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THE IRISH GUARDS IN THE GREAT WAR
[Illustration:
_ITINERARY
of the
SECOND BATTALION IRISH GUARDS_
_AUGUST 1915—DECEMBER 1918_
_Emery Walker Ltd. del. et sc._]
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY EMERY WALKER LTD., LONDON
THE IRISH GUARDS
IN THE GREAT WAR
EDITED AND COMPILED FROM
THEIR DIARIES AND PAPERS
BY
RUDYARD KIPLING
[Illustration: (decorative diamond icon)]
_VOLUME II_
THE SECOND BATTALION
AND
APPENDICES
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1923
[Illustration: (personal colophon of Rudyard Kipling)]
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
RUDYARD KIPLING
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
_First Edition_
CONTENTS
1915
LOOS AND THE FIRST AUTUMN 1
1916
SALIENT AND THE SOMME 49
1917
RANCOURT TO BOURLON WOOD 119
1918
ARRAS TO THE END 182
APPENDICES 217
INDEX 285
LIST OF MAPS
Itinerary of the Second Battalion Irish Guards _Frontispiece_
Actions and Billets. Second Battalion _Facing page_ 48
The Ypres Salient. Second Battalion Actions ” 66
The Somme. Second Battalion _Between pages_ 126, 127
THE IRISH GUARDS IN THE GREAT WAR
1915
LOOS AND THE FIRST AUTUMN
Officially, the formation of the 2nd Battalion of the Irish Guards
dates from the 15th July 1915, when it was announced that His Majesty
the King had been “graciously pleased to approve” of the formation of
two additional Battalions of Foot Guards—the 4th Grenadier Guards,
and the 2nd Battalion Irish Guards, which was to be made up out of
the personnel of the 2nd (Reserve) Battalion. And, officially, on
July 18 that formation took place. But those who knew the world in
the old days, and specially the busy part of it that had Warley
Barracks for its heart, know that the 2nd Battalion was born in
spirit as in substance, long ere the authorities bade it to be.
The needs of the war commanded it; the abundance of the reserves
then justified it; and, though Warley Barracks had been condemned
as unfit for use by the Honourable the East India Company a trifle
of fifty odd years ago, this was not the hour to stand on ancient
tradition. So the old, crazy barracks overflowed; the officers’ damp
and sweating dog-kennels were double-crammed; and, by sheer good-will
and stark discipline, the work went forward to the creation. Officers
and men alike welcomed it, for it is less pleasing to be absorbed in
drafts and driblets by an ever-hungry 1st Battalion in France, than
to be set apart for the sacrifice as a veritable battalion on its own
responsibility, with its own traditions (they sprang up immediately)
and its own jealous esprit-de-corps. A man may join for the sake of
“King and Country” but he goes over the top for the honour of his
own platoon, company, and battalion; and, the heart of man being
what it is, so soon as the 2nd Battalion opened its eyes, the first
thing that it beheld was its 1st Battalion, as an elder brother
to measure its stature against in all things. Yet, following the
ancient mystery of all armies, there were not two battalions, but one
regiment; officers and men interchangeable, and equally devoted to
the battalion that they served for the time, though in their deeper
minds, and sometimes confessing it, more devoutly attached to one or
the other of the two.
By summer of ’15 the tide of special reserve officers was towards
its flood, and the 2nd Battalion was largely filled by them. They
hailed from every quarter of the Empire, and represented almost every
profession and state of life in it, from the schoolboy of eighteen to
the lawyer of forty odd. They had parted long ago with any delusion
as to the war ending that year or the next. The information that came
to them by word of mouth was not of the sort dispensed in the Press,
and they knew, perhaps a little more than the public, how inadequate
were our preparations. One and all they realised that humanly
speaking, unless fortune favoured them with permanent disablement
they were doomed men; since all who recovered from their wounds were
returned to the war and sooner or later despatched. He was lucky
in those days who survived whole for three months; and six without
hurt was almost unheard of. So the atmosphere of their daily lives,
underneath the routine and the carefully organised amusements that
the world then offered to its victims, had an unreality, comparable
in some degree, to the elaborately articulated conversation and
serious argument over utterly trivial matters that springs up among
officers in that last hour of waiting under the thunder of the
preliminary bombardment before the word is given that hoists all
ranks slowly and methodically into a bone-naked landscape.
Lieut.-Colonel the Earl of Kerry, M.V.O., D.S.O., who commanded the
reserve and whose influence over the men was unbounded, began the
work of making the 2nd Battalion, and, later on, Major G. H. C.
Madden was recalled from duty in France to be its senior major.
Captain the Hon. T. E. Vesey was the first adjutant and, with a
tight hand which was appreciated afterwards, showed all that young
community how to take care of itself. It was a time for understanding
much and overlooking little. “Or else,” as the sergeants explained,
“ye’ll die before ye’ve killed a Jerry.”
On the 27th of July, Major and Brevet-Lieut.-Colonel the Hon. L. J.
