Private Horton (he had already shown his gifts in this direction),
“supported by a corporal and another man,” made his way along an
old blown-in trench that ran up the centre of the mass of the
Hohenzollern works, till he heard Germans talking at the far end of
it, and so reported. The second reconnaissance by Lance-Sergeant
G. McCarthy and Private Kingston of No. 2 Company explored along
another blown-in trench to the left of Private Horton’s line, which,
before our guns had wrecked it, had been a continuation of West Face
Trench and had run into Little Willie of unsavoury reputation, which
latter in its turn trended almost due north into the German works.
They found this trench barricaded just at its junction with Little
Willie, were fired on by a German sentry, and came away. So far good.
The Brigadier’s instructions next morning were for a night-attack
to be made along both these trenches which lay parallel to each
other; for barricades to be run up at the far end of the lengths
gained; and, later, the two points to be joined up by a fresh cut.
This, it was hoped, would pinch out about fifty yards of occupied
German trench opposite the one which had been dug that night by 2nd
Lieutenants A. Pym’s and Nugent’s party from Guildford Street to
West Face. What might arrive after that was a question of luck,
comparable to ferreting in a populous warren. The Battalion spent the
day under shell-fire that killed one man and wounded nine, in making
arrangements for bombs and sand-bags for the barricades, and decided
that the chain of men working up the trenches, which barely allowed
one and a half men abreast, should consist of two bombers, two
riflemen; two bombers and two riflemen again; and four men to carry
spare bombs. These were to drive the enemy back and hold them while
new barricades were being built in the annexed territory. Then would
come an officer and four more bombers to “hold the new barricade in
event of the leading bombers being rushed while it was being built,
then two men to build the barricade; then a chain of riflemen at
two-yard intervals reaching back to the point of departure who would
pass up more bombs or sand-bags as need arose,” and would clean up
the old trench along which our advance was made, “so as to give us
free access to our new barricade in daylight.” It is to be borne in
mind that, at that time, the bombers of the 2nd Irish Guards had
thrown just one live bomb apiece at training. (“We went in great
dread of our rear-ranks that night. A bomb’s no thing—more than fixed
bayonets—to go capering up trenches with at _anny_ time. And the
first time least of all.”)
The attack was confided to No. 4 Company (Captain Hubbard), who
chose 2nd Lieutenants T. F. Tallents and Hamilton for the left and
right attacks respectively. They led out at one in the morning, very
carefully, for the men were cautioned to stalk the enemy as much as
possible, but the moment they were discovered, to rush him back up
the trench. So he had to be listened for in the dark, with a sky
full of noises overhead. As soon as “contact had been obtained”—that
is to say, as soon as the first crack of a bomb and the yell that
accompanies it were heard down the cutting—the Very lights were
sent up for a signal for our guns and the troops on either side to
annoy and divert. Bombing affairs of the year ’15 were on the most
simple lines and unaccompanied by barrage. The left attack, when it
had toiled some sixty yards from its starting-point, met a party of
German bombers. What followed was inevitable. “Our bombers, who had
never had an opportunity of throwing more than one live bomb each at
training, were easily out-classed by the German bombers, and they
were all either killed, wounded, or driven back immediately on to
2nd Lieutenant Tallents.” He was coming up twenty or thirty yards
behind them, and had just reached some old smashed girders that had
been part of a bridge or a dug-out, and back to this tangle the
attack was driven. There a stand was made for a while by Tallents
and two privates, Higgins and Brophy, till Brophy was killed and
the officer and other private wounded. The Germans bombed their way
on down to the barricades whence the attack had been launched, and
for twenty minutes it was touch and go whether the Irish could hold
it even there. All this while Tallents, though wounded, headed the
resistance, urged the men to strengthen the barrier, and then got
atop of it, “so as to make a longer or more accurate shot with a
bomb.” Bombs ran short, as they usually do on such occasions; the
bombers were down and between men’s feet among the wreckage. 2nd
Lieutenant Coxon, who was sending up fresh men and bombs as best he
might over broken ground in darkness down blind trappy trenches,
indented on Battalion Headquarters for more, and the 1st Coldstream
whirled their bombers in till, by means that no one can quite
recall, the German rush was stayed long enough for a steady supply
of munitions to arrive. This was about four in the morning, after a
couple of hours of mixed rough-and-tumble that had died out for the
moment to snaps of rifle-fire round corners, and the occasional glare
of a bomb lobbed over some cover in the obstructed trench. Tallents
had kept his place at the barrier all the time, and, at what turned
out to be the psychological moment, launched a fresh attack down
the trench, headed by Lance-Corporals J. Brennan and C. Anstey and
backed by Lance-Corporal Cahill. It gave time for the men behind
to further strengthen the defence, while more bombs were coming up.
