at a time, on the 28th and 29th, whereby Lieutenant Moore, then
Acting Quartermaster, distinguished himself by promptitude, resource,
and organisation, remembered to his honour far beyond mere military
decorations. At the eleventh hour, owing to the breweries in the
back-area being flooded, there was a shortage of beer that should
wash down the beef and the pounds of solidest plum-pudding. “As it
would have been obviously preferable to have had beer and no dinners
to dinners and no beer, Lieutenant Moore galloped off to Estaires
pursued by a waggon, while the Second in Command having discovered
that some of the Eleventh Corps (it is always sound to stand well
with the corps you hope to join) also wanted beer, promised to get
it for them if supplied with a lorry, obtained same and bumped off
to Hazebrouck. Lieutenant Moore succeeded in getting 500 litres in
Estaires and got back in time.” So all was well.
Festivities began a little before two, and lasted till eight. They
sat at tables and ate off plates which they had not done since
leaving England. Food and drink are after all the only vital matters
in war.
The year closed with an interesting lecture on the principles of
war, delivered at La Gorgue, which dealt with the “futility of ever
surrendering the initiative,” and instanced some French operations
round Hartmannsweillerkopf on the Alsace front, when a German
general, heavily attacked, launched a counter-attack elsewhere along
the line, forcing his enemy to return to their original position
after heavy loss. Another example from the German gas-attack on St.
Julien, when the English confined themselves to desperately attacking
the captured section, whereby they only lost more men instead of
counter-attacking farther down the ridge. This led to the conclusion
that “to sit passively on the defensive with no idea of attacking
was so fatuous as not to be worth considering as an operation of
war.” At present, said the lecturer, we were on the defensive, but
purely to gain time until we had the men and materials ready for a
great offensive. Meantime the correct action was to “wear down the
enemy in every way.” Whence the conclusion that the attitude of the
Guards Division for the past seven weeks had been eminently proper;
since our guns had bombarded “all the time,” and had cut the German
wire in many places, so that the enemy never knew when he would
be attacked. Further, our troops had thrice entered his trenches,
besides twice making every preparation to do so (when, finding he
was ready, we “very rightly abandoned the enterprise”). Not once, it
was shown, had the enemy even attempted to enter our trenches. In
fact, he was reduced “to a state of pulp and blotting-paper.” The
lecture ended with the news that our motor-buses and lateral railways
could concentrate one army corps on any part of the British front
in twenty-four hours, and two corps in forty-eight. Also that the
Supreme Command had decided it was useless to break through anywhere
on a narrower front than twenty kilometres.
And on this good hearing the year ’15 ended for the 2nd Battalion
of the Irish Guards; the War, owing to the lack of men and material
which should have been trained and prepared beforehand, having just
two years, ten months, and eleven days more to run.
[Illustration: _SECOND BATTALION_
_Actions & Billets._
_Emery Walker Ltd. del. et sc._]
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY EMERY WALKER LTD., LONDON
1916
SALIENT AND THE SOMME
The mild and rainy weather loosed floods on all the low-lying fields
round Laventie. The 2nd Guards Brigade relieved the 3rd in the
Laventie sector, and the 2nd Battalion Irish Guards marched seven
miles in wind and wet from La Gorgue, of the battered little church,
to its old ground and old routine—first at the north end of Laventie
where it took over Dead End, Picantin, and Laventie East posts, from
the 4th Grenadiers; and, on the evening of the 3rd January, into the
well-kept trenches beyond Red House. They relieved the 1st Coldstream
here, and their leading company, in column of route behind Red House,
lost six men on the road from a savage, well-timed burst of H.E. One
man had an extraordinary double escape. A fragment of shell first hit
his ammunition which exploded, leaving him, for some absurd reason,
unhurt. Even as he was trying to find out what had happened, a big
shell dove directly under his feet, and, as he said, if it had burst
“they wouldn’t have found the nails to my boots.” But it plumped
harmlessly in the muddy ground. The same kind Providence looked after
the orderly-room kitten. Her faithful orderly was carrying the little
lady up to war on rats, when two blind shells pitched, one on each
side of him.