P. Butler took over command, and on August the 6th the Battalion with
full transport, and packs, paraded as such for its first route-march,
of sixteen miles in the flat country, filled with training troops,
that lies round Warley. The weather was very hot, nor did that
officer who had bethought him to fill his “full pack” with a
full-blown air-cushion, take much reward of his ingenuity when his
unlucky fraud betrayed him by bursting almost under the adjutant’s
eye. Men said that that was their real introduction to the horrors of
war.
They were inspected on the 10th August by Major-General Sir
Francis Lloyd, commanding the London District who, after the usual
compliments on their physique and steadiness, told them they were due
for France in a few days. Lord Kitchener came down and addressed them
on the 13th of the month, was photographed with a group of all the
officers of the 2nd Battalion and Reserve Battalions, and expressed
his belief that they would be a credit to the Guards Division then,
as we know, being formed in France.
On the 16th they left Brentwood Station, that has seen so many
thousands depart; and that evening were packed tightly at Southampton
in the _Anglo-Canadian_ and the _Viper_. Duly escorted by destroyers,
for the seas were troubled by submarines, both ships tied up at Havre
in stillness and strange “foreign” smells at midnight. The city and
its outskirts for miles round had long since been turned wholly to
the monotonous business of expediting troops and supplies; and the
camps that ringed it spread and linked on almost daily. The French
were used, now, to our armed Empire at large flooding their streets.
Wonder and welcome had passed. No pretty maids met them with wine or
garlands, and their route inland to their work was as worn and smooth
as the traffic-burnished metals from Brentwood to the sea. But the
country and its habits were new to all those new hands, trained in
a strict school; and it filled them with joy to behold the casual
manner in which a worn and dusty French sentry was relieved while
they were marching to their first wonderful camp outside the city.
They entrained for Lumbres on the 18th August and were bidden, next
day, to march to billets at Acquin, a little village on a hill-side
a few miles from St. Omer, in a fold of the great Sussex-like downs.
It is a place both steep and scattered, cramped and hot, and when the
air-war was in full swing had its small share of bombs intended for
Army Headquarters at St. Omer, and the adjacent aerodromes. The men
were billeted in barns forty and fifty at a time which, specially for
a new battalion, was rather unhandy, as offering many ups and downs
and corners, which afford chances for delays and misunderstandings.
But it was to be their first and only experience of comfort for any
consecutive time, and of French life a little untouched by war. They
most deeply enjoyed the simple kindliness of the village-folk, and
the graceless comments of the little sharp-faced French children
at the halting attempts of the Irish to talk French; the glimpses
of intimate domestic days, when sons and brothers of their hosts,
returned on a few days’ leave from far-away battlefields in the
Argonne or beyond, were shown with pride to the visitors who were
helping the villagers to cart their corn—“precisely as our own sons
would have done.” They talked, too, with veterans of ’70 met in the
fields and at the cafés, who told them in set and rounded phrases
that war was serious. And the French men and women upon whom they
were billeted liked them well and remembered them long. Said one,
years after, with tears in the eyes: “Monsieur, if you drew a line in
the air and asked those children not to cross it, it was as a wall
to them. They played, monsieur, like infants, without any thought of
harm or unkindness; and then they would all become men again, very
serious—all those children of yours.”
So things were gracious and kindly about them in that little village
where every one had suffered loss, and was making their resolute,
curt, French best of it; and the 2nd Battalion settled down to an
eleventh-hour course of instruction in everything that the war of
that day might call for—except, it may be, how to avoid their own
cavalry on the march.
The historic first meeting between the 1st and 2nd Battalions took
place on the 30th August on a march out to St. Pierre, when the
units of the different Guards Brigades were drawing in together for
combined work preparatory to the Battle of Loos. The veterans of the
1st were personal in their remarks, deriding the bright cap-stars
of the 2nd Battalion, and telling them that they would soon know
better than to advertise their rank under fire. The 2nd Battalion
Diary notes a point that the 1st, doubtless through delicacy,
omits—that when the merry gathering under the trees in the field
was at an end, after dinner, the 2nd Battalion fell in and marched
off the ground “before the critical eyes of their older comrades,
and the 1st followed.” No fault was found, but it was a breathless
business, compared, by one who took part, to the performances of
rival peacocks. (“There was not any one else, that we considered; but
we knew that, if we put a foot wrong _that_ parade in front of _them_
we’d be in the road to hear tell of it the rest of our lives.”) And
it was on this great day, too, that the Rev. Father Knapp joined as
R.C. Chaplain to the Battalion, and thereafter proved himself as far
forward on all fields as any of the rest of his brethren.
LOOS
They began to learn something about service conditions when, on the
1st September, they joined up with their Brigade, the 2nd Guards
Brigade, and shared a wet day of advancing, on parallel roads, with
three Guards Brigades, for practice at coming up into the line.
Otherwise, they dug trenches by day and night, developed, more or
less, their own system of laying them out in the dark, and their
brigade’s idea of storming trenches with the help of bombers who had
had very little practice with the live bomb; and kept their ears
open for any news about conditions on the front. The “smoke-helmets”
issued on the eve of the Battalion’s departure from England were new
also. Many of the talc eye-pieces had cracked in transit, and had to
be replaced, and the men instructed how to slip them on against time.
