Chapter III: Part 3

It turned out a quiet tour of duty; the two lines were so close together that much shelling was inexpedient, and snipers gave no trouble. So all hands were free to attend their own comforts, notably the care and discharge of drains. The R.E. who, contrary to popular belief, sometimes have bowels, had added wooden floors to many of the little huts behind the redoubts. Company Headquarters were luxurious, with real windows, and even window-curtains; the slimy trenches were neatly boarded over and posted, and men went about their business almost dry-shod. It was, as we know, the custom of those parts that, before entering the line, troops should dump their ankle-boots at a farm-house just behind Red House, and go on in the long trench boots. For no earthly reason that the Irish could arrive at, the Hun took it into his methodical head one night to shell their huge boot-dump where, as a matter of course, some regimental shoemakers were catching up with repairs. The shoemakers bolted like ferreted rabbits, and all the world, except those whose boots were buried, laughed at them. So long as a man comes through it alive, his agonies and contortions in the act of dodging death are fair game.

On the nights of the 4th and 5th January they began to engineer the detail of a local raid which marked progress in the art. Patrols went out from each company in the front line to hunt for weak places. The patrol from the right company worked to within fifteen yards of the enemy, got into boggy ground, noisy with loose wire, listened an hour to the Germans working and talking, and came back. The right centre company patrol slopped up a ditch for a full furlong, then ran into a cross-ditch fifteen feet wide, with a trip-wire (the enemy disliked being taken unawares), and also returned like the dove of old. Similarly the left-centre patrol, which found more ditch and trip-wires leading them to a singularly stout section of trench where two Germans looked over the edge of the parapet, and the general landscape was hostile. The left company had the luck. It was an officer’s patrol commanded again by 2nd Lieutenant Brew. Their crawl led them along a guiding line of willows, and to within six feet of a salient guarded by a three-foot wire belt. But a few yards farther down, they came across a gap our guns had made—not clean-cut, but easy enough, in their opinion, to “negotiate.” As far as men on their bellies could make out, the line seemed held by sentries at wide intervals who, after the manner of single sentries, fired often at nothing and sent up lights for the pleasure of seeing their support-line answer them. (“As we was everlastingly telling the new hands, the fewer there are of ye _anny_where, the less noise should ye be after making _anny_how. But ’tis always the small, lonely, miserable little man by himself that gives forth noises like large platoons.”) Then they were relieved by the 1st Coldstream, and their Acting C.O. (Captain Eric Greer) was instructed to produce a scheme for a really good raid from the left of their line on the weak place discovered. The Coldstream would attend to it during their tour, if the Irish furnished the information. Greer worked it out lovingly to the last detail. Three riflemen and three bombers were to lead off on the right, and as many on the left followed by a “killing and demolition party,” armed with bludgeons, of an officer and eight other ranks. A support party of one N.C.O. and five other ranks, with rifles and bayonets, and a connecting party of two signallers with telephones and four stretcher-bearers brought up the rear of what the ribald afterwards called “our mournful procession.” It was further laid down that a wire-cutting party (and the men hated wire-cutting) would “improve the gap in the enemy’s wire” for the space of one hour. The raiders were to work quietly along the line of the providential willows till they found the gap; then would split into two gangs left and right, and attend to the personnel in the trench “as quickly and silently as possible, never using bombs when they can bayonet a man.” The rest were to enter afterwards, and destroy and remove all they could find. “If possible and convenient, they will take a prisoner who will be immediately passed back to our trench by the supporting-party. Faces to be blacked for the sake of ‘frightfulness,’ mutual recognition, and invisibility,” and electric torches carried. The officer in charge was to be a German linguist, for the reason that a prisoner, hot and shaken at the moment of capture, and before being “passed back” was likely to exude more information than when cold and safe in our own lines.

