Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1175 page)

The Battalion relieved the Grenadiers once more on the 10th August, after another German mine had been exploded on the salient, and had carried away so much German wire that it seemed possible to effect an entry into their trenches across the new-made crater. A patrol under Lieutenant A. F. L. Gordon was therefore sent out at night but reported the slopes too steep to climb and, since another mine had gone up and destroyed four of our own sap-heads with it, the night was spent in repairing these under intermittent bomb-fire on both sides.

On the 11th August fresh attempts were made to work some sort of foothold across the crater-pitted ground into the enemy’s trenches, specially at the spot where a crater had been partially filled up by the explosion of a fresh mine. The day was quiet. Captain M. V. Gore-Langton spent the evening of it in reconnoitring the enemy’s wire, went out across the partly filled crater, found yet another crater which ran into the enemy’s line, and there met one German lying out within a few yards of him, whom Private Dempsey, his orderly, killed, thereby rousing the enemy in that particular point. They opened with bombs on a party of ours at work on a sap in one of the innumerable craters, and were discomfited for the moment. An hour later, Captain Gore-Langton, with one man, went out for the second time across the same crater to put up some more wire. He fell into the arms of a German bombing party, was knocked down thrice by explosions of bombs around him and only got back to the trenches with great difficulty. The C.O., Colonel Trefusis, then “remonstrated” with him on the grounds that “it is not the Company Commander’s business to go out wiring.” On the heels of this enterprise, a really vicious fight with machine-guns as well as bombs developed in the dark. It was silenced by four rounds of our howitzers when the roar of the bombs stopped as though by order. A third affair broke out just on dawn when our men found enemy working-parties in craters below them and bombed with them exceedingly, for the Germans were not good long-range throwers.

On the morning of the 12th August came General Horne to look at the position, which he examined leisurely from every part of the line instead of merely through the covered loop-holes which had been built for his convenience. “I was glad when I got him safely out of it,” wrote the C.O., “for one never knows when bombs may come over.” Just before they were relieved, the C.O., Colonel Trefusis, was telephoned word that he was to command the 20th Brigade and was pathetically grieved at his promotion. He hated leaving the Battalion which, after eleven months of better or worse, he had come to look upon as his own. No man could possibly wish to command a better. He was going to a brigade where he knew no one, and his hope was that he might be allowed to remain one day more with the Battalion “when it goes to the trenches” before going into reserve. He had his wish when they went into the line on the 14th August, and he faced the ordeal, worse than war, of saying good-bye to each company in the morning, and at evening “went round to make sure that the night companies had plenty of bombers in the proper places.” Bombs were the one tool at that time which could deal with nests of occupied craters, and since the work was dangerous the Irish were qualifying for it with zeal and interest, even though they occasionally dropped or released bombs by accident.

They were relieved (August 15) by a battalion from the 5th Brigade, who “had heard all sorts of dreadful stories about the position.” “But I told them,” said Colonel Trefusis, “it was not so bad, provided their bombers kept on bombing at night. Mines, of course, one cannot help, and the only way to minimise their effect is to keep as few men in the front line as possible.”

And so, Colonel the Hon. J. Trefusis passes out of the Battalion’s story, to his new headquarters and his new staff and bombing officers, and his brand-new troops, who “simply out of curiosity to see what was going on put their heads over the parapet while under instruction and so lost two men shot through the head, which I hope will be a lesson to them.”

He had commanded the Battalion since November, 1914, and no sudden occasion had found him wanting. The Diary says: “It is impossible to say all that he has done for the Battalion,” and indeed, high courage, unbroken humour, a cool head, skill, and infinite unselfishness are difficult things to set down in words. He was succeeded in the command by Major G. H. C. Madden who arrived from England on the 16th August, when the Battalion was in rest at Béthune and the hands of their company and platoon officers were closing upon them to make sure once more that such untidy business as mining, counter-mining, and crater-fighting had not diminished smartness on parade. This was doubly needful since the 4th (Guards) Brigade ceased, on the 19th August, to be part of the First Army and became the 1st Guards Brigade in the newly formed Guards Division of four Battalions Grenadiers, four Coldstream, two Scots, two Irish, and the Welsh Guards.

The 2nd Battalion of the Irish Guards, raised at Warley, left England for France on the 17th August.

Preparations on what was then considered an overwhelming scale, were under way to break the German line near Loos while the French attacked seriously in the Champagne country; the idea being to arrive at the long-dreamed-of battle of manœuvre in the plain of the Scheldt. Guns, gas-smoke apparatus, and material had been collected during the summer lull; existing communications had been more or less improved, though the necessity for feeder-railways was not at all realised, tanks were not yet created, and the proportion of machine-guns to infantry was rather below actual requirements. As compared with later years our armies were going into action with hammers and their bare hands across a breadth of densely occupied, tunnelled and elaborately fortified mining country where, as one writer observed “there is twice as much below ground as there is above.” Consequently, for the third or fourth time within a twelvemonth, England was to learn at the cost of scores of thousands of casualties that modern warfare, unlike private theatricals, does not “come right at the performance” unless there have been rehearsals.