This was even more important than the “attack of villages,” which
was another part of their curriculum at Avroult, Wismes, Wavrans,
Tatinghem, Wisques, Dohem, and the like in that dry autumn weather
that was saving itself to break filthily at Loos.
On the 5th September, knowing extremely well what they were intended
for, after battalion drill, Lieut.-General Haking, commanding the
Eleventh Corps, addressed all the Officers of the 2nd Guards Brigade
at the 1st Coldstream Mess at Lumbres. The summary is set down in the
Diary with no more comment than three exclamation points at the end.
He told them that an attack on the German lines was close at hand;
that the Germans had but forty thousand men at the selected point to
oppose our two hundred thousand; and that behind their firing-line
and supports were only six divisions as a reserve to their whole
western front. This may or may not have been true at the time. What
follows has a more direct bearing, perhaps, on the course of events,
so far as the Battalion was concerned. General Haking said that
almost everything depended on the platoon leaders, and “he instructed
them always to push on boldly whenever an opportunity offered, even
at the expense of exposing and leaving unguarded their flanks.”
Hence, perhaps, the exclamation points. From the civilian point of
view the advice seems hardly safe to offer to a battalion of at
least average courage a few days before they are to meet singularly
well-posted machine-guns, and carefully trained bombers.
Ceremonial drill of the whole of the 2nd Guards Brigade followed
the next day, when they were inspected by Major-General the Earl of
Cavan, marched past in column of double platoons, returned to line
in mass, complimented on their appearance and so forth, after which,
in the evening the C.O. of the Battalion with General Feilding (1st
Guards Brigade) Captain Viscount Gort (B.M. 1st Guards Brigade),
and Colonel Corry commanding the 3rd Grenadier Guards, went off in
a car to “see the country south-east of Béthune.” This was not a
sector that improved on acquaintance; and in the days that followed
all senior officers looked at and pondered over the unwholesome open
scarred ground over which “the greatest battle in the history of the
world,” as General Haking said, was to take place. Meantime, among
the drills held at Acquin appear orders, presumably for the first
time, that every one was to fire ten rounds “from his rifle while
wearing his smoke-helmet.” The result on the targets of this solitary
experiment is not recorded; but it takes some time for a man to get
used to sighting through dingy talc eye-pieces. Nor is it likely to
be known in this world whether the “six young officers” who attended
riding-school just before the march towards Loos, derived much
benefit from their instruction.
They moved on the evening of the 22nd September and marched to Dohem
where they picked up their Brigade Headquarters and some other units,
and thence, next day, in heavy rain to billets in Linghem. General
Haking delivered another speech at the Corps Conference on the 24th,
explaining the broad outlines of the “greatest battle, etc.” which
at that moment was opening. He dwelt specially on the part to be
played by the Eleventh Corps, as well as the necessity for speed and
for the use of reserves. It may have occurred to some of his hearers
that they were the reserves, but that speed was out of the question,
for the roads were clotted with cavalry, and there did not seem to
be any great choice of those “parallel roads” on which they had been
exercised, or any vast crush of motor-buses. When they got away from
Linghem on the early morning of the 25th and marched with their
brigade to Burbure and Haquin, they enjoyed continuous halts, owing
to the cavalry going forward, which meant, for the most part, through
them, and the wounded of the battle being brought back—all on the
same road. They billeted (this was merely a form) at Haquin “very wet
and tired” about one on the morning of the 26th, having been on their
feet standing, marching, or variously shifted about, for twenty odd
hours. The men’s breakfasts were issued at half-past four that same
dawn “as there was a possibility of an early move.”
No orders, however, came, the world around them being busied with
the shifting phases of the opening of Loos, which had begun with
an advance at some spots along the line, and at others was hung up
among wire that our two or three hours’ bombardment did not seem
to have wholly removed. The 2nd Guards Brigade, then, waited on
at Haquin till shortly after noon, and moved via Nœux-les-Mines,
Sailly-Labourse, Noyelles, and Vermelles, large portions of which
were then standing and identifiable, to trenches in front of Le
Rutoire. Here the German lines had been driven back a little, and
Captains Alexander and Hubbard commanding the two leading companies
of the Battalion were sent on to look at them in daylight. The
results of the Captains’ adventure, when it is recalled that one set
of trenches, at the best of times, looks remarkably like another,
and that this was far from being a good time, were surprisingly
satisfactory. “There was no one to tell them exactly which trenches
were to be taken over, but, from instructions given on the map, and
in consultation with the 1st Scots Guards who had to occupy ground
on their right, they arranged which set of them to inhabit. Owing to
congestion of roads, and having to go across much broken country,
etc., it was nearly midnight before the Battalion got into the
selected spot—an old line of captured German trenches in front of
Lone Tree.” This, as is well known to all regimental historians, was
a mark of the German guns almost to the inch, and, unfortunately,
formed one of our dressing-stations. At a moderate estimate the
Battalion had now been on foot and livelily awake for forty-eight
hours; the larger part of that time without any food. It remained
for them merely to go into the fight, which they did at half-past
two on the morning of the 27th September when they received “verbal
instructions to push forward to another line of captured German
trenches, some five hundred yards, relieving any troops that might
happen to be there.” It was nearly broad daylight by the time that
this disposition was completed, and they were much impressed with
the permanence and solidity of the German works in which they found
themselves, and remarked jestingly one to another, that “Jerry must
have built them with the idea of staying there for ever.” As a matter
of fact, “Jerry” did stay within half a mile of that very line for
the next three years and six weeks, less one day. They had their
first hint of his intentions when patrols pushed out from Nos. 2 and
3 Companies in the forenoon, reported that they were unable to get
even a hundred yards ahead, on account of rifle-fire. Men said, long
afterwards, that this was probably machine-gun fire out of the Bois
Hugo; which thoroughly swept all open communications, for the enemy
here as elsewhere had given ground a little without losing his head,
and was hitting back as methodically as ever.