Then Tallents collapsed and “was removed to the dressing-station,”
and 2nd Lieutenant F. Synge was sent up to relieve him. He was hit in
the head almost at once, but remained at his post, and “never relaxed
his efforts to get the position consolidated and tenable,” until he
too was withdrawn to the dressing-station after dawn. By this time
the barricade was completed, and the communication-trench back to the
main body was sufficiently cleared to enable work to be continued in
daylight.
The smooth official language, impersonal as the account of an
operation in a medical journal, covers up all the horror and sweat of
the night, the desperate labour with anything that came to hand to
make good the barrier, the automatic measurements of time and space
as the struggle up the trench swayed nearer or farther, as well as
the unspeakable absurdities that went sometimes with the very act and
agony of a man’s death between the feet of his comrades. The things
that cannot be recorded are those that are never forgotten. (“And a
man can go missing in such kind of doings more easy than anything
except direct hits from heavy stuff. There’s everything handy scraped
up against a barricade that will stop a bullet, and in the dark how
can one see or—what does one care? Bits of all sorts, as the saying
is. And a man will take the wrong turn in a trench and then three
or four bombs on him, and that shakes the side of it, the like of
deep drains. Then the side all shuts down on what’s left, ye’ll
understand, and maybe no living thing’ll come that way again till the
war’s end. No! There will _not_ be much left over to a bomber that’s
missing.”)
The right attack, commanded by Captain Hubbard, which was down the
old blown-in trench that ran straight towards the centre of the
Hohenzollern, was a much tamer affair than the left. The enemy were
not struck till our advance was some eighty yards up the cut. They
fell back after a few bombs had been exchanged, and our men were able
to build a new barricade across the trench fifty yards from their
starting-point, with no serious opposition. Their chief difficulty
was to clear the newly gained stretch of the hideous mess that choked
it, and forced them into the open where the bullets were coming from
three sides at once. The men are described as “slow” in settling to
this navvy-work, which, considering their distractions, was quite
possible. Dawn caught them “with just enough cover to enable them to
continue work in a crouching position, and before very many hours
of daylight had passed they made it all good.” But their officer,
2nd Lieutenant Hamilton, was shot through the jaw while he was
superintending the work (it is impossible to direct and give orders
without standing up) and he died an hour later. He was buried on the
afternoon of the same day at the lonely, flat little cemetery of
Vermelles, which is now so full of “unknown British soldiers killed
in action.” As the expert has already pointed out, “there’s not much
left over to a bomber that’s missing.”
The total loss in the night’s fray was Hamilton killed, Tallents
and Synge wounded, and about sixty other ranks killed, wounded, and
missing. The net gain was a few score yards of trench, of which the
enemy held both ends, with a “No Man’s Land” on either flank of
about as far as one could throw a bomb over a barricade. In front,
not a hundred yards off, a most efficient German trench with lavish
machine-guns sniped them continuously between the breathing-spaces
of our shell-fire. Our own big stuff, bursting on and near that
trench, shook and loosened the sides of our own. The entire area had
been fought over for months, and was hampered with an incredible
profusion, or so it struck the new hands at the time, of arms,
clothing, and equipment—from shreds, wisps, and clods of sodden
uniforms that twist and catch round the legs, to loaded rifles that
go off when they are trodden on in the mud or prised up by the
entrenching tools. The bottom and sides of the cuts were studded with
corpses whose limbs and, what was worse, faces stuck out of the mixed
offal, and were hideously brought to light in cleaning up. However,
as one youngster wrote home triumphantly, “I was never _actually_
sick.”
The affair could hardly be called a success, and the Battalion did
not pretend that it was more than a first attempt in which no one
knew what was expected of them, and the men were not familiar with
their weapons.
