factory close to the messes. Naturally, there was no adequate
fire-engine, and by the time that the A.S.C. turned up, amid the
cheers of the crowd whom they squirted with an extincteur, the place
was burned out. “When nothing was left but the walls and some glowing
timbers we heard, creeping up the street, a buzz of admiration and
applause. The crowd round the spot parted, and in strode a figure,
gaunt and magnificent, attired in spotless white breeches, black
boots and gaiters, a blue jacket and a superb silver helmet. He was
the Lieutenant of Pompiers, and had, of course, arrived a bit late
owing to the necessity of dressing for the part. He stalked round
the ring of urban dignities who were in the front row, shook each by
the hand with great solemnity, stared gloomily at the remains of the
house and departed.”
There was no expectation of any imminent attack anywhere, both sides
were preparing for “the spring meeting,” as our people called it; and
leave was being given with a certain amount of freedom. This left
juniors sometimes in charge of full companies, an experience that
helped to bring forward the merits of various N.C.O.’s and men; for
no two company commanders take the same view of the same private;
and on his return from leave the O.C. may often be influenced by the
verdict of his _locum tenens_ to give more or less responsibility to
a particular individual. _Thus: Locum Tenens._ “I say, Buffles, while
you were away, I took out Hasken—No, not ‘Bullock’ Hasken—‘Spud’—on
that double-ditch patrol, out by the dead rifle-man. He didn’t strike
_me_ as a fool.”
_Buffles._ “Didn’t he? _I_ can’t keep my patience with him. He talks
too much.”
_L. T._ “Not when he’s outside the wire. And he doesn’t see things
in the dark as much as some of ’em.” (Meditatively, mouth filled
with fondants brought from home by Buffles.) “Filthy stuff this
war-chocolate is.” (Pause.) “Er, what do _you_ think? He’s lance
already.”
_Buffles._ “I know it. I don’t think he’s much of a lance either.
Well ...”
_L. T._ “Anyhow, he’s dead keen on night jobs. But if you took him
once or twice and tried him.... He _is_ dead keen.... Eh?”
_Buffles._ “All right. We’ll see. Where is that dam’ logbook?” Thus
the matter is settled without one direct word being spoken, and
“Spud” Hasken comes to his own for better or for worse.
On the 7th February, they were shifted, as they had anticipated,
to the left of the right sector of the divisional front, which
meant much less comfortable trenches round Pont du Hem, and badly
battered Headquarters at Winchester House. They relieved the 1st
Coldstream in the line on the 9th, and found at once plenty of work
in strengthening parapets, raising trench-boards, and generally
attending to their creature comforts. (“Never have I known _any_
battalion in the Brigade that had a good word to say for the way the
other battalions live. We might all have been brides, the way we went
to our new housekeepings in every new place—turnin’ up our noses at
our neighbours.”)
And while they worked, Headquarters were “briefly but accurately”
shelled with whizz-bangs. On the 11th February the pace quickened
a little. There was mining along that front on both sides, and our
miners from two mines had reported they had heard work going on
over their heads only a hundred and twenty yards out from our own
parapets. It might signify that the enemy were working on “Russian
saps”—shallow mines, almost like mole-runs, designed to bring a
storming party right up to our parapets under cover. The miners
were not loved for their theories, for at midnight along the whole
Battalion front, pairs of unhappy men had to lie out on ground-sheets
listening for any sound of subterranean picks. The proceedings, it
is recorded, somewhat resembled a girls’ school going to bed, and
the men said that all any one got out of the manœuvres was “blashts
of ear-ache.” But, as the Diary observes, if there were any mining
on hand, the Germans would naturally knock off through the quietest
hours of the twenty-four.
In some ways it was a more enterprising enemy than round the Red
House, and they felt, rather than saw, that there were patrols
wandering about No Man’s Land at unseemly hours. So the Battalion
sent forth a couple of Lewis-gunners with their weapon, two bombers
with their bombs, and one telephonist complete with field telephones.