The attack of their Brigade developed during the course of the day.
The four C.O.’s of the Battalions met their Brigadier at the 1st
Grenadier Guards Headquarters. He took them to a point just north of
Loos, whence they could see Chalk-Pit Wood, and the battered bulk
of the colliery head and workings known as Puits 14 bis, together
with what few small buildings still stood thereabouts, and told them
that he proposed to attack as follows: At half-past two a heavy
bombardment lasting for one hour and a half would be delivered on
that sector. At four the Second Irish Guards would advance upon
Chalk-Pit Wood and would establish themselves on the north-east
and south-east faces of it, supported by the 1st Coldstream. The
1st Scots Guards were to advance echeloned to the right rear of
the Irish, and to attack Puits 14 bis moving round the south side
of Chalk-Pit Wood, covered by heavy fire from the Irish out of the
Wood itself. For this purpose, four machine-guns of the Brigade
Machine-gun Company were to accompany the latter battalion. The 3rd
Grenadiers were to support the 1st Scots in their attack on the
Puits. Chalk-Pit Wood at that time existed as a somewhat dishevelled
line of smallish trees and brush running from north to south along
the edge of some irregular chalk workings which terminated at their
north end, in a deepish circular quarry. It was not easy to arrive
at its precise shape and size, for the thing, like so much of the
war-landscape of France, was seen but once by the men vitally
concerned in its features, and thereafter changed outline almost
weekly, as gun-fire smote and levelled it from different angles.
The orders for the Battalion, after the conference and the short
view of the ground, were that No. 3 Company (Captain Wynter) was to
advance from their trenches when the bombardment stopped, to the
southern end of Chalk-Pit Wood, get through and dig itself in in the
tough chalk on the farther side. No. 2 Company (Captain Bird), on the
left of No. 3, would make for the centre of the wood, dig in too, on
the far side, and thus prolong No. 3’s line up to and including the
Chalk-Pit—that is to say, that the two companies would hold the whole
face of the Wood.
Nos. 1 and 4 Companies were to follow and back up Nos. 3 and 2
respectively. At four o’clock the two leading companies deployed
and advanced, “keeping their direction and formation perfectly.”
That much could be seen from what remained of Vermelles water-tower,
where some of the officers of the 1st Battalion were watching,
regardless of occasional enemy shell. They advanced quickly, and
pushed through to the far edge of the Wood with very few casualties,
and those, as far as could be made out, from rifle or machine-gun
fire. (Shell-fire had caught them while getting out of their
trenches, but, notwithstanding, their losses had not been heavy till
then.) The rear companies pushed up to thicken the line, as the fire
increased from the front, and while digging in beyond the Wood, 2nd
Lieutenant Pakenham-Law was fatally wounded in the head. Digging was
not easy work, and seeing that the left of the two first companies
did not seem to have extended as far as the Chalk-Pit, at the north
of the Wood, the C.O. ordered the last two platoons of No. 4 Company
which were just coming up, to bear off to the left and get hold of
the place. In the meantime, the 1st Scots Guards, following orders,
had come partly round and partly through the right flank of the
Irish, and attacked Puits 14 bis, which was reasonably stocked with
machine-guns, but which they captured for the moment. Their rush
took with them “some few Irish Guardsmen,” with 2nd Lieutenants W.
F. J. Clifford and J. Kipling of No. 2 Company who went forward not
less willingly because Captain Cuthbert commanding the Scots Guards
party had been adjutant to the Reserve Battalion at Warley ere the
2nd Battalion was formed, and they all knew him. Together, this rush
reached a line beyond the Puits, well under machine-gun fire (out of
the Bois Hugo across the Lens-La Bassée road). Here 2nd Lieutenant
Clifford was shot and wounded or killed—the body was found later—and
2nd Lieutenant Kipling was wounded and missing. The Scots Guards also
lost Captain Cuthbert, wounded or killed, and the combined Irish and
Scots Guards party fell back from the Puits and retired “into and
through Chalk-Pit Wood in some confusion.” The C.O. and Adjutant,
Colonel Butler and Captain Vesey went forward through the Wood to
clear up matters, but, soon after they had entered it the Adjutant
was badly wounded and had to be carried off. Almost at the same
moment, “the men from the Puits came streaming back through the Wood,
followed by a great part of the line which had been digging in on the
farther side of it.”
