Headquarters at a neighbouring château, the 2nd Coldstream,
their particular friends with them, and the other battalions of their
brigade at villages near by. The weather was good; for a week at
least work was reasonable, and they all went to pay a visit disguised
as a “Battalion Drill” to the parade ground of the cadet-school at
Blendecques, of which Lieutenant J. Halligan, late Orderly-Room
Quartermaster-Sergeant of the Battalion, was Adjutant. It is
reasonable to infer that the Russian General at the Poperinghe camp
got no better in the way of a ceremonial parade than did their old
comrade.
The shadow of preparations for the Somme fell over them afterwards.
They dug quadruple lines of trenches and assaulted them in full kit
with gas helmets; and found time, between whiles, to hold a boxing
competition, at which the 12th Lancers arrived with “their private
Young,” who was defeated by the Battalion’s Company Sergeant-Major
Voyles. These things are as sacred as the Eton dinner at St. Omer on
the 3rd June, which seven officers from the Battalion attended.
On the 7th June they moved on a twelve-mile march to Hondeghem, under
Cassel, _en route_ for a Poperinghe camp once more, and developed
several cases of sore feet. This was put down to a “bad issue of
socks,” but it supports the theory of the Sergeant’s Mess, that
nothing but careful inspection, coupled with steady route-marching,
can “put a foot” on men who have been paddling in trench-mud with
twisted, water-logged boots.
At Poperinghe they were coolies again till they went into line on the
15th June. A permanent fatigue-party of 150, under 2nd Lieutenants
Hegarty and Earle, was sent to the Engineers near Ypres. Another, a
hundred strong, helped to bury field-cables by night at Brielen on
the Ypres-Elverdinghe road, a place much sought after by the enemy’s
artillery. But digging is reckoned better than drill, and their next
tour of duty was to be a wearisome one. Lieutenant J. N. Marshall
from the Entrenching Battalion joined on the 15th, and Lieutenant J.
K. Greer took command of No. 1 Company, Lieutenant Law being on a
course.
They relieved the 11th Essex and the 8th Bedfordshires (Sixth
Division) on the night of the 16th, in the surprisingly short time
of one hour, which was nearly a record and showed that all hands
were abreast of their work. Their new sector lay north-west of
Wieltje and due north of Ypres, covering the Ypres-Pilckem road,
with supports at Lancashire farm, and the Battalion Headquarters amid
loose bricks and mud on the Canal bank. The trenches were bad; only
one communication-trench (Skipton Road) was moderately dry, and the
parapets were thin, low and badly gapped, which gave enemy snipers
their chance. Two men were killed outright the first day; one died of
wounds and four were wounded.
No Man’s Land at this point was several hundred yards deep, and
covered with long grass and weeds. The periscopes soon learned to
know that poppies and thistles grew brightest and tallest round the
edges of shell-holes, and since shell-holes meant cover, all patrols
directed their belly-flat course to them.
On the 18th June officer patrols went out to look at the enemy’s
wire. Second Lieutenant F. H. N. Lee was wounded in the leg while
close to it, and was carried back by No. 3836 Corporal Redmond; dying
later of gangrene. Another officer, Lieutenant Hon. P. Ogilvy, ran
by mistake into wire on his return journey, and had to fight his way
back with his orderly. One man was killed and one wounded, besides
the wounded officer.
On the 19th Lieutenant J. N. Marshall, while out with a
working-party, was sniped in the arm, but finished his work before
reporting it. A man was killed and two were wounded. “The day was
normal--probably the quietest of the tour,” says the Diary, but
one may be certain that certain inconspicuous German snipers were
congratulating themselves on their bag. The bulk of the trouble came
from five old dug-outs known as the “Canadian dug-outs,” some two or
three hundred yards away, which had once been in our hands. These had
been wired round collectively and individually, and their grass-grown
irregular moundage made perfect snipers’ nests.
The Battalion lay, from the 21st to the 23rd June, in shelters round
and cellars beneath Elverdinghe Château, the trees of which were
still standing, so that it was possible to put in an inspection and
a little drill beneath them, but careful watch had to be kept for
hostile aeroplanes. Drill under these circumstances is discipline
of the highest. “’Tis not the dhrill, ye’ll understand, but the
not budgin’ in the ranks that’s so hard to come by. For, ye’ll
understand, that you can’t help liftin’ an eye when you hear _them_
buzzin’ above. And, of course, if a man budges on parade, he’ll be
restless when he’s shelled.”
Our artillery had been cutting German wire on the front of the
Division with the idea of raids to follow. Consequently, there was
night-firing on both sides when the Battalion went back on the 24th.
The trenches had been a little improved, and one man only was killed
and one wounded by the snipers.
On the 26th June four men were sniped. On the 27th June wire-cutting
by our guns drew heavy retaliation from the enemy. Lieutenant F. L.
Pusch, D.S.O., as brave a man as the War made, who had only come up
from the Entrenching Battalion a few days before, was sniped and
killed at once. He had gone with his orderly to pick up a wounded man
in a trench, and both were hit by the same bullet. The sniper did his
best to kill Private Carroll, who dragged the wounded man and the
officer’s body under cover. Private Carroll was awarded the Military
Medal for this. Four dead and seven wounded were that night’s total.
The 28th June was the worst of that tour. The enemy opened on
the trenches and supports through night and day with everything
available, down to aerial torpedoes, killing five men and wounding
eight.