THE GUARDS IN FLANDERS.
“... They (the 3rd French Chasseurs) had neared the cross-road, when
Wellingtons’s voice was heard clear above the storm, ‘Stand up,
Guards!’ Then from the shelter of the wayside banks rose the line of
Maitland’s brigade of Guards, four deep and fifteen hundred strong,
which poured a withering volley into the square, and charging, swept
them out of the combat.”
(“The Guards at Waterloo.” From _The
Life of Wellington_, by the Right Hon.
Sir Herbert Maxwell, Bart., M.P.)
“Tangier,” “Namur,” “Gibraltar,” “Blenheim,” “Malplaquet,” “Dettingen,”
“Talavera,” “Fuentes d’Onor,” “Waterloo,” “Alma,” “Inkerman,”
“Tel-el-Kebir,” “South Africa”--what a host of gallant memories these
battle honours of the Guards call forth, what a glorious procession of
heroic figures defiling through history amid the fire and smoke of a
hundred deathless fights! Men come and go in war. The regiment remains.
Its battle honours are the symbol of what it was, the promise of what
it will be.
No body of troops in the British Army has redeemed the promise of
its battle honours more illustriously in this war than the Guards.
Marlborough, Wellington, Raglan, who saw in their careers, each in his
turn, that the Guards were true to the promise of their colours, must
look down from the Elysian Fields in proud admiration of the way in
which the Guards in this war have once more maintained the untarnished
splendour of their name. It will be with rightful satisfaction that
the historian of the future will record how, in an unmilitary age, the
British Army proved itself not unmindful of its great traditions, but
he will be able to add that no regiments showed themselves more highly
imbued with respect for the noblest qualities of the soldier than the
Guards.
It is this same respect for soldierly attributes that is the
outstanding feature of the Guards on active service. It is not a pose.
It is not an affectation of the officers. It is not an individual whim.
It is an attitude of mind that pervades the Guards as a whole, from
their most senior officer down to the youngest drummer-boy. It is not a
creation of this war, for then surely it would have withered for lack
of fertile soil, by reason of the number of original Guardsmen who have
died. On the contrary, it is seen as strong and as virile as ever,
even in men who abandoned their civilian pursuits to take service with
the Guards. The young men of good birth who have received commissions
in the Guards after the outbreak of war, and the recruits who come
out with drafts--novices all, not only to the war, but also to the
Guards--are saturated with this manly respect for soldierly virtues.
In what do these soldierly virtues consist? First and foremost, in
courage. Courage, indeed, is their alpha and omega, for it is the
basis of all merit in the soldier. The standard that the Guards set,
the standard that they most emulate and most admire, is the courage
that recks not of danger, the courage that thinks first of the common
cause, then of the fellow-man, and of self last; the courage that
leads the forlorn hope as blithely as the storm, that is uncomplaining
in hardships and humane after victory; the courage that hides itself
beneath a bushel when the ordeal is past.
Then there is discipline. The strictest discipline on duty, a certain
friendly good-fellowship off duty--these are the relations between
officers and men of the Guards, as, of course, they are between
officers and men right through the British Army. In the field the
Guards officer is a guardian to his men. He is eternally preoccupied
with their comfort in the trenches and in the billets; he furthers
their sports and games, often out of his own pocket; he takes a
general interest in their welfare. He is debonair and democratic in
his dealings with them off duty, and they respect the familiarity
thus allowed them, and in time of need repay their leaders’ generous
solicitude by a loyalty and a devotion that are beyond all praise.
The strict attention to duty which is enforced in the Guards is shown
in the personal neatness of the men and the fine condition of their
trenches. Be the conditions never so bad, and water never so scarce,
a Guardsman in the field will always contrive to present a clean
appearance. If his uniform is stained and patched, his puttees will be
neatly tied and his boots, cumbrous though they are, will be scraped
clean of mud. The army knows that a well-turned-out battalion, clean
in appearance and punctilious about saluting, is a good fighting
battalion. It has been the ambition of the Guards to set an example to
the army in this respect.