Evidently, one and a half-hour’s bombardment, against a country-side
packed with machine-guns, was not enough to placate it. The Battalion
had been swept from all quarters, and shelled at the same time, at
the end of two hard days and sleepless nights, as a first experience
of war, and had lost seven of their officers in forty minutes. They
were re-formed somewhat to the rear along the Loos-Hulluch road.
(“Jerry did himself well at Loos upon us innocents. We went into it,
knowing no more than our own dead what was coming, and Jerry fair
lifted us out of it with machine-guns. That was all there was to it
_that_ day.”) The watchers on the Vermelles water-tower saw no more
than a slow forward wave obscured by Chalk-Pit Wood; the spreading
of a few scattered figures, always, it seemed, moving leisurely;
and then a return, with no apparent haste in it, behind the wood
once more. They had a fair idea, though, of what had happened, and
guessed what was to follow. The re-formed line would go up again
exactly to where it had come from. While this was being arranged,
and when a couple of companies of the 1st Coldstream had turned up
in a hollow on the edge of the Loos-Hulluch road, to support the
Battalion, a runner came back with a message from Captain Alexander
saying that he and some men were still in their scratch-trenches on
the far side of Chalk-Pit Wood, and he would be greatly obliged if
they would kindly send some more men up, and with speed. The actual
language was somewhat crisper, and was supplemented, so the tale
runs, by remarks from the runner addressed to the community at large.
The demand was met at once, and the rest of the line was despatched
to the near side of the Wood in support. The two companies of the
Coldstream came up on the left of the Irish Guards, and seized
and settled down in the Chalk-Pit itself. They all had a night’s
energetic digging ahead of them, with but their own entrenching tools
to help, and support-trenches had to be made behind the Wood in case
the enemy should be moved to counter-attack. To meet that chance,
as there was a gap between the supporting Coldstream Companies and
the First Guards Brigade on the left, the C.O. of the 2nd Battalion
collected some hundred and fifty men of various regiments, during the
dusk, and stuffed them into an old German communication-trench as
a defence. No counter-attack developed, but it was a joyless night
that they spent among the uptorn trees and lumps of unworkable chalk.
Their show had failed with all the others along the line, and “the
greatest battle in the history of the world” was frankly stuck. The
most they could do was to hang on and wait developments. They were
shelled throughout the next day, heavily but inaccurately, when 2nd
Lieutenant Sassoon was wounded by a rifle bullet. In the evening
they watched the 1st Coldstream make an unsuccessful attack on Puits
14 bis, for the place was a well-planned machine-gun nest—the first
of many that they were fated to lose their strength against through
the years to come. That night closed in rain, and they were left to
the mercy of Providence. No one could get to them, and they could
get at nobody; but they could and did dig deeper into the chalk,
to keep warm, and to ensure against the morrow (September 29) when
the enemy guns found their range and pitched the stuff fairly into
the trenches “burying many men and blowing a few to pieces.” Yet,
according to the count, which surely seems inaccurate, they only lost
twenty dead in the course of the long day. The 3rd Guards Brigade on
their right, sent in word that the Germans were massing for attack
in the Bois Hugo in front of their line. “All ranks were warned,”
which, in such a situation, meant no more than that the experienced
among them, of whom there were a few, waited for the cessation of
shell-fire, and the inexperienced, of whom there were many, waited
for what would come next. (“And the first time that he is under
_that_ sort of fire, a man stops his thinking. He’s all full of
wonder, sweat, and great curses.”) No attack, however, came, and
the Gunners claimed that their fire on Bois Hugo had broken it up.
Then the Brigade on their left cheered them with instructions that
Chalk-Pit Wood must be “held at all costs,” and that they would not
be relieved for another two days; also, that “certain modifications
of the Brigade line would take place.” It turned out later that
these arrangements did not affect the battalions. They were taken
out of the line “wet, dirty, and exhausted” on the night of the 30th
September when, after a heavy day’s shelling, the Norfolks relieved
them, and they got into billets behind Sailly-Labourse. They had
been under continuous strain since the 25th of the month, and from
the 27th to the 30th in a punishing action which had cost them, as
far as could be made out, 324 casualties, including 101 missing. Of
these last, the Diary records that “the majority of them were found
to have been admitted to some field ambulance, wounded.” The number
of known dead is set down officially as not more than 25, which must
be below the mark. Of their officers, 2nd Lieutenant Pakenham-Law had
died of wounds; 2nd Lieutenants Clifford and Kipling were missing,
Captain and Adjutant the Hon. T. E. Vesey, Captain Wynter, Lieutenant
Stevens, and 2nd Lieutenants Sassoon and Grayson were wounded, the
last being blown up by a shell. It was a fair average for the day of
a debut, and taught them somewhat for their future guidance. Their
commanding officer told them so at Adjutant’s Parade, after they
had been rested and cleaned on the 2nd October at Verquigneul; but
it does not seem to have occurred to any one to suggest that direct
infantry attacks, after ninety-minute bombardments, on works begotten
out of a generation of thought and prevision, scientifically built
up by immense labour and applied science, and developed against all
contingencies through nine months, are not likely to find a fortunate
issue. So, while the Press was explaining to a puzzled public what
a far-reaching success had been achieved, the “greatest battle in
the history of the world” simmered down to picking up the pieces on
both sides of the line, and a return to autumnal trench-work, until
more and heavier guns could be designed and manufactured in England.
