BATTLE OF THE RIVERS
RALLY OF THE IRISH GUARDS TO THE GREEN FLAG
The British Expeditionary Force was driven through Northern France
before a mighty and irresistible wind of steel and lead, but the
tempest did not overtake and disperse them, as it might have
done--such was its roaring fury--any less disciplined and stubborn
troops. At the end of it all the British were weary from want of sleep
and plenty of hard fighting, but not badly shaken, and certainly with
spirits undaunted. So marvellously quick did they recover that on
September 7th, within a few days of the end of the retreat, they had
the great joy of joining with the French in turning upon the Germans
and rolling them from the gates of Paris back over the rivers Marne
and Aisne.
The Battle of the Rivers consisted of a series of almost continuous
engagements, lasting till the end of September, principally with
strong rearguards of the enemy who were holding the fords and bridges
of the Marne and Aisne, and their tributaries, the Grand Morin and the
Petit Morin, and the villages, farmlands and orchards of the
intervening countryside. Between the different British regiments there
was an emulation to outshine each other. It was a splendid vanity, for
everything done to realise it tended to the confusion of the common
enemy. This phase of the war was therefore crowded with incidents
showing the bravery of the soldiers of all the nationalities within
the United Kingdom. From the Irish point of view the most remarkably
dramatic was the rallying of the Irish Guards round the green flag.
"It is only a square piece of cloth, but its colour is green,
and on it is the Harp of Ireland and inscribed in a wreath are
the words: 'Eire go brath,' once bright and clear, but now faded
and obliterated almost beyond recognition. That is the flag the
Irish Guards obtained when they received information that they
were for the Front, and from the moment they set foot on foreign
soil that treasured emblem of Irish nationality has been
displayed at the head of the battalion, the pride and admiration
of the regiment."
So writes Corporal Michael O'Mara of the Irish Guards. The first
occasion upon which the flag was produced was when the Marne was
crossed, and on September 9th the Irish Guards had to advance for
miles across rather open country, swept by shot and shell, to dislodge
the Germans from a commanding position south of the Aisne.
The Irish as soldiers have two qualities which, though widely
different in nature, are really each the concomitant of the other. The
first is imperturbability, springing from indifference to danger, of
which the Retreat from Mons supplied some choice examples, as I have
recorded. This attribute is displayed while they are waiting for the
shock of an advancing attack, or for the command to launch themselves
upon a foe shooting at them from behind entrenchments. The clash comes
or the order to charge is given; and then it is that, showing the
other quality, they give vent to the fire and force of their
passionate temperament, which, as often as not, impels them to attempt
strokes more daring and rash than the occasion quite demands.
In the course of the advance between the Marne and the Aisne on
September 9th the changeful fortunes of the conflict seemed to make
the final issue doubtful. The line of the advance of the Irish Guards
was a hill upon which the Germans were strongly posted with several
machine-guns, each pouring forth a terrible stream of 600 bullets a
minute. Men were dropping on all sides. Then it was that the towering
form of an Irish Guardsman was seen running well on in front of the
first line flourishing the green flag, which he had tied round the
barrel of his rifle, and shouting "Ireland for Ever." The men roared
at the sight. On they swept, with redoubled speed, after the darling
flag, in one of their furious, overmastering Irish charges, made all
the more terrible by their vengeful yells. A thunderstorm was raging
at the time. The gleam on their bayonets may have been the flash of
the lightning, but it was more suggestive of a glint of the flame of
love of country that glowed in their eyes. "It was all over in ten
minutes," writes Private H.P. Mulloney to his sweetheart in Ireland.
"They absolutely stood dumfounded, with white faces and knees
trembling. I shouldn't like to stand in front of that charge myself.
Our men were drenched to the skin, but we didn't care; it only made us
twice as wild. Such dare-devil pluck I was glad to see. 'Back for
those guns,' roared an officer, 'or I'll have every one of you
slaughtered.' The men didn't want telling twice. We proceeded to line
up the prisoners and collect the spoils, which amounted to about 150
prisoners, six Maxim guns, and 38,000 rounds of ammunition." Even in
these rude passages we find expressed the rapture of the Irish
Guardsmen with the tumult and the passion of the fight.