An unexpected diversion turned up in the front line in the shape of
a cinema operator who unlimbered his camera on the parapet behind
the sand-bags and took pictures of our guns shelling enemy wire a
hundred yards ahead. Then he demanded “scenes in the trenches,” which
were supplied him, with all the Irish sense of drama, but, as local
opinion thought, a little too much “arranged.” Notably one picture
of a soldier tending a grave. An officer correspondent writes grimly,
“We have quite enough work digging graves to mind about tending
them.” The film duly appeared in the halls and revues, sometimes
before the eyes of those who would never again behold in life one
particular face there.
It turned out a quiet tour of duty; the two lines were so close
together that much shelling was inexpedient, and snipers gave no
trouble. So all hands were free to attend their own comforts, notably
the care and discharge of drains. The R.E. who, contrary to popular
belief, sometimes have bowels, had added wooden floors to many of the
little huts behind the redoubts. Company Headquarters were luxurious,
with real windows, and even window-curtains; the slimy trenches were
neatly boarded over and posted, and men went about their business
almost dry-shod. It was, as we know, the custom of those parts that,
before entering the line, troops should dump their ankle-boots at
a farm-house just behind Red House, and go on in the long trench
boots. For no earthly reason that the Irish could arrive at, the
Hun took it into his methodical head one night to shell their huge
boot-dump where, as a matter of course, some regimental shoemakers
were catching up with repairs. The shoemakers bolted like ferreted
rabbits, and all the world, except those whose boots were buried,
laughed at them. So long as a man comes through it alive, his agonies
and contortions in the act of dodging death are fair game.
On the nights of the 4th and 5th January they began to engineer the
detail of a local raid which marked progress in the art. Patrols went
out from each company in the front line to hunt for weak places. The
patrol from the right company worked to within fifteen yards of the
enemy, got into boggy ground, noisy with loose wire, listened an
hour to the Germans working and talking, and came back. The right
centre company patrol slopped up a ditch for a full furlong, then
ran into a cross-ditch fifteen feet wide, with a trip-wire (the
enemy disliked being taken unawares), and also returned like the
dove of old. Similarly the left-centre patrol, which found more
ditch and trip-wires leading them to a singularly stout section of
trench where two Germans looked over the edge of the parapet, and the
general landscape was hostile. The left company had the luck. It was
an officer’s patrol commanded again by 2nd Lieutenant Brew. Their
crawl led them along a guiding line of willows, and to within six
feet of a salient guarded by a three-foot wire belt. But a few yards
farther down, they came across a gap our guns had made—not clean-cut,
but easy enough, in their opinion, to “negotiate.” As far as men
on their bellies could make out, the line seemed held by sentries
at wide intervals who, after the manner of single sentries, fired
often at nothing and sent up lights for the pleasure of seeing their
support-line answer them. (“As we was everlastingly telling the new
hands, the fewer there are of ye _anny_where, the less noise should
ye be after making _anny_how. But ’tis always the small, lonely,
miserable little man by himself that gives forth noises like large
platoons.”) Then they were relieved by the 1st Coldstream, and their
Acting C.O. (Captain Eric Greer) was instructed to produce a scheme
for a really good raid from the left of their line on the weak place
discovered. The Coldstream would attend to it during their tour, if
the Irish furnished the information. Greer worked it out lovingly
to the last detail. Three riflemen and three bombers were to lead
off on the right, and as many on the left followed by a “killing and
demolition party,” armed with bludgeons, of an officer and eight
other ranks. A support party of one N.C.O. and five other ranks,
with rifles and bayonets, and a connecting party of two signallers
with telephones and four stretcher-bearers brought up the rear of
what the ribald afterwards called “our mournful procession.” It
was further laid down that a wire-cutting party (and the men hated
wire-cutting) would “improve the gap in the enemy’s wire” for the
space of one hour. The raiders were to work quietly along the line
of the providential willows till they found the gap; then would
split into two gangs left and right, and attend to the personnel in
the trench “as quickly and silently as possible, never using bombs
when they can bayonet a man.” The rest were to enter afterwards, and
destroy and remove all they could find. “If possible and convenient,
they will take a prisoner who will be immediately passed back to our
trench by the supporting-party. Faces to be blacked for the sake of
‘frightfulness,’ mutual recognition, and invisibility,” and electric
torches carried. The officer in charge was to be a German linguist,
for the reason that a prisoner, hot and shaken at the moment of
capture, and before being “passed back” was likely to exude more
information than when cold and safe in our own lines.