Meantime, men died.
THE HOHENZOLLERN AND TRENCH WORK
The Battalion, a little rested, and strengthened by four officers
from the 1st Irish Guards (Lieutenant and temporary Captain
FitzGerald, Lieutenants Rankin and Montgomery, and 2nd Lieutenant
Langrishe) as well as a draft of a hundred men under Lieutenant
Hamilton, was introduced to the trenches on the 3rd October, when
they moved to Vermelles and hid themselves in the ruins and cellars
of as much as the enemy had allowed to remain of it. It was an
unpleasant experience. The following comment covers it, and the many
others of the same sort that followed: “We was big men for the most
part, and this creeping and crawling in and out of what’s left of
houses, was not our ways of living. Maybe some of the little fellows
in the Line would have found it easier. And there’s a smell to that
kind o’ billet worse than graves—a smell off the house-plaster where
it lies, and the wall-paper peelin’ off the walls, and what’s in
the sand-bags that we build acrost the passages an’ the sculleries,
ye’ll understand, and the water on the floors stinkin’ and rottin’.
Ye hear it drip like dhrums through ceilings in the night. And ye go
in an’ out of them dark, stinkin’ places always stoopin’ an’ steppin’
on bits o’ things. Dead houses put the wind up a man worse than
trenches.”
Next day they were turned down into the multitude of trenches,
established or in the making, which lay between Vermelles and
the great Hohenzollern redoubt that swept every line of approach
with its sudden fires. They were led out (October 5) at dusk
across a muddy field beside a dead town, and entered that endless
communication-trench called Central Boyau, whose length was reckoned
by hours. It led them to the line held by the East Yorks Regiment
and two companies of the K.O.Y.L.I. they were relieving. Men
forget much, but no man of any battalion ever forgets his first
introduction to the stable, deadly fire-line, as distinguished from
the casual field-trench. An hour or so before they moved off, a 5.9
burst in a ruined cottage where all the Battalion Staff was sitting,
and might well have destroyed the sergeant-major, drill-sergeants and
signallers, etc. The only casualty, however, was one pioneer killed,
while the officers of the Battalion Staff in the next mound of ruins
escaped unhurt.
Then began the slow and repeatedly checked sidle in the dusk, of
single men up Central Boyau, which was also a thoroughfare for
other units falling, tripping, and cursing among festoons of stray
telephone wires. From Vermelles to their trenches was a mile and a
quarter. They began at seven at night and completed the relief at six
in the morning. Not much shelling greeted them, but the darkness was
“tickled up,” as one man put it, with bullets from all angles, and
while No. 3 Company was settling in to reserve trenches just at the
point of grey dawn, 2nd Lieutenant Hine showed himself by getting up
on to the parapet, and was shot through the head at once, probably by
a sniper. Over and above the boy’s natural fearlessness, by which he
had already distinguished himself at Loos (for he had helped Captain
Alexander to hold the men in Chalk-Pit Wood after the failure of
Coldstream attack on Puits 14 bis), he was utterly convinced he would
not be killed in the war. Others of his companions had presentiments
of their own death more than once, and yet survived to the end with
nothing worse than a wound or gassing. It may be worth noting, as far
as this sort of information goes, that a man who felt that he was
“for it” on the eve of an engagement was seldom found to be wrong.
Occasionally, too, it would come over a man in the trenches that that
day or night would be his last. Indeed the very hour would sometimes
forespeak itself as with an audible voice, and he, chosen, would go
forward to the destined spot—so men have said who saw it—already
divorced from this world.
But at the beginning, before nerves wore down, there was hope and
interest for every one. The enemy had probably learned of the fresh
material before them, for they filled the day of the 6th October
with alternate whizz-bangs and large-size H.E. howitzers; the crack
and gravel-like smash of the small stuff alternating with the grunt,
vomit, and stamp of the Jack Johnsons. Every one was hit by the
flying dirt, and well-nigh choked by the stench, and some officers
visiting the front line had their first experience of crawling in
cold blood across bits of broken trench, where the débris of corpses
was so mingled with the untidy dirt that one could not be sure till
later what hand or foot had met. It struck some of the young officers
as curious that they were not more impressed. Others were frankly
sick; while others found that the sights lifted from them the dread
fear of being afraid which waits at every generous man’s shoulder.
But they all owned, according to their separate temperaments, that
they were quite sufficiently frightened for working purposes, and
so—went on with their work.