The training of the men in the forms of attack anticipated went forward energetically behind the front lines, together with arrangements for the massing and distribution of the seventy thousand troops of the First Army (First and Fourth Corps) assigned to the attack. For the next six weeks or so the Irish Guards were under instruction to that end, and the trenches knew them no more.

There was a formal leave-taking as they left Béthune for St. Hilaire, when the ex-4th (Guards) Brigade was played out of Béthune by the band of the 1st King’s Liverpools and marched past General Horne commanding the Second Division between lines of cheering men. A company of the trusty Herts Territorials, who had been with the Brigade since 1914, took part in the ceremony. It was repeated next day before Sir Douglas Haig at Champagne and again in the Central Square of St. Omer, when Sir John French thanked all ranks for “the splendid services they had rendered” and was “much impressed with their soldier-like bearing.”

Major-General Horne’s special farewell order ran as follows:

General Haig on the 20th August handed the following Special Order of the Day to the Brigade Commander:

And the reward of their confused and unclean work among the craters and the tunnels of the past weeks came in the Commander-in-Chief’s announcement:

They lay at Eperlecques for a day or two on their way to Thiembronne, a hot nineteen-mile march during which only five men fell out. It was at St. Pierre between Thiembronne and Acquin that they met and dined with the 2nd Battalion of the Regiment which had landed in France on the 18th August. There are few records of this historic meeting; for the youth and the strength that gathered by the cookers in that open sunlit field by St. Pierre has been several times wiped out and replaced. The two battalions conferred together, by rank and by age, on the methods and devices of the enemy; the veterans of the First enlightening the new hands of the Second with tales that could lose nothing in the telling, mixed with practical advice of the most grim. The First promptly christened the Second “The Irish Landsturm,” and a young officer, who later rose to eminent heights and command of the 2nd Battalion sat upon a table under some trees, and delighted the world with joyous songs upon a concertina and a mouth-organ. Then they parted.

LOOS

The next three weeks were spent by the 1st Battalion at or near Thiembronne in training for the great battle to come. They were instructed in march-discipline, infantry attack, extended-order drill and field-training, attacks on villages (Drionville was one of them selected and the French villagers attended the field-day in great numbers) as well as in bussing and debussing against time into motor-buses which were then beginning to be moderately plentiful. Regimental sports were not forgotten — they were a great success and an amusement more or less comprehensible to the people of Thiembronne — and, since the whole world was aware that a combined attack would be made shortly by the English and French armies, the officers of the Guards Brigade were duly informed by Lieutenant-General Haking, commanding the Eleventh Army Corps, to which the Guards Division belonged, that such, indeed, was the case.

The domestic concerns of the Battalion during this pause include the facts that 2nd Lieutenant Dames-Longsworth from the 2nd Middlesex was attached on the 9th September “prior to transfer” to the Irish Guards; Captain C. D. Wynter, Lieutenant F. H. Witts, and 2nd Lieutenant W. B,. Stevens were transferred (September 10, from the 1st to the 2nd Battalion) and 2nd Lieutenant T. K. Walker and T. H. Langrishe transferred on the same day from the 2nd to the 1st, while Orderly-Room Quartermaster Sergeant J. Halligan, of whom later, was gazetted a 2nd Lieutenant to the Leinster Regiment. Captain L. R. Hargreaves was on the 13th “permitted to wear the badge of Captain pending his temporary promotion to that rank being announced in the
London Gazette
,” and the C. 0., Major G. H. C. Madden, was on the 6th September gazetted a temporary Lieutenant-Colonel. These were the first grants of temporary rank in the Battalion.

On the 18th September the C.O.’s of all the battalions in the Guards Division motored to the Béthune district, where a reconnaissance was made “from convenient observation-posts” of the country between Cuinchy and Loos that they might judge the weight of the task before them.

It was a jagged, scarred, and mutilated sweep of mining-villages, factories, quarries, slag-dumps, pitheads, chalk-pits, and railway embankments — all the plant of an elaborate mechanical civilization connected above ground and below by every means that ingenuity and labour could devise to the uses of war. The ground was trenched and tunnelled with cemented and floored works of terrifying permanency that linked together fortified redoubts, observation-posts, concealed batteries, rallying-points, and impregnable shelters for waiting reserves. So it ran along our front from Grenay north of the plateau of Notre Dame de Lorette, where two huge slag-heaps known as the Double Crassier bristled with machine-guns, across the bare interlude of crop land between Loos and Hulluch, where a high German redoubt crowned the slopes to the village of Haisnes with the low and dangerous Hohenzollern redoubt south of it. Triple lines of barbed wire protected a system of triple trenches, concrete-faced, holding dug-outs twenty feet deep, with lifts for machine-guns which could appear and disappear in emplacements of concrete over iron rails; and the observation-posts were capped with steel cupolas. In the background ample railways and a multitude of roads lay ready to launch fresh troops to any point that might by any chance be forced in the face of these obstacles.