A REST AND LAVENTIE
On the evening of the 21st October they were relieved by the 1st
Coldstream, and were grateful to go into Brigade Reserve in the
trenches beside the Vermelles railway line, where they were out of
direct contact with the enemy and the nerve-stretching racket of
their own artillery shelling a short hundred yards ahead of them.
(“The heavies are like having a good friend in a fight behind
your back, but there’s times when he’ll punch ye in the kidneys
trying to reach the other fella.”) They were put to cleaning up
old communication-trenches, and general scavenging, which, though
often in the highest degree disgusting, has a soothing effect on the
mind, precisely as tidying out a room soothes a tired woman. For the
first time in a month the strain on the young Battalion had relaxed,
and since it was their first month at the front, they had felt the
strain more than their elders. They had a general impression that the
German line had been very nearly broken at Loos; that our pressure
upon the enemy was increasingly severe; that their own artillery
were much better and stronger than his, and that, taking one thing
with another, the end might come at any moment. Since there were but
a limited number of Huns in the world, it was demonstrable that by
continually killing them the enemy would presently cease to exist.
This, be it remembered, was the note in the Press and the public mind
towards the close of 1915—the War then redly blossoming into its
second year.
As to their personal future, it seemed to be a toss-up whether they
would be kept to worry and tease Huns in trenches, or moved off
somewhere else to “do something” on a large scale; for at the back
of the general optimism there lurked a feeling that, somehow or
other, nothing very great had been actually effected. (Years later
the veterans of twenty-five, six, and seven admitted: “We were a bit
young in those days, and, besides, one had to buck up one’s people
at home. But we weren’t quite such fools as we made ourselves out to
be.”)
They were taken away from that sector altogether on the 23rd
October, marched to Noyelles, thence to Béthune on the 25th, where
they entrained for Lillers and billeted at Bourecq. This showed
that they had done with the chalk that does not hide corpses, and
that the amazing mud round Armentières and Laventie would be their
portion. At that date the Battalion stood as follows, and the
list is instructive as showing how very little the army of that
epoch had begun to specialise. It was commanded by Lieut.-Colonel
Hon. L. Butler; Adjutant Captain (temporary) J. S. N. FitzGerald;
Transport Officer Lieutenant C. Moore; Bomb Officer 2nd Lieutenant
R. E. Coxon; Quartermaster 2nd Lieutenant J. Brennan. Companies:
No. 1, Captain Witts, Lieutenant Nugent, 2nd Lieutenant Pym; No. 2,
Captain (temporary) Parsons, 2nd Lieutenants Hannay and James; No. 3,
Captain (temporary) R. Rankin, Lieutenant Montgomery, 2nd Lieutenant
Watson; No. 4, Captain (temporary) Hubbard, Lieutenant Kinahan, 2nd
Lieutenant Brew.
Drafts of eighty-five men in all had come in since they went into
Brigade Reserve, and Captain Alexander, who had been sick with
influenza and fever for the past fortnight, during which time the 1st
Battalion had demanded him urgently, went over to it as Temporary
C.O. and Temporary Major.
So they settled down at Bourecq, which in peace time has few merits,
and devoted themselves to eating and to talking about food between
meals. In the trenches they had not eaten with discrimination. Out of
them, they all demanded variety and abundance, sweets, solids, and
savouries devoured at any hour, and sleep unlimited to settle it all.
Lord Cavan came on the last day of the month and addressed them as
their Divisional Commander; which meant a parade in wet weather. He
congratulated them on their fine work of the preceding fortnight
(the trench-affairs round Hohenzollern) and on “the fine fighting
spirit which had enabled them to persevere and accomplish their task
in spite of an initial rebuff.” (“He knew as well as we did that
if we hadn’t hoofed the Hun out of the trench the Hun would have
hoofed us,” was one comment.) He assured the Battalion that the lives
unfortunately lost in the undertaking had not been lost in vain,
and that it was only by continually harassing him that we would
eventually defeat the German. He said that the Battalion had begun
well, and he only wished for it that it might do as well as the 1st,
“than which no finer example of a Guards Battalion existed.” “And
that,” said one of those who were young when the speech was made, and
lived to be very old and wise, “was at a time when we had literally
no troop railways, and relatively no artillery. And they told us we
were going to break through every time we had cleared fifty Jerries
out of a front-line trench!”