The hill was surmounted and the machine-guns taken. Afterwards the
advance was continued for five miles, over a country covered with dead
Germans and horses, and blazing homesteads. The Irish rested for a
time in a field, and then pushed on again until they reached the banks
of the Marne. They captured 600 Germans, including many officers and
eight machine-guns. But if the advance was swift, sure, and triumphant
a bitter price had to be paid for it, as is the way of war, for many a
fine and stalwart Irish youth found his grave between the rivers.
The man who produced the green flag was Corporal J.J. Cunningham from
Dublin. He bought it in London before the Irish Guards left for the
Front. It became a prized possession of the regiment. "You may be
surprised to hear that the Irish flag I bought from the pedlar before
parting with you I have still got," Cunningham, who was made a
sergeant, says in a letter to a friend in London. "It has been carried
through all our engagements, and with God's help I will carry it back
to England. Clay from the trenches has made the harp on it very dirty,
but, thank God, that is the only disgrace it has suffered. I did not
think when we were buying it that it would go through so much." I am
told, indeed, that in a far later stage of the war, at another
critical moment, it was flourished by the Earl of Cavan, an Irishman,
then in command of the Guards' Brigade, to egg on the Irish to an
enterprise before which other units had excusably quailed. He knew of
the episode between the Marne and the Aisne. He had probably heard
also a story of the American Civil War. An Irish regiment on the side
of the North carried a green flag bearing a harp in the glow of a
sunburst, and so noted were they for their wild and reckless daring
that a Confederate general, seeing the dreaded colour surging
forwards, and borne proudly aloft through the battle smoke and the
hail of bullets, cried out to his men, "Steady, boys, steady. Here's
that infernal green flag again." The Germans, on the day that Lord
Cavan waved the improvised flag of the Irish Guards had reason also
to curse it if they but knew--for the loss of valuable trenches.
On September 13th the main forces of the Germans retired to the high
ground two miles north of the Aisne and entrenched themselves. As the
British also dug themselves in, this was the beginning of trench
warfare. But the combatants did not settle themselves down to it
entirely for some months afterwards. There were still surprise attacks
and counter-strokes, in which cavalry took a part, as is seen from an
adventure of the 2nd Irish Fusiliers as told by Lance-Corporal
Casement. "One night," he says, "after a very hard day in the
trenches, when we were wet to the skin, and had lighted fires to dry
our tunics, we heard firing along our front, and then the Germans came
down on us like madmen. We had to tackle them in our shirt-sleeves. It
was mainly bayonet work, and hard work at that. They were well
supported by cavalry, who tried to ride us down in the dark, but we
held our ground until reinforcements came up, and then we drove the
enemy off with a fine rush of our horsemen and footmen combined."
One of the most inspiring of the deeds of self-sacrifice which the war
has produced was done by an Irish soldier. In the churchyard of a
village near the Aisne is the grave of a private of the Royal Irish
Regiment marked by a cross without a name, but with the arresting
inscription--"He saved others; himself he could not save." The story
of how this unknown hero gave his life to save others was told by a
wounded corporal of the West Yorkshire Regiment in an hospital at
Woolwich. On September 14th, in the concluding stage of the struggle
for the Aisne, the battalion was sent ahead to occupy a little village
near Rheims. "We went on through the long, narrow street," says the
narrator, "and just as we were in sight of the end of it a man in
khaki, to our great surprise, dashed out from a farmhouse on our right
and ran towards us shouting a warning. Immediately we heard the
crackle of rifles in front, and the poor chap fell dead before he
reached us." The West Yorkshires ran to cover, and ultimately drove
the Germans out of the houses they occupied at the outskirts of the
village. Then they discovered that an ambush had been prepared into
which they would have moved to their doom but for the warning given by
the man in khaki at the cost of his life. He was a private of the
Royal Irish Regiment--2nd battalion--who was taken prisoner the day
before and confined in the farmhouse, but his identification disc had
been removed by the Germans, and there was no means of discovering his
name. "We buried him with military honours," concludes the narrator;
"and there was not a dry eye among us as we laid him to rest."