The Guards trenches are famous all along our line. Deep, and well
made, and clean, and as safe as they can be made, they are named after
London streets familiar to the Guards on their “walkings out” on Sunday
evenings--Piccadilly and Bond Street and Edgware Road and Praed Street.
When the Guards are in their trenches they are kept scrupulously neat
and tidy; the greatest attention is paid to hygiene, with the result
that the plague of vermin and flies is probably less felt here than in
any other part of the line.
There is a fine disdain for the shirker in the Guards. The Guards
esteem it an honour to be able to fight with the Guards against the
Germans, and therefore among the men there is nothing but contemptuous
pity for the young fellow who prefers to loaf at home to earning the
proud right to say in after years: “I was with the Guards in Flanders!”
But for the Guards officer who should stay away from his battalion in
the front line for any reason whatsoever, even to do useful duties in
the rear, the officers have nothing but the most withering disdain.
It is no use arguing the question. It is no use pointing out to them
that a man who is by temperament not a fighter can render better
service to the country by serving on a Staff or doing other work behind
the fighting-line. The only reply is that “they cannot imagine how the
fellow can stay away from his battalion at a time like this.” You feel
that they are often unjust in such wholesale condemnation, but you
cannot help admiring the real Guards spirit which is reflected in this
attitude of mind.
Their spirit is one of the most jealous exclusiveness. It is apparent
in their mental attitude as well as in their dress. The Guards officers
have succeeded in investing even their prosaic service khaki with
one or two little touches that render their uniform quite distinct
from that of officers of the line. In the first place, the different
Guards regiments retain their distinctive button groupings in the
service tunics of the officers, the buttons being arranged in ones for
the Grenadier, in twos for the Coldstream, in threes for the Scots
Guards, and in fours for the Irish Guards. It is etiquette that the
buttons should be of dulled bronze, and as small and as unobtrusive as
possible. No badges are worn on the collar, and the badge on the cap is
silver and diminutive in size. Many Guards officers affect excessively
baggy breeches, cut like full golfing-knickers, and worn with puttees.
They are certainly distinctive, but they can hardly be said to be
becoming, and are liable to get sodden and heavy from the wet in the
trenches, I am told.
The Guards in the field judge life by two standards--the Guards’
standard and other men’s standard. There is nothing offensive to
the rest of the army in their carefully studied exclusiveness. They
are genuinely and generously appreciative of the undying gallantry
displayed by line regiments. They show themselves friendly and
companionable neighbours in the trenches, and stout and reliable
comrades in action. But you will find that what they are seriously
willing to concede to other regiments they will never allow to the
Guards. They have no criticism to offer if a line battalion surrenders
after a most gallant stand against overpowering odds, but if you probe
their minds you will find that they would naturally expect a Guards
battalion in similar circumstances to fight to the last man. And the
remarkable thing is that, if you examine their records in this war, you
will find that this is the standard the Guards have set and lived up to.
Indeed, the Guards’ spirit is not of this war. It is of another age.
It is as old as chivalry itself. It was to the British Guards, if
you remember, that the Frenchmen at Fontenoy said: “_Messieurs les
Anglais, tirez les premiers!_” and as far as our Guards are concerned,
a similar incident might occur in this war. You will never hear a
Guardsman disparage the German as a fighter. He thinks the German is
a bad sportsman, and, remembering Belgium and the _Lusitania_, he has
a fierce joy in fighting him. But he knows he is a brave man, for our
Guards, remember, saw the Prussian Guard advancing in parade order to
their death at Ypres in the face of a perfect tornado of shot and shell.
“They were fine, big men all,” a Guards officer who witnessed that last
desperate attempt to break our line said to me, “and they walked past
the corpses of their dead comrades choking their line of advance, and
straight into our machine-gun fire like brave men that were not afraid
to die.”
It was the spirit of the Guards in Marlborough’s day that sent the
Guardsman William Lettler across the river at Lille to cut the chains
of the drawbridge. It was the same spirit that carried the Guards
forward at Talavera with such impetuosity that a catastrophe was only
narrowly averted, that at Waterloo welded them into a solid wall of
steel. It was the Guards’ spirit that transformed the little Irishman,
Michael O’Leary, into an epic hero; that inspired the Coldstreams at
Ypres, the Scots Guards at Festubert, to fight to the last man.