Two Lewis-guns, which were then new things, had been supplied to
the Battalion, and teams were made up and instructed in the working
by 2nd Lieutenant Hannay, while the Bomb Officer, 2nd Lieutenant
Coxon, had his bombing-teams out daily, and it is recorded that on
one afternoon the bombers of Nos. 1 and 2 Companies, thirty-two in
all, threw fifty live bombs at practice. Then it rained drearily and
incessantly for days and nights on end, and there was nothing to do
but to eat and attend lectures. A fresh draft of fifty men turned
up. Second Lieutenant Keenan, who had been sick, and 2nd Lieutenant
Synge, who had been wounded in the bombing attack, rejoined a few
days before they marched with the 2nd Guards Brigade to new billets
at La Gorgue in mud. Here they had huge choice of mixed discomforts,
for the whole sad landscape was sodden with autumn rain. They were to
take over from the 60th Brigade at Laventie a peaceful semi-flooded
sector, with every promise, for which they were not in the least
grateful, of staying in that part of the world the winter long.
The seasonal pause had begun when men merely died without achieving
visible result, even in the Press. The C.O.’s and Adjutants of
the Brigade, accompanied by the Brigadier-General, made wet and
melancholy reconnaissances to their destined stamping ground—an
occasion when every one is forgiven for being in the worst of
tempers. The one unpardonable offence was false and bustling
optimism. The Battalion’s line ran from Winchester road on the left
to South Moated Grange on the right, all “in very bad order owing to
the recent rain.”
Next day, the 12th November, the medical officer and the four company
commanders were added to the reconnaissance parties. (“It was like
going into a cold bath, one toe at a time. And I don’t see how
looking at it for a week in advance could have made it any better.”)
Wet days followed the wet nights with Hunnish precision. A wretched
Lieutenant (Montgomery) was sent out like Noah’s dove to “arrange the
route for leading his company in,” the communication-trenches being
flooded; and on the 14th November, after Divine Service, the men were
paraded in billets and “rubbed their feet with anti-frostbite grease
preparatory to going into the trenches.” It seems a small matter, but
the Battalion had been in the way of hearing a good deal about the
horrors of the previous winter in the Ypres Salient, when men were
forbidden to stand for more than twelve hours at a time belly-deep
in water without relief—“if possible.” (“That foot-greasing fatigue,
with what the old hands told us was in store, put the wind up us
worse than Loos. We was persuaded we would be drowned and frost-bit
by whole platoons.”)
They paraded that afternoon and marched down to their dreary
baptism. Boots—“gum, thigh, long”—had been supplied limitedly to the
companies, and they changed into them in a ruined cottage behind
the lines, leaving their marching boots to be picked up on return.
“Thus some men were able to wade without getting wet,” says the
Diary. It was not so with others. For example, the whole of No. 3
Company was taken along one thoroughly flooded communication-trench
half-way up their thighs. A platoon of No. 2 was similarly treated,
only their guide lost his way, and as all the support-trenches were
flooded, 2 and 3 had to be packed in the fire-trenches. Nos. 4 and
1 got off without a complete soaking, and it is pathetic to see how
the Battalion, to whom immoderate and omnipresent dampness was still
a new thing, record their adventures in detail. But it was not so
much water as the immensely sticky mud that oppressed them, with the
consequent impossibility of being able to lie down even for a moment.
Then it froze of nights. All which are miseries real as wounds or
sickness.
They were kept warm for the whole of their tour by repairing the
fallen parapets. Shelling was light and not important, but some
shrapnel wounded Captain G. Hubbard, and enemy snipers killed three
and wounded six men in the forty-eight hours. When the Coldstream
relieved them on the evening of the 16th November, which they did in
less than four hours, they felt that they could not face the flooded
communication-trenches a second time, and made their way home across
the open in the dark with no accident. Avoidable discomfort is ever
worse than risk of death; for, like the lady in the _Ingoldsby
Legends_, they “didn’t mind death but they couldn’t stand pinching.”