These, cheered by hot drinks, lay up a hundred yards from our
parapets, installed their gun in an old trench, and telephoned
back on prearranged signals for Very lights in various directions
to illumine the landscape and invite inspection. “The whole scheme
worked smoothly. In fact, it only wanted a few Germans to make it a
complete success.” And the insult of the affair was that the enemy
could be heard whistling and singing all night as they toiled at
their own mysterious jobs. In the evening, just as the Battalion
was being relieved by the Coldstream, a defensive mine, which was
to have been exploded after the reliefs were comfortably settled
in, had to go up an hour before, as the officer in charge, fearing
that the Germans who were busy in the same field might break into
his galleries at any moment, did not see fit to wait. The resulting
German flutter just caught the end of the relief, and two platoons
of No. 1 Company were soundly shelled as they went down the Rue du
Bacquerot to Rugby Road. However, no one was hurt. The men of the 2nd
Battalion were as unmoved by mines as were their comrades in the
1st. They resented the fatigue caused by extra precautions against
them, but the possibilities of being hoisted sky-high at any moment
did not shake the Celtic imagination.
While in Brigade Reserve for a couple of days No. 1 Company amused
itself preparing a grim bait to entice German patrols into No Man’s
Land. Two dummies were fabricated to represent dead English soldiers.
“One, designed to lie on its back, had a face modelled by Captain
Alexander from putty and paint which for ghastliness rivalled
anything in Madame Tussaud’s. The frame-work of the bodies was wire,
so they could be twisted into positions entirely natural.” While they
were being made, on the road outside Brigade Headquarters at Pont du
Hem, a French girl came by and believing them to be genuine, fled
shrieking down the street. They were taken up to the front line on
stretchers, and it chanced that in one trench they had to give place
to let a third stretcher pass. On it was a dead man, whom no art
could touch.
Next night, February 15, between moonset and dawn, the grisliest
hour of the twenty-four, Lieutenant Pym took the twins out into No
Man’s Land, arranging them one on its face and the other on its
back in such attitudes as are naturally assumed by the old warped
dead. “Strapped between the shoulders of the former, for the greater
production of German curiosity, was a cylinder sprouting india-rubber
tubes. This was intended to resemble a flammenwerfer.” Hand- and
rifle-grenades were then hurled near the spot to encourage the theory
(the Hun works best on a theory) that two British patrols had fought
one another in error, and left the two corpses. At evening, the
Lewis-gun party and a brace of bombers lay out beside the kill, but
it was so wet and cold that they had to be called in, and no one was
caught. And all this fancy-work, be it remembered, was carried out
joyously and interestedly, as one might arrange for the conduct of
private theatricals or the clearance of rat-infested barns.
On the 16th they handed over to the 9th Welsh of the Nineteenth
Division, and went back to La Gorgue for two days’ rest. Then the 2nd
Guards Brigade moved north to other fields. The “spring meeting” that
they talked about so much was a certainty somewhere or other, but it
would be preceded, they hoped, by a period of “fattening up” for the
Division. (“We knew, as well as the beasts do, that when Headquarters
was kind to us, it meant getting ready to be killed on the hoof—but
it never put us off our feed.”) Poperinghe, and its camps, was their
immediate destination, which looked, to the initiated, as if Ypres
salient would be the objective; but they had been promised, or had
convinced themselves, that there would be a comfortable “stand-easy”
before they went into that furnace, of which their 1st Battalion
had cheered them with so many quaint stories. Their first march was
of fifteen miles through Neuf and Vieux-Berquin—and how were they
to know what the far future held for them there?—to St. Sylvestre,
of little houses strung along its typical pavé. Only one man fell
out, and he, as is carefully recorded, had been sick the day before.
Thence, Wormhoudt on the 22nd February, nine miles through a heavy
snow-storm, to bad billets in three inches of snow, which gave the
men excuse for an inter-company snowball battle. The 1st Battalion
had thankfully quitted Poperinghe for Calais, and the 2nd took
over their just vacated camp, of leaky wooden huts on a filthy
parade-ground of frozen snow at the unchristian hour of half-past
seven in the morning. On that day 2nd Lieutenant Hordern with a
draft of thirty men joined from the 7th Entrenching Battalion. (“All
winter drafts look like sick sparrows. The first thing to tell ’em
is they’ll lose their names for coughing, and the next is to strip
the Warley fat off ’em by virtue of strong fatigues.”) They were
turned on to digging trenches near their camp and practice-attacks
with live bombs; this being the beginning of the bomb epoch, in which
many officers believed, and a good few execrated. At a conference
of C.O.’s of the Brigade at Headquarters the Brigadier explained
the new system of trench-attack in successive waves about fifteen
yards apart. The idea was that if the inevitable flanking machine-gun
fire wiped out your leading wave, there was a chance of stopping the
remainder of the company before it was caught.
