Chapter II: Part 2

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.

Bomb practice was taken up seriously while at La Gorgue, and the daily allowance of live bombs increased to sixty. Drums and fifes had been sent out from the Regimental Orderly-Room, together with a few selected drummers from Warley. The Battalion promptly increased the number from its own ranks and formed a full corps of drums and fifes, which paraded for the first time on the 23rd November, when they exchanged billets with the 1st Coldstream at Merville. The first tune played was the Regimental March and the second “Brian Boru,” which goes notably to the drums. (In those days the Battalion was overwhelmingly Irish in composition.) Captain the Hon. H. R. Alexander, who had been in hospital with influenza for a week, rejoined on the 23rd as second in command.

Merville was a mixed, but not too uncomfortable, experience. The Battalion with the rest of the Guards Division was placed temporarily at the disposal of the Forty-fifth Division as a reserve, a position which meant neither being actually in the trenches nor out of them. They were beyond reach of rifle-fire and in a corner not usually attended to by artillery. There was a roof to the officers’ mess, and some of the windows did not lack glass. They ate off tables with newspapers for cloth and enjoyed the luxury of chairs. The men lived more or less in trenches, but were allowed out, like well-watched poultry, at night or on misty mornings. All this was interspersed with squad drill, instruction, baths, and a Battalion concert; while, in view of possibilities that might develop, Captain Alexander and the four company commanders “reconnoitred certain routes from Merville to Neuve Chapelle.” But every one knew at heart that there was nothing doing or to be done except to make oneself as comfortable as might be with all the blankets that one could steal, at night, and all the food one could compass by day. Leave was going on regularly. Captain and Adjutant J. S. N. FitzGerald left on the 26th for ten days and Lieutenant A. Pym took over his duties. When adjutants can afford to go on leave, life ought to be easy.

Then they shifted to Laventie in a full blizzard, relieving the 2nd Scots Guards in Brigade Reserve. Their own Brigade, the 2nd, was taking over from the 3rd Guards Brigade, and Captain Alexander, who not unnaturally caught a fresh attack of influenza later, spent the afternoon reconnoitring the trenches which he would have to occupy on the 28th. The No Man’s Land to be held in front of them was marsh and ditch, impassable save when frozen. It carried no marks in the shape of hedges or stumps to guide men out or back on patrol, and its great depth—three hundred yards in places from wire to wire—made thorough ferreting most difficult. In this war, men with small-arms that carried twenty-eight hundred yards, hardly felt safe unless they were within half bow-shot of their enemy.

The Battalion’s entry into their forlorn heritage was preceded by a small house-warming in the shape of an artillery bombardment on our side. This, they knew, by doleful experience, would provoke retaliation, and the relief was accordingly delayed till dark, which avoided all casualties. Their general orders were to look out for likely spots whence to launch “small enterprises” against the enemy. It meant patrols wandering out in rain and a thaw that had followed the stiff frost, and doing their best to keep direction by unassisted intellect and a compass. (“Ye’ll understand that, in those days, once you was out on your belly in that muck, ye knew no more than a babe in a blanket. Dark, wet and windy it was, with big, steep, deep ditches waiting on ye every yard. All _we_ took of it was a stiff neck, and all _we_ heard was Jerry gruntin’ in his pigstye!”) A patrol of No. 4 Company under Lieutenant Brew managed to get up within ear-shot of the German wire on the night of the 29th, crossing a drain by a providential plank. While they lay close, listening to the Huns hammering stakes in their trenches, they saw a German patrol slip home by the very bridge which they themselves had used. Hope ran high of catching the same party next night in the same place, but it rained torrentially, and they found it impossible to move a man out across the bog. They spent their time baling their own trenches as these filled, and were happy to wade only ankle-deep. But their professional lives were peaceful. Though the enemy shelled mechanically at intervals not a soul was even wounded when on the 30th November they came back for the short rest in billets in Laventie.