Between the 5th and the 7th October the Battalion lost one officer
(2nd Lieutenant Hine) and six other ranks killed and twenty-one
wounded. Their trenches were moderately good, and had been regularly
used, and they discovered dug-outs here and there, which enabled some
of them to doze lying down instead of propped against the side of
a trench full of moving men. This was great luxury to them, though
their revolvers punched holes in their hips and their boots drew like
blisters. The more imaginative wrote home that the life was something
like camping out. The truthful merely said that they were having an
interesting time, and gave their families peace. There was no need
to explain how their servants brought them up their meals, dodging,
balancing, and ducking along a trench as the fire caught it, or how,
even while the hungry youngsters waited and watched, both food and
servant would be wiped out together, with a stretch of the parapet
under which they had decided to eat.
Just where the Battalion lay, our front line was two hundred yards
from the enemy—too far for hand-bombing, but deadly for artillery
and machine-gun work. Our artillery was declared to be more numerous
and powerful than the German, which generally showered our supports
and reserves with shrapnel, while machine-guns kept down the heads
of the front line with small-arm fire. Orders had been issued at
that moment that recesses should be built, at twenty-five yard
intervals in our fire-trench parapets, for mounting gas-cylinders,
and the Battalion worked at this new fatigue under the direction of
an Engineer Officer, Lieutenant Ritchie. The recesses meant nothing
in particular, but gave people a pleasant feeling that there was
abundance of gas somewhere in the background. They were regularly
shelled, but, mankind being infinitely adaptable, had come in the
few days of this new life to look on it as almost normal, and to
alleviate it with small shifts and contrivances. “I think,” says one
of the beginners, “that in those days we were as self-centred as a
suburban villa-residence. The fact of not being able to put your
head up without having a shot through it kept us from worrying about
our neighbours.” Their first experience of external trouble in their
underground world began on the afternoon of the 8th October, when
loud bombing and shelling broke out two battalions down the line to
the right, and some one from the 3rd Grenadiers came charging round
the traverses asking for all available bombers, because the Germans
had got into their line and were making rather a hash of things.
Bombers were accordingly sent, though their experience with the live
bomb was limited, and the two companies on the right got to work on
sand-bags to bulkhead their right flank in case of a break through.
No one really thought that they would be attacked, possibly for the
reason that such a thing had not happened to them personally before.
“You see, we had lost count of time—even of the days of the week.
Every day seemed as long as a year, and I suppose we considered
ourselves like aged men—prisoners of Chillon, you know. We didn’t
think anything could happen.” On that occasion they were correct. The
riot died down and they fell back into normal night routine, every
second man in the fire-trench on sentry, every fifth man in support
seventy or eighty yards behind, and relief every hour; one officer
sitting, between rounds, on one particular spot of the fire-step
(so that every one knew where to find him), discussing life, death,
Very lights, and politics with his C.S.M. and at intervals peering
over the parapet; another officer pervading the support-trench where
bayonet charges are supposed to be supplied from, and where the
men grumble that they are always set to make fancy improvements.
Meantime, the dim dark on every hand is marked with distant
pin-pricks and dots, or nearer blurs or blasts of fire, that reveal
the torn edges of the shell-holes like wave-crests of a petrified
ocean. Yet, after a few nights, the men in the front line said their
chief difficulty was to avoid dozing off “because there was nothing
to do.”
They lost three killed and nineteen wounded from all causes between
the 7th and 8th October, but completed the recesses for the
gas-cylinders, and cleaned out an indescribably old trench, needed
for future operations, of its stale corpses mixed with bomb-boxes.
While this delicate job was in progress, the enemy started shelling
that section with high explosives and shrapnel. They had to shift
twenty boxes of bombs under, first, a particular and next a general
bombardment, which was connected with a German attack a little
farther down the line. Their relief came that same day, on the 12th
October, after their first full week in the trenches. It was not a
cheerful affair. Three battalions were involved in the chaos, as
far as the 2nd Irish Guards was concerned. What befell the rest of
their Brigade may be left to the imagination. A reconnoitring party
of the 1st Monmouths—four officers and eight other ranks—turned
up at a quarter past five to look over the Irish Guards’ trenches
before their own men came. They were sitting just outside Battalion
Headquarters when a 5.9 killed one of the officers and three of
the other ranks, wounded the three other officers, and buried the
whole party. The Diary, rightly regardful of the interests of the
Battalion, observes: “Another lucky escape for our Battalion H.Q.
Staff. For this was the spot in the trench normally occupied by
the senior drill-sergeant and all the orderlies.” Even so, the
Monmouths were the only relieving unit that had any idea where they
were or what they were to take over. The others, the 4th and 5th
Leicesters, lost themselves on the way and wandered blasphemous among
trenches. “The consequent confusion was deplorable.” The Battalion
were chaperoning themselves and others from half-past ten to a
quarter past four in the morning. Then began the mile and a half of
nightmare-like crawl up the seven-foot-deep communication-trench,
whose sides took strange Egyptian-desert-like colours in the
dawn-light, and whose bends and windings bewildered all sense of
direction. They shuffled in file behind each other like migrating
caterpillars, silently except for the grunt and jerk of a tired man
slipping in mud, and whispers along the echoing cut bidding them
always “close up.” They were all out, in every way, at five o’clock.