There was nothing special on at the Front just then; and the 2nd Battalion and the Coldstream discussed and improved that raid at every point they could think of. One authority wanted a double raid, from left and right fronts simultaneously, but they explained that this particular affair would need “so much quietness” in combined stalking that it would be “inconvenient to run it on a time schedule.” Then our guns were given word to cut wire in quite other directions from the chosen spot which was no more to be disturbed till the proper time than a pet cover. That was on the 7th January. On the night of the 8th the Twentieth Division on their left announced that they were “going to let off gas” at 2 A. M., and follow up with a raid. The Battalion had to stand to arms, stifling in its respirators, during its progress; and by the glare of the enemy’s lights could see our gas drifting low in great grey clouds towards the opposite lines. They observed, too, a number of small explosions in the German side when the gas reached there, which seemed to dissipate it locally. The enemy guns were badly served, opening half an hour late and pitching shell in their own wire and trenches, but they hardly annoyed the Battalion at all. The affair was over in a couple of hours. (“There is nothing, mark you, a man hates like a division on his flank stirring up trouble. Ye know the poor devils have no choice of it, but it looks always as if they was doing it to spite their neighbours, and not Jerry at all.”)

But the pleasure of the Twentieth Division was not allowed to interfere with the business of their own private raid. Before the gas was “let off” 2nd Lieutenant Brew again chaperoned two scouts of the Coldstream to show them the gap in the wire in case they cared to try it on their tour. It was found easily and reported to be passable in single file.

But, as they said wrathfully afterwards, who could have guessed that, on the night of the 10th, after the Coldstream’s wire-cutting party had worked for two hours, and their raiders had filed through the gap, and met more wire on the parapet which took more time to cut—when they at last dropped into the trench and searched it for three long hours they—found no sign of a German? The Coldstream’s sole trophies were some bombs, a box of loaded M.G. belts, and one rocket!

When they relieved the Coldstream on the 11th January, they naturally tried their own hand on the problem. By this time they had discovered themselves to be a “happy” battalion which they remained throughout. None can say precisely how any body of men arrives at this state. Discipline, effort, doctrine, and unlimited care and expense on the part of the officers do not necessarily secure it; for there have been battalions in our armies whose internal arrangements were scandalously primitive, whose justice was neolithic, and yet whose felicity was beyond question. It may be that the personal attributes of two or three leading spirits in the beginning set a note to which the other young men, of generous minds, respond: half a dozen superior N.C.O.’s can, sometimes, raise and humanise the soul of a whole battalion; but, at bottom, the thing is a mystery to be accepted with thankfulness. The 2nd Battalion of the Irish Guards was young throughout, the maker of its own history, and the inheritor of the Guards’ tradition; but its common background was ever Warley where they had all first met and been moulded—officers and men together. So happiness came to them and stayed, and with it, unity, and, to use the modern slang, “efficiency” in little things as well as big—confidence and joyous mutual trust that carries unspoken through the worst of breakdowns.

The blank raid still worried them, and there may have been, too, some bets on the matter between themselves and the Coldstream. At any rate 2nd Lieutenant Brew reappears—his C.O. and the deeply interested battalion in confederacy behind him.

On the night of the 11th of January, Brew took out a small patrol and entered the German trench that they were beginning to know so well. He re-cut the wire, made a new gap for future uses, explored, built two barricades in the trench itself; got bogged up among loose wire, behind which he guessed (but the time was not ripe to wake up that hornet’s nest) the German second line lay, and—came back before dawn with a periscope as proof that the trench was occupied by daylight. “The enterprise suffered from the men’s lack of experience in patrolling by night,” a defect that the C.O. took care to remedy.

As a serious interlude, for milk was a consideration, “the cow at Red House calved successfully. Signallers, orderlies, and others were present at the accouchement.” Doubtless, too, the orderly-room kitten kept an interested eye on the event.