On their return to the “Red House” where they relieved the 1st Coldstream on the 2nd December, their night patrols discovered, apparently for the first time, that the enemy held their front line very thinly and their support in strength. As a matter of later observation, it was established that, on that sector, the front line mostly withdrew after dark and slept at the back till our unsympathetic guns stirred them up. Our custom seemed always to crowd the front line both with men and responsibility.

The main of the Battalion’s work was simple aquatics; draining off of waters that persisted in running uphill, and trying to find the bottom of fluid and unstable ditches where things once lost disappeared for ever. They had not yet seen a man choking in mud, and found it rather hard to believe that such things could happen. But the Somme was to convince them.

The organization of the Front evolved itself behind them as time passed, and batteries and battalions came to understand each other. Too much enemy shelling on a trench led to a telephone-call, and after a decent interval of from two to six minutes (the record was one minute fifty-five seconds) our batteries would signify their displeasure by a flight of perhaps thirty shells at one drench, or several separate salvoes. As a rule that was enough, and this, perhaps, led to the legend that the enemy artillery was weakening. And, with organisation, came the inevitable floods of paper-work that Authority insists on. There was a conference of the four C.O.’s of the Brigade on the subject on the 6th December, where suggestions were invited for “reducing correspondence” and “for saving company officers as much as possible,” which seemed, like many other conferences, to have ended in more paper-work and resolutions on “the importance of keeping a logbook in the trenches by each company officer.” The logbook handed over by every company commander to his relief is essential to the continuity of trench-war life, though nine tenths of the returns demanded seemed pure waste.

Yet there is another point of view. (“Looking back on it, one sees that that everlasting having to pull yourself together to fill in tosh about raspberry jam, or how men ought to salute, steadies one a good deal. We cursed it at the time, though!”)

On the 7th December, patrols reported the enemy with full trenches working on their front-line wire, upon which our artillery cut it up, and the enemy turned out in the evening to repair damages. The local Battery B, 76th Brigade R.F.A., was asked “to fire again.” They fired two salvoes at 10.15 P. M., and two more one hour later. One Lewis-gun of No. 1 Company “also fired at this point.” So simple and homœopathic was war in that age!

On the 8th their sister battalion took over from them at Red House, in a relief completed in ninety minutes, and the drums of the 1st Battalion played the companies through Laventie, while the drums of the 2nd played them into billets at La Gorgue. For the first time since they had been in France all the officers of both battalions messed together, in one room, for all the time that they were there; and, as supplies from friends at home were ample and varied, the tales of some of the meals at La Gorgue endure to this day.

The system of the Guards’ company training always allowed large latitude to company officers as long as required results were obtained; and they fell back on it when bombers and Lewis-gun teams were permanently added to the organization. With the reservation that bombing-practice with live bombs was only to take place under the battalion bombing officer, company commanders were made entirely responsible for the training both of their bombers and Lewis-gunners. It made an almost immediate difference in the handiness and suppleness of the teams, and woke up inter-company competition. The teams, it may have been pointed out, were surprisingly keen and intelligent. One officer, finding a nucleus of ex-taxi drivers among his drafts, treated the Lewis-gun as a simple internal-combustion engine, which simile they caught on to at once and conveyed it in their own words and gestures to their slower comrades.

On the 12th December, the Battalion was paraded while the C.O. presented the ribbon of the D.C.M. to Lance-Corporal Quinn for gallantry in Chalk-Pit Wood at the battle of Loos, that now seemed to all of them a century distant.

On the 14th they moved to a more southerly sector to take over from the Welsh Guards, and to pick up a company of the 13th R.W. Fusiliers; one platoon being attached to each company for instruction, and the Fusiliers B.H.Q. messing with their own. There is no record what the Welshmen thought of their instructors or they of them, except the fragment of a tale of trench-fatigues during which, to the deep disgust of the Irish, who are not loudly vocal by temperament, “the little fellas sang like canary-birds.”

Their new lines, reached across mud, from Pont du Hem, were the old, well-known, and not so badly looked-after stretch from North Moated Grange Street to Erith Street at the lower end of the endless Tilleloy Road which faced south-easterly towards the Aubers Ridge, then held by the enemy. The relief was finished without demonstrations beyond a few shrapnel launched at one of the posts, Fort Erith.