A lecture on the 1st March by the Major-General cheered the new
hands. He told them that “there was a great deal of work to be
done in the line we were going into. Communication-trenches were
practically non-existent and the front parapet was not continuous.
_All_ this work would have to be done by the infantry, as the
Divisional R.E. would be required for a very important line along the
Canal and in front of the town of Ypres.” One of the peculiarities of
all new lines and most R.E. corps is that the former is always out of
condition and the latter generally occupied elsewhere.
Their bombing-practice led to the usual amount of accidents, and
on the 2nd March Lieutenant Keenan was wounded in the hand by a
premature burst; four men were also wounded and one of them died.
Next day, when their Quartermaster’s party went to Calais to take
over the 1st Battalion’s camp there, they heard of the fatal accident
at bomb-practice to Lord Desmond FitzGerald and the wounding of
Lieutenant Nugent and Father Lane-Fox. They sent Captains J. S. N.
FitzGerald and Witts, and their Sergeant-Major and Drum-Major to
FitzGerald’s funeral.
On the 6th March they entrained at Poperinghe for Calais, where the
whole Brigade lay under canvas three miles out from the town beside
the Calais-Dunkirk road. “The place would have been very nice, as
the Belgian aviation ground, in the intervals of dodging the Belgian
aviators, made a fine parade and recreation ground, but life in tents
was necessarily marred by continued frost and snow.” More intimately:
“The bell-tents are all right, but the marquees leak in the most
beastly manner. There are only a few places where we can escape the
drips.”
Here they diverted themselves, and here Sir Douglas Haig reviewed
them and some Belgian artillery, which, as it meant standing about
in freezing weather, was no diversion at all. But their “Great
Calais First Spring Meeting” held on Calais Sands, in some doubt as
to whether the tide would not wipe out the steeple-chase course, was
an immense and unqualified success. Every soul in the Brigade who
owned a horse, and several who had procured one, turned out and rode,
including Father Knapp, aged fifty-eight. There were five races, and
a roaring multitude who wanted to bet on anything in or out of sight.
The Battalion bookmaker was a second lieutenant—at home a barrister
of some distinction—who, in fur coat, brown bowler of the accepted
pattern, and with a nosegay of artificial flowers in his buttonhole,
stood up to the flood of bets till they overwhelmed him; and he and
his clerk “simply had to trust to people for the amounts we owed them
after the races.” Even so, the financial results were splendid. The
mess had sent them into the fray with a capital of 1800 francs, and
when evening fell on Calais Sands they showed a profit of 800 francs.
The star performance of the day was that of the C.O.’s old charger
“The Crump,” who won the steeple-chase held an hour after winning
the mile, where he had given away three stones. His detractors
insinuated that he was the only animal who kept within the limits
of the very generous and ample course laid out by Captain Charles
Moore. There followed a small orgy of Battalion and inter-Battalion
sports and amusements—football competitions for men and officers,
with a “singing competition” for “sentimental, comic, and original
turns.” Oddly enough, in this last the Battalion merely managed to
win a consolation prize, for a private who beat a drum, whistled, and
told comic tales in brogue. It may have been he was the great and
only “Cock” Burne or Byrne of whom unpublishable Battalion-history
relates strange things in the early days. He was eminent, even among
many originals—an elderly “old soldier,” solitary by temperament,
unpredictable in action, given to wandering off and boiling tea,
which he drank perpetually in remote and unwholesome corners of
the trenches. But he had the gift, with many others, of crowing
like a cock (hence his _nom-de-guerre_), and vastly annoyed the
unhumorous Hun, whom he would thus salute regardless of time, place,
or safety. To this trick he added a certain infinitely monotonous
tom-tomming on any tin or box that came handy, so that it was easy
to locate him even when exasperated enemy snipers were silent. He
came from Kilkenny, and when on leave wore such medal-ribbons as he
thought should have been issued to him—from the V.C. down; so that
when he died, and his relatives asked why those medals had not been
sent them, there was a great deal of trouble. Professionally, he
was a “dirty” soldier, but this was understood and allowed for. He
regarded authority rather as an impertinence to be blandly set aside
than to be argued or brawled with; and he revolved in his remote
and unquestioned orbits, brooding, crowing, drumming, and morosely
sipping his tea, something between a poacher, a horse-coper, a gipsy,
and a bird-catcher, but always the philosopher and man of many queer
worlds. His one defect was that, though difficult to coax on to the
stage, once there and well set before an appreciative audience,
little less than military force could haul “Cock” Byrne off it.