In the afternoon the Brigadier came round, and the C.O. and the 2nd Lieutenant discussed a plan of the latter to cross the German line and lie up for the day in some disused trench or shell-hole. It was dismissed as “practical but too risky.” Moreover, at that moment there was a big “draw” on hand, with the idea of getting the enemy out of their second line and shelling as they came up. The Battalion’s private explorations must stand over till it was finished. Three infantry brigades took part in this game, beginning at dusk—the Guards on the left, the 114th Brigade in the centre, and the left battalion of the Nineteenth Division on the right. The 114th Brigade, which was part of the Thirty-eighth Division, had just relieved the 1st Guards Brigade. Every one stood to arms with unlimited small-arm ammunition handy, and as daylight faded over the enemy’s parapets the 114th sent up a red rocket followed by one green to mark Zero. There was another half minute to go in which a motor machine-gun got overtilted and started to gibber. Then the riot began. Both battalions of the 2nd Guards Brigade, the left half-battalion of the 114th Brigade, and the left of the Nineteenth Division opened rapid fire with rifles, machine-, and Lewis-guns. At the same time, our artillery on the right began a heavy front and enfilade bombardment of the German line while our howitzers barraged the back of it. The infantry, along the Winchester Road, held their fire, but simulated, with dummies which were worked by ropes, a line of men in act to leave the trenches. Last, the artillery on our left joined in, while the dummies were handled so as to resemble a second line attacking.

To lend verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative, the guns on the right lifted and began shelling back-lines and communication-trenches, as though to catch reinforcements, while the dummies jigged and shouldered afresh on their energetic ropes. The enemy took the thing in quite the right spirit. He replied with rifle-fire; he sent up multitudes of red lights, which always soothed him when upset; and his artillery plastered the ground behind our centre with big shells that could be heard crumping somewhere in the interior of France till our own guns, after a ten minutes’ pause, came down once more. Over and above the annoyance to him of having to rush up supports into the front line, it was reasonable to suppose that our deluges of small-arm stuff must have done him some damage. “The men were all prepared and determined to enjoy themselves, the machine-gunners were out to show what a lot of noise they could really make, and the fire must have been infinitely uncomfortable for German quartermaster-sergeants, cookers, and others, wandering about behind the line with rations—if they walk about as much as we do. One of the companies alone loosed off 7000 rounds, including Lewis-guns, during the flurry.”

They were back at La Gorgue again on the 13th January, in divisional rest; the 3rd Guards Brigade relieving them. While there the C.O. launched a scheme for each subaltern to pick and train six men on his own, so as to form the very hard core of any patrols or bombing-parties he might have to lead hereafter. They were specially trained for spotting things and judging distance at night; and the tales that were told about them and their adventures and their confidences would fill several unprintable books. (There was an officer who did not so much boast as mount, with a certain air, a glass eye. One night, during patrol, he was wounded in the shoulder, and brought in by his pet patrol-leader, a private of unquestioned courage, with, by the way, a pretty taste for feigning abject fear when he wished to test new men with whom he was working in No Man’s Land. He rendered first aid to his officer whose wound was not severe, and then invited him to “take a shquint” at the result. The officer had to explain that he was blind on that side. Whereupon, the private, till the doctor turned up, drew loud and lively pictures of the horror of his wife at home, should it ever come to her knowledge that her man habitually crawled about France in the dark with an officer “blinded on the half of him.”)

They rested for nearly a fortnight at La Gorgue, attended a lecture—“if not instructive, at least highly entertaining”—by Max Abbat, the well-known French boxer, on “Sport and what England had done for France,” and had a regimental dinner, when ten of the officers of the First Battalion came over from Merville with their brigadier and the Staff Captain, and Lieutenant Charles Moore who had saved the Battalion Christmas dinners, looked after them all to the very end which, men say, became nebulous. Some one had been teaching the Battalion to bomb in style, for their team of thirty returned from Brigade Bombing School easy winners, by one hundred points in the final competition. (“Except that the front line is mostly quieter and _always_ more safe, there is no differ betwixt the front line and Bombing School.”)

They went back into line and support-billets on the 26th relieving the 3rd Guards Brigade; and the Battalion itself taking over from the 1st Grenadiers on the Red House sector, Laventie. Apparently, the front line had been fairly peaceful in their absence, but they noted that the Grenadier Headquarters seemed “highly pleased to go,” for the enemy had got in seven direct hits that very day on Red House itself. One shell had dropped in “the best upstairs bedroom, and two through the roof.” They took this as a prelude to a Kaiser’s birthday battle, as there had been reports of loyal and patriotic activities all down that part of the line, and rumours of increased railway movement behind it. A generous amount of tapped German wireless lent colour to the belief. Naturally, Battalion Headquarters at Red House felt all the weight of the war on their unscreened heads, and all hands there, from the adjutant and medical officer to the orderlies and police strengthened the defences with sand-bags. A battalion cannot be comfortable if its headquarters’ best bedrooms are turned out into the landscape. No attacks, however, took place, and night patrols reported nothing unusual for the 26th and 27th January.