The relief had begun at eight. After this, they marched three or four
hours to billets at Vaudricourt and Drouvin, within sound but out
of reach of the guns, where they dropped and slept and shaved and
washed, and their officers were grateful to pig down, six together,
on the floor of a loft, and none troubled them till four in the
afternoon when they were ordered to parade “clean.”
Only two nights were allowed for rest and refit, during which time a
draft of fifty men under Lieutenant Kinahan joined, and the Battalion
bombers were “organised” (they had not thrown very well lately) and
made up to eight per platoon. That was on the 14th October. Next
morning the Brigadier called up the C.O.’s of all four battalions
and instructed them that every bomber was, as far as possible, to
be given the chance of throwing a live bomb before going into the
trenches again. He added that “again” meant next morning. On the
morning of the 15th October, then, each one of those one hundred
and twenty-eight organised bombers did, at practice, throw one live
bomb. Says the Diary, without even a note of exclamation: “With the
knowledge, experience, and confidence thus gained, they had to face
trained German bombers a few days later.” They might have had to
face them that same evening when they took over some Brigade Reserve
trenches, directly behind those of their first tour, from the 7th and
8th Sherwood Foresters; but they were merely shelled as they settled
in, and the bombing fell farther down the line. Their new trenches
were dirty and badly knocked about, but, by some obscure forethought
or other, well provided with small and fairly safe dug-outs which
gave cover to almost all. Though they were heavily shelled their
first two days, and many direct hits fell on the parapet itself, and
many men were buried, only two were killed outright and thirty-two
wounded. The sensation of being pinned, even when one has one’s
head above ground, by a weight of pressing earth, added to natural
speculation as to whether the next shell may complete the burial, is
a horror that returns to a man in his dreams, and takes the heart out
of some even more than dysentery. (“There’s something in being held
tight that makes you lose hold of yourself. I’ve seen men screamin’
and kickin’ like wired hares, and them no more than caught by one leg
or two. ’Tis against Nature for a man to be buried with his breath in
him.”)
A RAID
On the 18th October they relieved the 1st Coldstream in the front
line on the west face of Hohenzollern redoubt, which, were there
choice, might be reckoned the very warmest sector of all the
neighbourhood. Both battalions knowing their business, the relief
was effected in two and a half hours under heavy shelling without
casualty, though the Irish lost two killed and three wounded in the
earlier part of the day. Their new position ran without definite
distinction, except sand-bagged barricades, into the German system,
and one might at any time crawl into nests of enemy sentries and
bombers. This, again, was a fresh experience to them. Loos had been
clean-cut in its boundaries. Their week in Left and Right Boyau
from the 8th to the 15th October had not led to undue intimacies
with anything worse than Jack Johnsons, but now they were promised
a change of methods. Since the great break-through had failed that
was to carry our triumphant arms to Lille, the authorities seemed to
attach immense importance to the possession of a few score yards of
enemy trench, commanded, when won, by a few thousand yards of other
trenches, and were willing to expend much blood upon the captures.
Doubtless there was deep design at the back of the detailed work,
but, from the point of view of those who had to carry it through, it
was a little wearisome. They were warned that bombing attacks would
be the order of the day, and on the 10th October their Brigadier
visited them and, as a preliminary, ordered that a trench should be
run to connect Guildford Street, on the left of the redoubt as they
faced it, with West Face Trench, a matter of some “sixty yards over
ground fully exposed to hostile fire at a range of sixty yards.”
In this manner, then, was the trench dug. Beginning in the dark at
eight o’clock 2nd Lieutenant A. Pym, with a party of No. 1 Company,
crept out of West Face, Lance-Sergeant Comesky leading, and the
whole chain crawling behind him “extended” (on their stomachs) along
the line to be dug. They had noted the bearing very carefully in
the daytime, and a party in Guildford Street under 2nd Lieutenant
T. Nugent were trying to help them to keep it, in a subdued tone.
One must not shout when there are rifles and machine-guns, hands on
triggers, fifty yards away. As the party lay they dug and scratched,
first with their entrenching implements, and then with picks and
shovels passed along the line; and Lance-Sergeant Comesky, the curve
of whose labouring back in the darkness was their guide, had to
keep his direction through broken wire, what had been broken men,
shell-holes, and the infinite tangle and waste of war. The Irish have
some small reputation for digging when there is need. They dug that
night as not even the 1st Battalion had dug, and when light came the
new trench was four and a half feet deep, and the sole casualty was
Lance-Sergeant Comesky, slightly wounded. They had been suspected and
“slated” by machine-gun fire in their direction from time to time,
but were not actually located till they were well down. As a point of
vantage the new line had its defects. By daylight no periscope could
live there half a minute ere it was knocked to shivers by rifle-fire.