This book is not a history, and I must leave the story of the Guards’
achievements in this war to an abler pen than mine. From the outset
they have been in the very thick of the fighting. At Mons we find the
famous Guards Brigade--2nd Grenadiers, 2nd and 3rd Coldstream and 1st
Irish Guards--with the Second Division, and with the First Division the
1st Coldstream and the 2nd Scots Guards. With Sir Henry Rawlinson’s
Seventh Division in Belgium--that splendidly gallant division of whose
exploits in the early days of the war we heard so little--were the 1st
Grenadiers and the 2nd Scots Guards. At Mons the Guards battalions
played their part gallantly in beating back the desperate attempt of
the Germans to overwhelm “French’s contemptible little army” with
vastly superior numbers.
No battle honour will figure more gloriously in years to come on the
colours of the four battalions of the Guards Brigade than Landrecies.
The magnificent stand which the brigade, under General Scott-Kerr,
made in this little town averted a disaster and inflicted enormous
losses on the enemy. The Germans delivered a surprise attack on the
place in the mist and darkness of the night of August 25, hoping,
by dint of tremendously superior numbers, to overwhelm the Guards
and burst through our line. The Guards hastily improvised a defence,
and throughout the night, through hours of bloody and desperate
hand-to-hand fighting in the narrow streets, held their own. At last
the Germans realized that the surprise had failed, and withdrew,
leaving their dead piled up in ramparts on the cobblestones.
With the rest of the British Army, sorely pressed and exhausted, but
not beaten, the Guards fell back from Mons. We hear of the Guards
Brigade again in the woods of Villers-Cotterets, fighting a desperate
rear-guard action, engaged at close quarters, as they love to be. Here
the Irish Guards, on active service for the first time in this war--and
right gallantly have they acquitted themselves--lost their Colonel,
Lieutenant-Colonel Morris, a man as brave as he was big.
When fortune changed, and to the stern ordeal of the retreat and the
bad news from Belgium succeeded the spirited pursuit of Von Kluck
falling back baffled from Paris, once more we find the Guards in the
centre of things. They fought in the battle of the Marne, and advanced
with the rest of the army to the Aisne. Carrying out Sir John French’s
historic order to “make good the Aisne,” the Guards Brigade had a
stiff fight at Chavonne, but managed to cross the river at this place,
after overcoming severe German resistance in the woods, by ferrying a
battalion over the stream.
In the first great struggle about Ypres in October, 1914, the
Guards--like every other British regiment engaged there, be it
said--gave of their best in the defence of our line. The 2nd Scots
Guards, holding the trenches at Kruseik, north-east of Zandvoorde,
came in for the brunt of the smashing attempt of the Germans to pierce
the line of the Seventh Division. The enemy actually managed to break
through, but the gap was closed and the bulk of the storming party
killed or made prisoner. The 2nd Scots Guards counter-attacked with
splendid dash, and the German attempt failed, but in a subsequent
vigorous assault by the enemy the gallant battalion was all but
exterminated. That was on October 25. On October 31--by Sir John
French’s own admission, the critical day of the battle--when the
Germans broke through the line of the First Division, the 1st
Coldstreams held on till the end, and were practically destroyed.
Meanwhile, the Guards Brigade, which had come into line on the previous
evening, was fighting desperately on the left of the First Division.
I have already mentioned in my chapter on Sir John French how the 2nd
Worcester Regiment, by its gallant charge at Gheluvelt, saved the
British Army on that fateful 31st of October. For a time the peril
was averted. But after a short respite from their persevering efforts
to obey the Emperor’s command to win Ypres at all costs, the Germans
attacked again on November 6, this time against the Klein Zillebeke
position, defended by the 2nd and the Guards Brigades and a French
division--the Ninth--under General Moussy.
General Scott-Kerr, who commanded the Guards Brigade at Mons, wounded
at Villers-Cotterets, relinquished the command to Brigadier-General the
Earl of Cavan, who came out from England to take up the appointment.