A new devilry (January 28) now to be tried were metal tubes filled with ammonal, which were placed under enemy wire and fired by electricity. They called them “Bangalore torpedoes” and they were guaranteed to cut all wire above them. At the same time, dummies, which had become a fashionable amusement along the line, would be hoisted by ropes out of our trenches to the intent that the enemy might be led to man his parapets that our guns might sweep them. It kept the men busy and amused, and they were more excited when our snipers reported that they could make out a good deal of movement in the line in front of Red House, where Huns in small yellow caps seemed to be “rolling something along the trench.” Snipers were forbidden to pot-shot until they could see a man’s head and shoulders clearly, as experience had proved that at so long a range—the lines here were full two hundred yards apart—“shooting on the chance of hitting half a head merely made the enemy shy and retiring.” One gets the impression that, in spite of the “deadening influence of routine” (some of the officers actually complained of it in their letters home!) the enemy’s “shyness,” at that moment, might have been due to an impression that he was facing a collection of inventive young fiends to whom all irregular things were possible.

They went into brigade reserve at Laventie on the 30th of the month, with genuine regrets, for the trenches that they had known so long. “We shall never be as comfortable anywhere else,” one boy wrote; and the C.O. who had spent so much labour and thought there lifts up a swan-song which shows what ideal trenches should be. “Handed over in November in a bad state, they are now as nearly perfect as a line in winter can be. The parapets are perfect, the fire-steps all wooden and in good repair. The dug-outs, or rather the little huts which answer to that name in this swampy country, their frameworks put up by the engineers and sand-bagged up by the infantry, are dry and comfortable. The traffic-trench, two boards wide in most places, is dry everywhere. Wherever trench-boards ran on sand-bags or mud they have been painted and put on piles. The wire in front of the line is good.”

They were due for rest at Merville, farther out of the way of fire than La Gorgue, for the next week or so, but their last day in Laventie was cheered by an intimate lecture on the origin, nature, and effects of poison-gas, delivered by a doctor who had seen the early trials of it at Ypres. He told them in cold detail how the Canadians slowly drowned from the base of the lung upwards, and of the scenes of horror in the ambulances. Told them, too, how the first crude antidotes were rushed out from England in a couple of destroyers, and hurried up to the line by a fleet of motor ambulances, so that thirty-six hours after the first experience, some sort of primitive respirators were issued to the troops. The lecture ended with assurances that the ’15 pattern helmets were gas-proof for three quarters of an hour against any gas then in use, if they were properly inspected, put on and breathed through in the prescribed manner.

Their only diversion at Merville was a fire in the local chicory factory close to the messes. Naturally, there was no adequate fire-engine, and by the time that the A.S.C. turned up, amid the cheers of the crowd whom they squirted with an extincteur, the place was burned out. “When nothing was left but the walls and some glowing timbers we heard, creeping up the street, a buzz of admiration and applause. The crowd round the spot parted, and in strode a figure, gaunt and magnificent, attired in spotless white breeches, black boots and gaiters, a blue jacket and a superb silver helmet. He was the Lieutenant of Pompiers, and had, of course, arrived a bit late owing to the necessity of dressing for the part. He stalked round the ring of urban dignities who were in the front row, shook each by the hand with great solemnity, stared gloomily at the remains of the house and departed.”