There was nothing special on at the Front just then; and the 2nd
Battalion and the Coldstream discussed and improved that raid at
every point they could think of. One authority wanted a double
raid, from left and right fronts simultaneously, but they explained
that this particular affair would need “so much quietness” in
combined stalking that it would be “inconvenient to run it on a
time schedule.” Then our guns were given word to cut wire in quite
other directions from the chosen spot which was no more to be
disturbed till the proper time than a pet cover. That was on the 7th
January. On the night of the 8th the Twentieth Division on their
left announced that they were “going to let off gas” at 2 A. M., and
follow up with a raid. The Battalion had to stand to arms, stifling
in its respirators, during its progress; and by the glare of the
enemy’s lights could see our gas drifting low in great grey clouds
towards the opposite lines. They observed, too, a number of small
explosions in the German side when the gas reached there, which
seemed to dissipate it locally. The enemy guns were badly served,
opening half an hour late and pitching shell in their own wire and
trenches, but they hardly annoyed the Battalion at all. The affair
was over in a couple of hours. (“There is nothing, mark you, a man
hates like a division on his flank stirring up trouble. Ye know the
poor devils have no choice of it, but it looks always as if they was
doing it to spite their neighbours, and not Jerry at all.”)
But the pleasure of the Twentieth Division was not allowed to
interfere with the business of their own private raid. Before the gas
was “let off” 2nd Lieutenant Brew again chaperoned two scouts of the
Coldstream to show them the gap in the wire in case they cared to try
it on their tour. It was found easily and reported to be passable in
single file.
But, as they said wrathfully afterwards, who could have guessed
that, on the night of the 10th, after the Coldstream’s wire-cutting
party had worked for two hours, and their raiders had filed through
the gap, and met more wire on the parapet which took more time to
cut—when they at last dropped into the trench and searched it for
three long hours they—found no sign of a German? The Coldstream’s
sole trophies were some bombs, a box of loaded M.G. belts, and one
rocket!
When they relieved the Coldstream on the 11th January, they naturally
tried their own hand on the problem. By this time they had discovered
themselves to be a “happy” battalion which they remained throughout.
None can say precisely how any body of men arrives at this state.
Discipline, effort, doctrine, and unlimited care and expense on
the part of the officers do not necessarily secure it; for there
have been battalions in our armies whose internal arrangements
were scandalously primitive, whose justice was neolithic, and yet
whose felicity was beyond question. It may be that the personal
attributes of two or three leading spirits in the beginning set a
note to which the other young men, of generous minds, respond: half
a dozen superior N.C.O.’s can, sometimes, raise and humanise the
soul of a whole battalion; but, at bottom, the thing is a mystery
to be accepted with thankfulness. The 2nd Battalion of the Irish
Guards was young throughout, the maker of its own history, and the
inheritor of the Guards’ tradition; but its common background was
ever Warley where they had all first met and been moulded—officers
and men together. So happiness came to them and stayed, and with it,
unity, and, to use the modern slang, “efficiency” in little things as
well as big—confidence and joyous mutual trust that carries unspoken
through the worst of breakdowns.
The blank raid still worried them, and there may have been, too, some
bets on the matter between themselves and the Coldstream. At any rate
2nd Lieutenant Brew reappears—his C.O. and the deeply interested
battalion in confederacy behind him.
On the night of the 11th of January, Brew took out a small patrol and
entered the German trench that they were beginning to know so well.
He re-cut the wire, made a new gap for future uses, explored, built
two barricades in the trench itself; got bogged up among loose wire,
behind which he guessed (but the time was not ripe to wake up that
hornet’s nest) the German second line lay, and—came back before dawn
with a periscope as proof that the trench was occupied by daylight.