Lord Cavan commanded at Ypres. The achievements of the Guards Brigade
in this war will for ever be associated with his name. A short, stoutly
built little man, there is nothing particularly suggestive of the
great soldier in his personal appearance, but a few minutes’ talk with
him will show you the fine courage in his keen eyes, the tremendous
virility in his language and gestures, that bespeak the leader of men.
Cavan is the Guards’ spirit incarnate. All his admiration goes to the
fearless man. I wish I could tell you in his own words, as he told me,
the now familiar story of how Mike O’Leary of the Irish Guards won the
V.C. at Cuinchy. The General (who believes that where the Guards are
there he should also be) witnessed the incident himself. He tells how
he saw O’Leary, right ahead of his company, dash up one bank and kill
the Germans there, then dash up another and kill the Germans there,
then, going round the back, seize two Germans working a machine-gun by
the scruff of the neck, and with either hand gripping their collars
firmly, call to his comrades to relieve him of his prisoners. “A most
extraordinary fellow,” says the General. “By rights he should have been
killed a dozen times.”
Lord Cavan’s own fearlessness and complete indifference to danger
are a by-word in the army. His officers swear by him. His men adore
him, regarding him, with true Guards’ exclusiveness, as a treasured
possession, a peculiar acquisition of the Guards. More than once he has
been mentioned in despatches. This is what the Commander-in-Chief, on
the recommendation of Sir Douglas Haig, wrote of his conduct at the
first battle of Ypres: “He was conspicuous for the skill, coolness, and
courage with which he led his troops, and for the successful manner
in which he dealt with many critical situations.” Lord Cavan has no
enemies, I believe, and no one who has seen him in the field will think
that what I have written in praise of him is excessive.
A sudden German attack on November 6 drove back the troops on the left
of the Guards Brigade, which was left exposed. A splendid charge by
the Household Cavalry brought a British cavalry brigade to fill the
gap on the left of the Guards, and the next day the Guards delivered a
successful counter-attack, but could not retain the ground they had won
against the overwhelming German odds.
On November 11 the final desperate effort of the Germans to break
through to the sea, in the shape of the attack of the Prussian Guard,
failed, and the battle came to a close. The First Brigade, with which
were the 1st Coldstream and the 1st Scots Guards, with the rest of the
First Division, stemmed the tide and threw the flower of the German
Army back in confusion. The First Brigade left its commander on that
blood-stained field in the person of the gallant Brigadier-General
Fitzclarence, V.C., who, as I have told elsewhere, was the author of
the famous order to the 2nd Worcesters that saved the day at Ypres on
October 31.
The next serious fighting in which the Guards were involved was to the
south, in the wet and dreary black country opposite La Bassée. In
December the First Division was ordered up to Givenchy to relieve the
Indian Corps, which had been having a very bad time, and on December 21
the First Brigade found itself holding the trenches from Givenchy down
to the La Bassée Canal. The prompt intervention of this fine division
enabled our line, from which the Indians had been partially forced
back, to be re-established.
This ugly and sinister region from Givenchy to Cuinchy, situated on
the other side of the La Bassée Canal, was destined to be the home
of the Guards for many months, and the scene of some of their most
heroic exploits in this war. On January 24 the First Brigade, under
Brigadier-General Cecil Lowther, found itself holding the line in the
Cuinchy brick-fields opposite the famous La Bassée Railway triangle
formed by the Béthune-La Bassée line and the Lens-La Bassée line,
which joins the first in two branches. The 1st Scots Guards and the
1st Coldstreams were in the trenches. On the 25th the Germans opened
a heavy bombardment of the Guards’ trenches, which were practically
destroyed. The line was broken, and the Germans managed to secure a
footing in the brick-fields. A counter-attack, delivered with great
gallantry by the Black Watch, the Cameron Highlanders, and the King’s
Royal Rifles, succeeded in partially clearing our second line. The
First Brigade lost heavily, and was relieved during the night.
On February 1 Cavan’s Guards Brigade was holding the line through
the Cuinchy brick-fields. At half-past two in the morning the 2nd
Coldstreams were driven out of their trenches, but managed to hold out
till daylight in a position close to their old trench. A counter-attack
launched in the small hours by some of the Irish Guards and Coldstreams
was checked by the enemy’s rifle-fire.