On the 15th 2nd Lieutenant Brew went out with a patrol to investigate some mine-craters in front of the German firing-line and found them empty, but woke up an enemy machine-gun in the background. Other patrols reported like slackness, but when they tried to take advantage of it, they met the same gun awake, and came home upon their bellies. The ground being so flat, however, the German machines could not get well down to their work of shaving the landscape, and fifteen inches will clear a prostrate man if he lies close. A snipers’ team had been organised, and the deep peace of that age may be seen from the fact that, at the end of a quiet day, the only claim put in was for “one victim who was passing a gap between two mine-craters.”

They were relieved by the 1st Coldstream on the 16th December and went into billets, not more than two miles back, at Pont du Hem and La Flinque Farm, with scattered platoons and single officers holding posts in the neighbourhood of the Rue du Bacquerot. A draft of forty-seven men, which should have been fifty, turned up that same day. The odd three had contrived to mislay themselves as only men on draft can, but were gathered in later with marvellous explanations at the tips of their ready tongues. Officers sent out from Warley also got lost _en route_, to the wrath of company commanders clamouring for them. One writer home complains: “it seems that they are waylaid by some unknown person at the base and sent off for quite long periods to take charge of mysterious parties which dig trenches somewhere unknown.” This was the origin, though they knew it not at the Front, of the divisional entrenching battalion—a hated and unpopular necessity.

On the 18th December, Captain Eric Greer joined on transfer from the 3rd Reserve Battalion as Second in Command, and a couple of companies (Nos. 1 and 2) had to start the relief at Winchester Farm by daylight. The authorities had ordered the trenches should be kept clear that evening for a number of gas-cylinders to be placed in the parapets. It meant running the heavy cylinders up a light, man-power railway to the front line, when they were slung on poles, carried to the recesses that had been dug out for them, and there buried beneath sand-bags. (“There was all sorts and manners of gadgets made and done in those days. We was told they was all highly scientific. All us Micks ever took by any of them was fatigues. No! We did _not_ like them gas-tanks.”)

The next day a shell lit within five yards of a recess apparently stocked with extra gas-tanks. The officer of No. 2 Company at once telephoned for retaliation. “After a slight lapse during which the gunners shelled our trench, and were told by the O.C. No. 2 that that was not _exactly_ what he wanted, the retaliation was quite satisfactory.” They could easily count the number of shells that fell in those days and piously entered them in the company logbooks.

Here follows an appreciation, compiled at first-hand, of their surroundings, and the methods by which they kept themselves more or less dry. “Drains are a very difficult problem as there is probably only a fall of three feet in as many miles behind the line. The system is that the men drain the water in the actual trenches or redoubts into a drain slightly in rear. Then there are a number of drains, two or three per company-area, running straight back. Three men are told off to these and do nothing but patrol them, deepening and clearing where necessary.... From about two hundred yards in rear, the R.E. take and run off the water by larger drains and ditches already in existence into a river some miles in rear. At least that is the theory. The line is now wonderfully dry to live in as the profuse supply of trench-boards has made an enormous difference. Thus men can walk dry-shod up Winchester Street, our main communication-trench, on a path of floor-boards built up on piles over, perhaps, three feet of water. Of course, it hits both ways, as you are taken out of the water, but also out of the ground above your waist, and parapets must be built accordingly.... The front line, which is also the only one, as the labour of keeping it habitable absorbs every available man, is composed of a sand-bag redoubt about seven or eight feet high, and very thick. It is recessed and traversed. About ten or fifteen yards in rear runs the ‘traffic trench,’ a boarded path which sometimes runs along the top of black slime, and sometimes turns into a bridge on piles over smelly ponds. Between the redoubt and traffic-trench, rising out of slime, are a weird collection of hovels about three feet high, of sand-bags and tin. They are the local equivalents of ‘dug-outs’—cover from rain but not from shells. Everywhere there are rats.”