“The enterprise suffered from the men’s lack of experience in
patrolling by night,” a defect that the C.O. took care to remedy.
As a serious interlude, for milk was a consideration, “the cow at Red
House calved successfully. Signallers, orderlies, and others were
present at the accouchement.” Doubtless, too, the orderly-room kitten
kept an interested eye on the event.
In the afternoon the Brigadier came round, and the C.O. and the
2nd Lieutenant discussed a plan of the latter to cross the German
line and lie up for the day in some disused trench or shell-hole.
It was dismissed as “practical but too risky.” Moreover, at that
moment there was a big “draw” on hand, with the idea of getting
the enemy out of their second line and shelling as they came up.
The Battalion’s private explorations must stand over till it was
finished. Three infantry brigades took part in this game, beginning
at dusk—the Guards on the left, the 114th Brigade in the centre,
and the left battalion of the Nineteenth Division on the right. The
114th Brigade, which was part of the Thirty-eighth Division, had
just relieved the 1st Guards Brigade. Every one stood to arms with
unlimited small-arm ammunition handy, and as daylight faded over
the enemy’s parapets the 114th sent up a red rocket followed by one
green to mark Zero. There was another half minute to go in which a
motor machine-gun got overtilted and started to gibber. Then the
riot began. Both battalions of the 2nd Guards Brigade, the left
half-battalion of the 114th Brigade, and the left of the Nineteenth
Division opened rapid fire with rifles, machine-, and Lewis-guns. At
the same time, our artillery on the right began a heavy front and
enfilade bombardment of the German line while our howitzers barraged
the back of it. The infantry, along the Winchester Road, held their
fire, but simulated, with dummies which were worked by ropes, a line
of men in act to leave the trenches. Last, the artillery on our left
joined in, while the dummies were handled so as to resemble a second
line attacking.
To lend verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing
narrative, the guns on the right lifted and began shelling back-lines
and communication-trenches, as though to catch reinforcements, while
the dummies jigged and shouldered afresh on their energetic ropes.
The enemy took the thing in quite the right spirit. He replied with
rifle-fire; he sent up multitudes of red lights, which always soothed
him when upset; and his artillery plastered the ground behind our
centre with big shells that could be heard crumping somewhere in the
interior of France till our own guns, after a ten minutes’ pause,
came down once more. Over and above the annoyance to him of having to
rush up supports into the front line, it was reasonable to suppose
that our deluges of small-arm stuff must have done him some damage.
“The men were all prepared and determined to enjoy themselves, the
machine-gunners were out to show what a lot of noise they could
really make, and the fire must have been infinitely uncomfortable
for German quartermaster-sergeants, cookers, and others, wandering
about behind the line with rations—if they walk about as much as we
do. One of the companies alone loosed off 7000 rounds, including
Lewis-guns, during the flurry.”
They were back at La Gorgue again on the 13th January, in divisional
rest; the 3rd Guards Brigade relieving them. While there the C.O.
launched a scheme for each subaltern to pick and train six men
on his own, so as to form the very hard core of any patrols or
bombing-parties he might have to lead hereafter. They were specially
trained for spotting things and judging distance at night; and the
tales that were told about them and their adventures and their
confidences would fill several unprintable books. (There was an
officer who did not so much boast as mount, with a certain air, a
glass eye. One night, during patrol, he was wounded in the shoulder,
and brought in by his pet patrol-leader, a private of unquestioned
courage, with, by the way, a pretty taste for feigning abject fear
when he wished to test new men with whom he was working in No Man’s
Land. He rendered first aid to his officer whose wound was not
severe, and then invited him to “take a shquint” at the result. The
officer had to explain that he was blind on that side. Whereupon, the
private, till the doctor turned up, drew loud and lively pictures of
the horror of his wife at home, should it ever come to her knowledge
that her man habitually crawled about France in the dark with an
officer “blinded on the half of him.”)