Another counter-attack was arranged for 10.15 a.m. It was preceded by
a splendid artillery preparation--the kind of ruthless and accurate
rain of high-explosive projectiles that puts a fine heart into men
waiting to attack. Then the storming-party went forward, a grand array
of big, stalwart men in whose great hands their rifles with bayonets
fixed seemed as light and as inconsiderable as toothpicks. Captain A.
Leigh Bennett led the way at the head of fifty of the 2nd Coldstreams,
bent on “getting their own back”; following came Second-Lieutenant F.
F. Graham with thirty Irish Guards, with whom went one Michael O’Leary
in the front line, and a party of Royal Engineers with barbed wire in
rolls, and sandbags, to “organize” the trenches that might fall into
our hands.
It was a magnificent piece of work. The Guards were irresistible. They
swept like an avalanche over the lost trench, bayoneting their way.
All the ground lost was retaken, and another trench besides, while two
machine-guns and thirty-two prisoners fell into our hands. It was here
that Michael O’Leary performed his prodigious exploit.
But the achievements of the Guards were not confined to brilliance in
the open with the bayonet. They proved themselves well-disciplined,
uncomplaining, resourceful, and patient through the long winter months
in the trenches in this sordid region, which vies with the Ypres
salient as being the ugliest, wettest, and most depressing portion of
our whole line.
Neuve Chapelle saw the 1st Grenadiers and 2nd Scots Guards in line
with the Seventh Division. The latter stages of that historic fight
made great demands on the courage and tenacity of the troops engaged,
and these two famous battalions maintained their high reputation for
both. The Guards were not engaged in the second battle of Ypres. Their
services were required farther south, where the attack on the Fromelles
ridge, to support the French “push” in the Artois, was preparing. In
the operations which began on May 9, and, continuing with intervals
until the middle of June, resulted in the gain of a mile or two of
front and the capture of several hundred prisoners, all the brigades in
which the Guards are serving were concerned.
After the attack by the Seventh Division on May 15 on the German
trenches south of Richebourg l’Avoué, the greater part of a company of
the 2nd Scots Guards, including Captain Sir Frederick Fitzwygram, was
found to be missing. Presently word came down to the brigade--I think
from the Canadians, who had taken over the line here--that some Scots
Guards’ graves had been located. Would the brigade send up an officer
to investigate?
An officer was despatched. He was destined to elucidate the mystery of
the missing company. He did not find Fitzwygram, who had been wounded
and captured. But he found the dead bodies of sixty Scots Guards lying
huddled together in the open, the centre of a grim circle of some 200
German corpses, and close by two rough white crosses marking the spot
where the Canadians had laid two Scots Guards officers to rest.
The Scots Guards, who had advanced side by side with the Border
Regiment, had outdistanced their fellows. They were found dead, amid
heaps of empty cartridge cases, with their rifles still grasped in
their stiffened fingers, in the place where they had last been seen
through a drifting haze of high-explosive vapours, standing shoulder to
shoulder together under a murderous fire poured in on them from three
sides. Soaked by the rain and blackened by the sun, their bodies were
not beautiful to look upon, but monarch never had nobler lying-in-state
than those sixty Guardsmen dead on the coarse grass of the dreary
Flanders plain.
It has been my privilege to have seen a good deal of the Guards in this
war. You would scarcely recognize in these battle-stained warriors the
spruce Guardsmen of St. James’s and the Park. The first Guardsmen I met
in this war were a battalion of Irish Guards and a battalion of the
Coldstreams on an evening in May, as they were marching down a road
near Chocques towards the firing-line. Their creased caps and stained
khaki, their dull green web equipment and short brown rifles, made them
look at the first superficial glance like any other Regular troops.
But something about their stride, the way they bore themselves, their
alignment (though they were marching easy), made me look again. That
magnificent physique, that brave poise of the head, that clear, cool
look of the eye--that could only be of the Guards!
They had come a long way. It was a close, warm evening, and the roads
were a smother of choking dust. The Guards wore their caps pushed back
off their foreheads, and their tunics unbuttoned at the neck, showing a
patch of white skin where the deep tan of their faces and necks ended.