Having added gas to their local responsibilities, they suffered from the enthusiasms of the specialists attached to, and generals who believed in, the filthy weapon. As soon as possible after the cylinders, which they feared and treated with the greatest respect, were in position, all the talk was of a real and poisonous gas-attack. They were told on the 19th December that such a one would be launched by them on the first night the wind should favour it, and that their patrols would specially reconnoitre the ground that, by the blessing of fortune, the gas would waft across. Then the moon shone viciously and all special patrols were ordered off.

On the 20th the Gunner Officer, Major Young, paid a breakfast call, with the pleasant news that he was going to open an old repaired gap in the enemy wire, and cut two new ones, which, on the established principle of “throwing stones at little brother,” meant the infantry would be “retaliated on.” He did it. The C.O.’s of the Battalion and the 1st Coldstream, and the Brigade-Major, made a most careful periscope reconnaissance of the ground, with particular attention to the smoking gaps that Major Young had blasted, and arranged for a joint reconnaissance by the 1st Coldstream and 2nd Irish Guards for that very evening. The two subalterns told off to that job attended the conference. Second Lieutenant Brew, who had gifts that way, represented our side, for the affair naturally became an inter-regimental one from the first, and 2nd Lieutenant Green the Coldstream. That afternoon everybody conferred—the brigade commanders of the 2nd and 3rd Guards Brigade, with their Staffs, all four C.O.’s of the 2nd Brigade, and the C.O. of the 1st Welsh Guards; and between them they arranged the attack in detail, with a simplicity that in later years almost made some of the survivors of that conference weep when they were reminded of it. The gas was to be turned on at first, while machine-guns and Lewis-guns would make a joyous noise together for five minutes to drown the roar of its escape. The artillery would start heavy fire “at points in rear” simultaneously with the noisy gas. At five minutes past Zero machine-guns would stop, and the artillery would slow down. But thirty-five minutes later they would “quicken up.” Three quarters of an hour after Zero “gas would be turned off,” and, five minutes after that, the attacking parties would start “with gas-helmets on their heads but rolled up” and, penetrating the enemy’s second line, would “do all possible damage before returning.” Then they arranged to reassemble next day, after inspecting the ground. The Battalion was relieved that same evening by the 1st Coldstream, whom they expected to have for their confederates in the attack, and lay up at Pont du Hem.

On the 21st December, Brew, who had been out the night before reconnoitring with Green of the Coldstream, started on yet another investigation of the enemy wire at 3 A. M. They got right up to the wire, were overlooked by a German patrol, and spotted by a machine-gun on their way home. “But they lay down and the bullets went over them.” There was another conference at Winchester House in the afternoon, where all details were revised, and the day ended with a message to the troops who would be called upon, that the “attack had been greatly modified.”

On the 22nd December the notion of following up the gas by a two-company attack was washed out, and the assailants cut down to a select party, under the patient but by now slightly bewildered Brew, of bombers and bludgeoneers, who were to enter the German trench after three quarters of an hour of mixed gas and artillery, “collect information and do all possible damage.” If the gas and guns had produced the desired effect, five more bombers and bludgeonists, and a machine-gunner with one crowbar would follow as a demolishing-party, paying special attention to telephones, the bowels of machine-guns and, which was really unkind, drains. The R.E. supplied the bludgeons “of a very handy variety,” and everything was present and correct except the favouring breeze. (“And, all the while, ye’ll understand, our parapet stuffed with these dam gas-tanks the way they could be touched off by any whizz-bang that was visiting there, and the whole Brigade and every one else praying the wind ’ud hold off long enough for some one else to have the job of uncorking the bottle. Gas is no thrick for beginners!”)

They called the attack off once more, and the Battalion, with only one night left of their tour, in which to “uncork the bottle,” wired to the 1st Coldstream at Pont du Hem, “Latest betting, Coldstream 2 to 1 on (T. and O.) Irish Guards, 6 to 4 against.” Back came the prompt answer, “Although the first fence is a serious obstacle, it should not take more than twenty-four hours with such fearless leapers. Best luck and a safe return. No betting here. All broke. We think we have caught a spy.” He turned out to be a perfectly innocent Frenchman “whose only offence was, apparently, that he existed in the foreground at the moment when a bombing-school, some miles in rear, elected to send up some suspicious blue lights.”