They rested for nearly a fortnight at La Gorgue, attended a
lecture—“if not instructive, at least highly entertaining”—by Max
Abbat, the well-known French boxer, on “Sport and what England had
done for France,” and had a regimental dinner, when ten of the
officers of the First Battalion came over from Merville with their
brigadier and the Staff Captain, and Lieutenant Charles Moore who had
saved the Battalion Christmas dinners, looked after them all to the
very end which, men say, became nebulous. Some one had been teaching
the Battalion to bomb in style, for their team of thirty returned
from Brigade Bombing School easy winners, by one hundred points in
the final competition. (“Except that the front line is mostly quieter
and _always_ more safe, there is no differ betwixt the front line and
Bombing School.”)
They went back into line and support-billets on the 26th relieving
the 3rd Guards Brigade; and the Battalion itself taking over from the
1st Grenadiers on the Red House sector, Laventie. Apparently, the
front line had been fairly peaceful in their absence, but they noted
that the Grenadier Headquarters seemed “highly pleased to go,” for
the enemy had got in seven direct hits that very day on Red House
itself. One shell had dropped in “the best upstairs bedroom, and two
through the roof.” They took this as a prelude to a Kaiser’s birthday
battle, as there had been reports of loyal and patriotic activities
all down that part of the line, and rumours of increased railway
movement behind it. A generous amount of tapped German wireless lent
colour to the belief. Naturally, Battalion Headquarters at Red House
felt all the weight of the war on their unscreened heads, and all
hands there, from the adjutant and medical officer to the orderlies
and police strengthened the defences with sand-bags. A battalion
cannot be comfortable if its headquarters’ best bedrooms are turned
out into the landscape. No attacks, however, took place, and night
patrols reported nothing unusual for the 26th and 27th January.
A new devilry (January 28) now to be tried were metal tubes filled
with ammonal, which were placed under enemy wire and fired by
electricity. They called them “Bangalore torpedoes” and they were
guaranteed to cut all wire above them. At the same time, dummies,
which had become a fashionable amusement along the line, would be
hoisted by ropes out of our trenches to the intent that the enemy
might be led to man his parapets that our guns might sweep them. It
kept the men busy and amused, and they were more excited when our
snipers reported that they could make out a good deal of movement
in the line in front of Red House, where Huns in small yellow caps
seemed to be “rolling something along the trench.” Snipers were
forbidden to pot-shot until they could see a man’s head and shoulders
clearly, as experience had proved that at so long a range—the lines
here were full two hundred yards apart—“shooting on the chance of
hitting half a head merely made the enemy shy and retiring.” One gets
the impression that, in spite of the “deadening influence of routine”
(some of the officers actually complained of it in their letters
home!) the enemy’s “shyness,” at that moment, might have been due
to an impression that he was facing a collection of inventive young
fiends to whom all irregular things were possible.
They went into brigade reserve at Laventie on the 30th of the month,
with genuine regrets, for the trenches that they had known so long.
“We shall never be as comfortable anywhere else,” one boy wrote; and
the C.O. who had spent so much labour and thought there lifts up a
swan-song which shows what ideal trenches should be. “Handed over in
November in a bad state, they are now as nearly perfect as a line in
winter can be. The parapets are perfect, the fire-steps all wooden
and in good repair. The dug-outs, or rather the little huts which
answer to that name in this swampy country, their frameworks put up
by the engineers and sand-bagged up by the infantry, are dry and
comfortable. The traffic-trench, two boards wide in most places, is
dry everywhere. Wherever trench-boards ran on sand-bags or mud they
have been painted and put on piles. The wire in front of the line is
good.”
They were due for rest at Merville, farther out of the way of fire
than La Gorgue, for the next week or so, but their last day in
Laventie was cheered by an intimate lecture on the origin, nature,
and effects of poison-gas, delivered by a doctor who had seen the
early trials of it at Ypres. He told them in cold detail how the
Canadians slowly drowned from the base of the lung upwards, and
of the scenes of horror in the ambulances. Told them, too, how
the first crude antidotes were rushed out from England in a couple
of destroyers, and hurried up to the line by a fleet of motor
ambulances, so that thirty-six hours after the first experience, some
sort of primitive respirators were issued to the troops. The lecture
ended with assurances that the ’15 pattern helmets were gas-proof for
three quarters of an hour against any gas then in use, if they were
properly inspected, put on and breathed through in the prescribed
manner.