There was no expectation of any imminent attack anywhere, both sides were preparing for “the spring meeting,” as our people called it; and leave was being given with a certain amount of freedom. This left juniors sometimes in charge of full companies, an experience that helped to bring forward the merits of various N.C.O.’s and men; for no two company commanders take the same view of the same private; and on his return from leave the O.C. may often be influenced by the verdict of his _locum tenens_ to give more or less responsibility to a particular individual. _Thus: Locum Tenens._ “I say, Buffles, while you were away, I took out Hasken—No, not ‘Bullock’ Hasken—‘Spud’—on that double-ditch patrol, out by the dead rifle-man. He didn’t strike _me_ as a fool.”

_Buffles._ “Didn’t he? _I_ can’t keep my patience with him. He talks too much.”

_L. T._ “Not when he’s outside the wire. And he doesn’t see things in the dark as much as some of ’em.” (Meditatively, mouth filled with fondants brought from home by Buffles.) “Filthy stuff this war-chocolate is.” (Pause.) “Er, what do _you_ think? He’s lance already.”

_Buffles._ “I know it. I don’t think he’s much of a lance either. Well ...”

_L. T._ “Anyhow, he’s dead keen on night jobs. But if you took him once or twice and tried him.... He _is_ dead keen.... Eh?”

_Buffles._ “All right. We’ll see. Where is that dam’ logbook?” Thus the matter is settled without one direct word being spoken, and “Spud” Hasken comes to his own for better or for worse.

On the 7th February, they were shifted, as they had anticipated, to the left of the right sector of the divisional front, which meant much less comfortable trenches round Pont du Hem, and badly battered Headquarters at Winchester House. They relieved the 1st Coldstream in the line on the 9th, and found at once plenty of work in strengthening parapets, raising trench-boards, and generally attending to their creature comforts. (“Never have I known _any_ battalion in the Brigade that had a good word to say for the way the other battalions live. We might all have been brides, the way we went to our new housekeepings in every new place—turnin’ up our noses at our neighbours.”)

And while they worked, Headquarters were “briefly but accurately” shelled with whizz-bangs. On the 11th February the pace quickened a little. There was mining along that front on both sides, and our miners from two mines had reported they had heard work going on over their heads only a hundred and twenty yards out from our own parapets. It might signify that the enemy were working on “Russian saps”—shallow mines, almost like mole-runs, designed to bring a storming party right up to our parapets under cover. The miners were not loved for their theories, for at midnight along the whole Battalion front, pairs of unhappy men had to lie out on ground-sheets listening for any sound of subterranean picks. The proceedings, it is recorded, somewhat resembled a girls’ school going to bed, and the men said that all any one got out of the manœuvres was “blashts of ear-ache.” But, as the Diary observes, if there were any mining on hand, the Germans would naturally knock off through the quietest hours of the twenty-four.

In some ways it was a more enterprising enemy than round the Red House, and they felt, rather than saw, that there were patrols wandering about No Man’s Land at unseemly hours. So the Battalion sent forth a couple of Lewis-gunners with their weapon, two bombers with their bombs, and one telephonist complete with field telephones. These, cheered by hot drinks, lay up a hundred yards from our parapets, installed their gun in an old trench, and telephoned back on prearranged signals for Very lights in various directions to illumine the landscape and invite inspection. “The whole scheme worked smoothly. In fact, it only wanted a few Germans to make it a complete success.” And the insult of the affair was that the enemy could be heard whistling and singing all night as they toiled at their own mysterious jobs. In the evening, just as the Battalion was being relieved by the Coldstream, a defensive mine, which was to have been exploded after the reliefs were comfortably settled in, had to go up an hour before, as the officer in charge, fearing that the Germans who were busy in the same field might break into his galleries at any moment, did not see fit to wait. The resulting German flutter just caught the end of the relief, and two platoons of No. 1 Company were soundly shelled as they went down the Rue du Bacquerot to Rugby Road. However, no one was hurt. The men of the 2nd Battalion were as unmoved by mines as were their comrades in the 1st. They resented the fatigue caused by extra precautions against them, but the possibilities of being hoisted sky-high at any moment did not shake the Celtic imagination.