At this early period of the war, while the cavalry--not yet
transformed into infantry by the adoption of trench warfare--were
still being used as horsemen, Irish troopers were distinguishing
themselves. I have noticed in the newspapers, from time to time,
disputes as to which unit of the auxiliary forces was the first to
come under fire. The honour had been claimed by the London Scottish,
who entered the field at Neuve Eglise in the first days of November,
and allowed until it was established that the Northumberland Yeomanry
had been in action before the London Scottish left home. But the
Northumberland Hussars have in turn to yield to the South Irish Horse.
This section of the Irish Yeomanry went to France early in August,
1914. They were attached to the Guards' Brigade, and were with the
Irish and Coldstreams when they turned in the little town of
Landrecies to hold back the Germans on August 25th, the second day of
the retreat from Mons. The North Irish Horse arrived in France on
August 20th, and pushing forward at once reached the French and
Belgian frontier in time to relieve the pressure on the retreating
forces. They had their baptism of fire near Compiegne on September
1st, and fought again a few days later at Le Cateau. These little side
details or footnotes of history are not without their interest. Often,
indeed, they excite the mind even more than the big, decisive events.
During the Battles of the Marne and the Aisne both the North and the
South Irish Horse were employed rounding up parties of Uhlans in the
woods, and scouring the isolated villages and deserted farmhouses for
stragglers. The Uhlans, by all accounts, were contemptible as foes.
"They run like scalded cats when they see you," writes Captain N.G.
Stewart Richardson, of the North Irish Horse, to a friend in Belfast,
"and are always in close formation as if afraid to separate. I had a
grand hunt after twenty (there were five of us), and we got four dead,
picking up two more afterwards. We came on them round the corner of a
street, and they went like hunted deer."
The duties were discharged with varying good luck and bad. Corporal
Fred Lindsay tells how the North Irish Horse discovered one of those
minor tragedies of war and lost Troopers Jack Scott of Londonderry and
W. Moore of Limavady. "With a Sergeant Hicks they were sent to patrol
as far as a ford in the river which, unknown to us, was held by a
German force with a machine gun. When the three reached the ford they
found a British officer dead across his motor-car and some of his men
dead around the car. They were about to dismount to investigate when
the machine-gun fired upon them, instantly killing the two troopers.
Sergeant Hicks escaped on Moore's horse, his own being shot under
him." On another day, the same troop came upon a force of Uhlans in a
wood near a village, and succeeded in killing some, taking a good many
prisoners, and capturing a number of horses. "In this action,"
Corporal Fred Lindsay relates, "Trooper M'Clennaghan, of Garvagh,
accounted for three Uhlans and took two horses single-handed; and two
others and myself, firing simultaneously at an escaping Uhlan, brought
both horse and rider down at 900 yards' distance. Sitting on the
roadside later eating biscuits and bully beef with the rest of us
Viscount Massereene complimented us, saying, 'Boys, you have done a
good day's work. If we only had an opportunity like this every day!'"
Subsequently the North Irish Horse had the distinction of forming the
bodyguard of Sir John French. The South Irish Horse took service, like
the cavalry, in the trenches.
There is also to be told a story of a clever ambush and capture of a
long scattered line of German transport wagons loaded with food by a
party of the 5th (Royal Irish) Lancers after the Battle of the Marne.
Commanding a bridge over a stream, by which the convoy had to pass,
was a coppice in which the Lancers were able to conceal themselves and
the horses. They waited until the head of the column was straggling
across the bridge, and then they emptied their carbines into them
along a wide front that gave the impression of a great force being
engaged in the attack.
One who was there thus describes what followed:--
"The Germans were taken completely by surprise. Their horses
started to rear and plunge, and many men and animals went over
into the stream, being carried away. The motor wagons could not
be stopped in time, and they crashed into each other in
hopeless confusion. Into this confused mass of frightened men
and horses and wagons that had run amok the Lancers now charged
from two separate points, setting up the most awful cries in
English where they didn't know any other language, but as some
knew a little French and others more Irish they joined in, and
all that added to the confusion of the Germans, who must have
fancied that the whole Allied Army had come down on them. The
Lancers made short work of the escort at the head of the column,
and the officer in command agreed to surrender all that was
under his direct control, though he said he couldn't account for
the rearguard."