They celebrated St. Patrick’s Day on the 14th March instead of the
17th, which was fixed as their date for removal; and they wound up
the big St. Patrick dinners, and the Gaelic Football Inter-company
Competition (a fearsome game), with a sing-song round a bonfire in
the open. Not one man in six of that merry assembly is now alive.
THE SALIENT FOR THE FIRST TIME
They marched out of Calais early on the 17th March, through Cassel,
and Major the Hon. A. C. S. Chichester joined on transfer from
the 1st Battalion as Second in Command. Poperinghe was reached
on the afternoon of the 18th, a sixteen-mile march in suddenly
warm weather, but nobody fell out. The town, crowded with troops,
transport, and traffic of every conceivable sort, both smelt and
looked unpleasant. It was bombed fairly regularly by enemy planes,
so windows had long since ceased to be glazed; and at uncertain
intervals a specially noxious gun, known as “Silent Susy,” sent into
its populated streets slim shells that arrived unfairly before the
noise of their passage. But neither bombs nor shells interfered with
the cinemas, the “music hall,” the Y.M.C.A. or other diversions, for
every one in “Pop” was _ipso facto_ either going into the Salient or
coming out, and in both cases needed the distraction of the words and
pictures of civilised life. They lay there for a few days, and on
the 26th March about midnight, in a great quiet, they entered Ypres,
having entrained, also with no noise whatever, from Poperinghe. The
Diary, rarely moved to eloquence, sets down: “It was an impressive
sight not to be forgotten by those who were present, as we threaded
our way through the wrecked and shattered houses. Those of the
Battalion who knew it before had not seen it since the dark days of
November ’14, when with the 1st Battalion they played their part in
the glorious First Battle of Ypres, a fight never to be forgotten in
the annals of the Irish Guards.”
[Illustration: _THE YPRES SALIENT_
_Second Battalion Actions_
_Emery Walker Ltd. del. et sc._]
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY EMERY WALKER LTD., LONDON
The impression on the new hands, that is, the majority of men and
officers, struck in and stayed for years after. Some compared their
stealthy entry to tip-toeing into the very Cathedral of Death itself;
and declared that heads bowed a little and shoulders hunched, as in
expectation of some stroke upon the instant. Also that, mingled with
this emotion, was intense curiosity to know what the place might look
like by day. (“And God knows Ypres was no treat to behold, then or
after—day or night. The way most of us took it, was we felt ’twas
The Fear itself—the same as meeting up with the Devil. I do not
remember if ’twas moonlight or dark when we came in that first time.
Dark it must have been though, or we felt it was, and there was a
lot of doings going on in that darkness, such as Military Police,
and men whispering where we was to go, and stretchers, and parties
carrying things in the dark, in and out where the houses had fallen
by lumps. And there was little blue lights showing here and there and
around, and the whole stink of the Salient, blowing back and forth
upon us, the way we’d get it up our noses for ever. Yes—and there was
transport on the pavé, wheels going dam’ quick and trying, at the
same time, not to make a noise, if ye understand.
“And I remember, too, voices out of holes low down betwixt the
rubbish-heaps. They would be the troops in cellars over against the
Cloth Hall, I expect. And ye could hear our men breathing at the
halts, and the kit squeaking on their backs, and we marching the way
we was striving not to break eggs. I know _I_ was.”)
At the time no one seemed to have noticed the peculiarity of the
Salient, which, like Verdun, appears at night surrounded by a ring
of searchlights and artillery; so that on going forward one feels
as though one were altogether cut off from the rest of the front, a
target open to every fire.