On relief, they went into Brigade Reserve in close billets near Rouge
Croix, No. 1 Company furnishing an officer and platoon as garrison
for the two posts Rouge Croix East and West. Life was reduced to
watching the rain drive in swathes across the flat desolation of the
land, improving billets under the supervision of the Engineers, which
is ever a trial, and sending parties to flounder and dig in the dark
at new works behind the firing-line.
Snipers on both sides began to find each other’s range and
temperament, and “put in good work” according to their lights and
opportunities. The enemy developed a taste for mining, and it was
necessary to investigate by patrol some craters that appeared
spottily on the Battalion’s front, and might hide anything. The
Germans met these attempts with grenades (minenwerfers not being yet
in existence), which fell short; but their burst and direction gave
our rifles their line. The days passed with long, quiet intervals
when one caught the drawing scrape of a spade or the thicker note
of a hammer on revetting stakes—all difficult to locate exactly,
for sound runs along trenches like water. A pump would gurgle,
a bucket clink, or a shift of the rare sunlight sparkle on some
cautiously raised periscope. That crumb of light drawing a shot
from an over-keen watcher, half a dozen single shots would answer
it. One or other of the four Battalion Lewis-guns would be moved to
spray the sector of tumbled dirt which it commanded. In the midst of
the stuttered protest, without whoop or wail of warning, a flight
of whizz-bangs would call the parapet to order as emphatically as
the raps of the schoolmaster’s cane silence the rising clamour of a
class-room. The hint would be taken, for none were really anxious to
make trouble, and silence would return so swiftly that, before the
spades had ceased repairing the last-blown gap in the head-cover, one
heard the yawn of an utterly bored private in the next bay fretting
under his kit because there was no possibility of sneaking a “lay
down.”
It was pettifogging work for both sides, varied with detestable
cleaning out “the height of the muck,” wrestling with sodden
sand-bags and throwing up breast-works on exposed ground, so
that men might smuggle themselves along clear of the flooded
communication-trenches.
The first idea of raiding on a system was born out of that dull time;
the size of the forces is noteworthy.
On the 20th November, a misty day when things were quiet, the
C.O.’s of the two front-line Battalions (3rd Grenadiers and 2nd
Irish Guards) together with the commandants of artillery brigades
and batteries in the vicinity were assembled “to select passages
to be cut by artillery fire at certain places, and for these to
be kept constantly open, while raids one or two companies strong
paid surprise visits to the German lines, killing or capturing
and returning.” Three such places were thus chosen on the brigade
front, one of which was in the line of the centre company of the 2nd
Irish Guards. Having neatly laid out that much trouble for their
successors, they were relieved by the 3rd Coldstream, marched to
billets at La Gorgue and came into Divisional Reserve at 10.30 P. M.
They expected, as they were entitled to, a long night in the Girls’
School which they occupied. But, for reasons which have long since
passed with dead policies, it was important that the late Mr. John
Redmond, M.P., should inspect them next morning. So their sleep was
cut and they and their 1st Battalion marched a mile out of La Gorgue,
and hung about for an hour on a muddy road in morning chill, till Mr.
Redmond, blandly ignorant of his deep unpopularity at the moment,
walked down the lines and shook hands after the manner of royalty
with each officer. One of these chanced to be an ex-R.I.C. who, on
the last occasion they had met, was engaged in protecting Mr. Redmond
from the attentions of Mr. O’Brien’s followers in a faction-fight
at Mallow. Mr. Redmond did not remember this, but the tale unholily
delighted the Battalion, on their way to Divine Service afterwards.
Lieutenant T. Nugent left them on the 21st November to join the
1st Battalion with a view to appointment as Adjutant. This was a
season, too, when a little leave might be counted on as within the
possibilities. Nothing was breathed about it officially, but hopeful
rumours arose that they were likely to be in billets well back of the
firing-line for the next few weeks. The mere chance of five or six
days’ return to real life acts as unexpectedly as drink or drugs
on different temperaments. Some men it fills with strenuous zeal.
Others it placates so that the hardiest “bad character” can take
advantage of them; and there are yet those who, fretting and yearning
beneath the mask of discipline, are hardly fit to approach on light
matters till their date for home has been settled. Moreover, one’s
first service-leave is of a quality by itself, and in those days was
specially precious to parents and relatives, who made themselves
cling to the piteous belief that the War might, somehow, end at any
moment, even while their beloved was safe with them.