The perspiration poured off them in streams. It traced little channels
in the dust that lay thick on their sunburnt cheeks. Every now and then
a man, with a grunt, would wipe the sweat from his eyes, and in the
same motion administer that little hoist to his pack that is peculiar
to the British soldier marching with a full load.
Many a time, on German manœuvres, I have passed a regiment on the
march, like these Guardsmen, in the stifling dust of a summer day. I
have been all but choked by the sour odour which the breeze has wafted
over from the marching men, and have been only too glad to follow the
advice of the old hands to put the wind between them and me. But these
British Guardsmen, grimy and travel-stained though they were on the
outside, were clean of body, and the air about them was pure. Looking
at them closer, I saw that under the dust their haversacks were neatly
packed and fastened, their uniform well-fitting and whole, their
puttees beautifully tied. These things may seem trifles to you who
will read this in the sheltered atmosphere of England, where one man
in khaki with a gun seems as another. But they are the mark of a good
battalion, and, noting them on that dusty French road, with the guns
drumming faintly in the distance and an aeroplane droning aloft, I
knew that the trenches for which those troops were bound would be well
held.
One of the most stirring military spectacles it has ever been my
good-fortune to witness was a parade of some battalions of the Guards
before the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Kitchener, and M. Millerand, the
French Minister of War. I have seen many reviews of the Prussian
Guard before the German Emperor, both in Berlin and in Potsdam. My
eye has been fascinated by the perfect precision of the movements of
the Prussian drill, the long lines of heads thrown stiffly over at
the left shoulder at the same angle, of feet flung forward in the
_Paradeschritt_ with such mathematical exactitude that they seemed as
one movement, of white-gloved hands swinging to and fro in absolute
accord.
I have watched the rippling line of the French infantry swing past the
saluting-point at Longchamps reviews with a wiry elasticity that gave
better promise of efficiency in the field than the stiff precision of
the Prussian, and have delighted in the brilliant array of colours, the
red and blue and gold and silver against the deep green background of
the historic racecourse.
But I have never seen, and never wish to see, a more inspiring picture
than those four battalions of Guards drawn up in their drab khaki on a
heath in Flanders over against the Tricolour and the Union Jack flying
side by side. An ancient military tradition, a high purpose and perfect
physical condition, never combined to produce a more sublime spectacle
of troops than this. There was no display, no searching after cheap
effects. The Guards were there in their khaki, as they had come from
the trenches; the officers carried no swords; the colours were guarded
in churches at home. The Grenadiers and Coldstreams had their drums and
fifes; the Scots Guards their pipers, wearing the proud red tartan of
the ancient House of Stuart. The four battalions stood there in four
solid phalanxes, unbeautiful and undecorative, save when, to the crash
of the opening bars of the “Marseillaise,” three distinct ripples ran
through those serried ranks, and with a dazzling flash of steel the
Guards presented arms.
Memories of Mons and Landrecies, of Klein Zillebeke and Cuinchy and
Festubert, went shuddering by, pale shadows escaping from the prison of
the imagination, as the stalwart giants of the King’s Company of the
Grenadiers led off the march past. The drums and fifes crashed through
“The British Grenadiers” again and again and again before the serried
files of men, marching with an iron tread that fairly shook the earth,
had all gone by, and the skirling of the pipes proclaimed the approach
of the Scots Guards.
There were faces in that procession like faces on a Greek frieze,
fighters all, radiant with youth and strength and determination to
conquer or readiness to die, men who had looked Death in the eyes, and,
in that they had withstood the ordeal, had risen above man’s puny fears
of the Unknown. It was a spectacle to thrill a soldier, to inspire a
poet, to make an Englishman vibrate with pride at the thought that
these are his brothers.
The army in the field loves the Guards. It is not jealous of their
exclusiveness, for the Guards have shown in this war that they are not
content to rest upon their laurels. The army trusts the Guards, for it
knows that, when in a critical hour Wellington’s voice shall be heard
once more above the storm crying, “Stand up, Guards!” the Guards will
rise again in a solid wall of steel, as invulnerable as their phalanx
at Waterloo.