On the 23rd December, after a very quiet night, an entirely new plan of attack came in from an unnamed specialist who suggested that the gas (words cannot render their weariness of the accursed thing at this stage!) should be let off quite quietly without any artillery fire or unusual small-arm demonstration, at about four in the morning, when the odds were most of the enemy would be asleep, and that of those on duty few would ever have heard the sound of escaping gas. As the expert noted, “It requires a quick decision and a firm determination to give an alarm at 4 A. M., unless one is certain that it is not a false alarm, especially to a Prussian officer.” The hope was that the slow-waking and highly-to-his-superiors-respectful Hun would be thus caught in his dug-outs. The artillery would, gas or no gas, only give a general warning, and the suggested barrage (the first time, oddly enough, that the word is employed in the Diary) in rear of the enemy trenches would prevent his reserves from coming up into the gas-zone, “where there is always a chance that they may be gassed in spite of their gas-helmets.” So all the commanders held yet another conference, and agreed that the gas should be loosed at 4.30, that the barrage in the rear should be abandoned and a bombardment of the enemy’s parapet substituted for it, and that no patrols should be sent out. The companies were duly warned. The wind was not. The enemy spent the day shelling points in the rear till our guns retaliated on their front line, which they returned by shelling our parapet with small stuff. One piece they managed to blow in, and turned a machine-gun on the gap. They also made one flooded dug-out a shade less habitable than before. The wind stayed true south all night, and the rain it brought did more damage to the hovels and huts than any enemy shells; for the Chaplain and the Second in Command were half buried by “the ceiling of their bedroom becoming detached. The calamity was borne with beautiful fortitude.” (Even a second in command cannot express all his sentiments before a Chaplain.)

Christmas Eve was officially celebrated by good works; for the Battalion, its gas still intact, was warned to finish relief by eight o’clock, because, for the rest of the night, our guns would bombard German communication-trenches and back-areas so as to interfere as much as possible with their Christmas dinner issues. The 1st Coldstream filed in, and they filed out back to their various billets and posts at Pont du Hem, La Flinque Farm, and the rest. Christmas Day, their first at the front, and in the line, was officially washed out and treated as the 25th of December, dinners and festivities being held over till they should be comfortably settled in reserve. Some attempts at “fraternisation” seem to have been begun between the front-line trenches in the early morning, but our impersonal and impartial guns shelled every moving figure visible, besides plastering cross-roads and traffic lines at the back. Lieut.-Colonel McCalmont, Lord Desmond FitzGerald, and Captain Antrobus rode over from the 1st Battalion for lunch, and in the afternoon Lord Cavan spoke to the officers of his approaching departure from the Guards Division to command the Fourteenth Corps; of his regrets at the change, and of his undisguised hopes that the Guards Division might be attached to his new command. “He finished by telling us that we were following in the steps of our great 1st Battalion, which, as he has told the King and Sir Francis Lloyd, was as fine a battalion as ever trod.” Then there was a decorated and becandled Christmas tree brought out from England by Captain Alexander, which appeared at dinner, and, later, was planted out in the garden at the back of the mess that all might admire. Likewise, No. 1 Company received a gift of a gramophone, a concertina, and mouth-organs from Miss Laurette Taylor. The Irish take naturally to mouth-organs. The gramophone was put under strict control at once.

On boxing day, the whole 2nd Guards Brigade were relieved by the 1st Brigade, and went back out of reach of the shells to Merville _via_ La Gorgue, passing on the road several companies of the 1st Battalion on their way to relieve the 1st Scots Guards. (“When the like of that happens, and leave is given for to take notice of each other, ye may say that the two battalions cheer. But ’tis more in the nature of a running roar, ye’ll understand, when we Micks meet up.”)

Merville billets were thoroughly good, and the officers’ mess ran to a hard-worked but quite audible piano. Best of all, the fields around were too wet for anything like drill.

The postponed Christmas dinners for the men were given, two companies 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.

_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.