They were welcomed on the morning of the 27th March by three shells
well and truly placed, one after the other, in the courtyard of
the Convent where Battalion H.Q. stood. Six N.C.O.’s and men were
wounded, of whom Sergeant McGuinn died a few hours later. This was
the prelude to a night-long bombardment from a battery evidently told
off for the job, which opening at eleven kept it up till ten of the
morning of the 28th, when it ceased, and the remainder of the day was
quiet. One must remember that the enemy used Ypres through the years
as their gunnery school officers’ training-ground.
The 29th March was also a quiet day for the Battalion. There was,
naturally, no walking about, or any distraction from the wonder
where the next blast of fire would choose to fall, a sensation of
helplessness which is not good for the nerves. They were the right
Reserve Battalion of the Right Brigade, which, elsewhere, would
have been equivalent to being in the front line, but Ypres had its
own scale of sufferings. They worked quietly on repairs from dusk
till the first light of dawn in their trenches beyond the Canal.
From daylight to dusk again they lay up in dug-outs for the most
part, and all fires that showed smoke were forbidden. But a race
accustomed to peat can miraculously make hot tea over a few fragments
of ammunition-boxes or a fistful of stolen coke, even in the inner
bowels of a sealed dug-out. Any signs of life were punished by visits
from observation-planes or a shelling from one flank or the other;
for the enemy commanded practically all their trenches, and this
implied a constant building and repair of traverses and blindages. It
took them three hours to relieve the 1st Coldstream in the front line
on the night of the 30th March, and during relief the reserve trench
which was being taken over by No. 4 Company under Captain Eric Greer
(he had reverted to Company Officer on Major Chichester’s arrival as
Second in Command) was shelled and badly knocked about. There were
only eight men wounded, however, and the company was “perfectly cool
throughout.” (“When you know ye may be for it every minute, you can
_not_ be more frightened than frightened. The same as getting drunk,
_I_ think. After a while—dead-drunk ye get, and dead-drunk ye stay.
Ah, but they was genteel trenches and pleasant-spoken Jerries down at
Laventie where we’d come from, in front of Red House and all!”)
The last day of March brought them for one breathless half-hour
the heaviest shelling they had yet undergone; but it ended, as so
many such outbursts did, in nothing but a few slight wounds, and a
searching of the Menin road by night with big stuff that roared and
rattled on what remained of the tortured stones. One could always
know when Ypres city had been shelled afresh, by the pools of blood
on the pavé in the raw morning or some yet undisposed-of horse which
told that the night-hawking processions of the transport had caught
it once again. Their daily lives in the front and reserve line were
dark, confined, and unsavoury. One officer was ill-advised enough
to pry into the vitals of his dug-out. (“When I arrived, it did not
look so bad, as the floor was covered with sand-bags as usual.”) A
strong-stomached orderly turned in to remove a few. He found no less
than six layers of them, progressively decaying; then floor-boards
of a fabulous antiquity, and last the original slime of ’14’s
corruption. It was neglectful, but men who may be blown out of this
life any hour of the twenty-four do not devote themselves to the
continuities of house-cleaning.
In Ypres city that spring not one single building was habitable,
though many of them still retained the shapes of human dwellings. The
Battalion messes were all underground in cellars, a couple of which,
with a hole knocked through the dividing walls, make a good anteroom;
but their sole light came from a small window which also gave passage
to the stove-pipe. A tired man could doze down there, in gross fuggy
warmth and a brooding stillness broken only by the footsteps of small
parties moving without ostentation till the triple whistle of the
aeroplane-watchers sent feet scurrying loudly to cover.
Those who have known of both terrains say Verdun Salient, by reason
of its size, contours, and elevation was less of a permanent tax on
the morale than the flatness and confinement of Ypres. One could
breathe in certain spots round Verdun; look out over large horizons
from others; and solid, bold features of landscape interposed between
oneself and the enemy. The thickness and depth, too, of all France
lay behind for support. In the Salient it was so short a distance
from Calais or Boulogne that one could almost hear the Channel
threatening at one’s back, and wherever wearied eyes turned, forwards
or flank wise, the view was closed by low, sullen rises or swells of
ground, held and used in comfort and at leisure by an established
enemy.