While in Brigade Reserve for a couple of days No. 1 Company amused itself preparing a grim bait to entice German patrols into No Man’s Land. Two dummies were fabricated to represent dead English soldiers. “One, designed to lie on its back, had a face modelled by Captain Alexander from putty and paint which for ghastliness rivalled anything in Madame Tussaud’s. The frame-work of the bodies was wire, so they could be twisted into positions entirely natural.” While they were being made, on the road outside Brigade Headquarters at Pont du Hem, a French girl came by and believing them to be genuine, fled shrieking down the street. They were taken up to the front line on stretchers, and it chanced that in one trench they had to give place to let a third stretcher pass. On it was a dead man, whom no art could touch.

Next night, February 15, between moonset and dawn, the grisliest hour of the twenty-four, Lieutenant Pym took the twins out into No Man’s Land, arranging them one on its face and the other on its back in such attitudes as are naturally assumed by the old warped dead. “Strapped between the shoulders of the former, for the greater production of German curiosity, was a cylinder sprouting india-rubber tubes. This was intended to resemble a flammenwerfer.” Hand- and rifle-grenades were then hurled near the spot to encourage the theory (the Hun works best on a theory) that two British patrols had fought one another in error, and left the two corpses. At evening, the Lewis-gun party and a brace of bombers lay out beside the kill, but it was so wet and cold that they had to be called in, and no one was caught. And all this fancy-work, be it remembered, was carried out joyously and interestedly, as one might arrange for the conduct of private theatricals or the clearance of rat-infested barns.

On the 16th they handed over to the 9th Welsh of the Nineteenth Division, and went back to La Gorgue for two days’ rest. Then the 2nd Guards Brigade moved north to other fields. The “spring meeting” that they talked about so much was a certainty somewhere or other, but it would be preceded, they hoped, by a period of “fattening up” for the Division. (“We knew, as well as the beasts do, that when Headquarters was kind to us, it meant getting ready to be killed on the hoof—but it never put us off our feed.”) Poperinghe, and its camps, was their immediate destination, which looked, to the initiated, as if Ypres salient would be the objective; but they had been promised, or had convinced themselves, that there would be a comfortable “stand-easy” before they went into that furnace, of which their 1st Battalion had cheered them with so many quaint stories. Their first march was of fifteen miles through Neuf and Vieux-Berquin—and how were they to know what the far future held for them there?—to St. Sylvestre, of little houses strung along its typical pavé. Only one man fell out, and he, as is carefully recorded, had been sick the day before. Thence, Wormhoudt on the 22nd February, nine miles through a heavy snow-storm, to bad billets in three inches of snow, which gave the men excuse for an inter-company snowball battle. The 1st Battalion had thankfully quitted Poperinghe for Calais, and the 2nd took over their just vacated camp, of leaky wooden huts on a filthy parade-ground of frozen snow at the unchristian hour of half-past seven in the morning. On that day 2nd Lieutenant Hordern with a draft of thirty men joined from the 7th Entrenching Battalion. (“All winter drafts look like sick sparrows. The first thing to tell ’em is they’ll lose their names for coughing, and the next is to strip the Warley fat off ’em by virtue of strong fatigues.”) They were turned on to digging trenches near their camp and practice-attacks with live bombs; this being the beginning of the bomb epoch, in which many officers believed, and a good few execrated. At a conference of C.O.’s of the Brigade at Headquarters the Brigadier explained the new system of trench-attack in successive waves about fifteen yards apart. The idea was that if the inevitable flanking machine-gun fire wiped out your leading wave, there was a chance of stopping the remainder of the company before it was caught.

A lecture on the 1st March by the Major-General cheered the new hands. He told them that “there was a great deal of work to be done in the line we were going into. Communication-trenches were practically non-existent and the front parapet was not continuous. _All_ this work would have to be done by the infantry, as the Divisional R.E. would be required for a very important line along the Canal and in front of the town of Ypres.” One of the peculiarities of all new lines and most R.E. corps is that the former is always out of condition and the latter generally occupied elsewhere.

Their bombing-practice led to the usual amount of accidents, and on the 2nd March Lieutenant Keenan was wounded in the hand by a premature burst; four men were also wounded and one of them died.

Next day, when their Quartermaster’s party went to Calais to take over the 1st Battalion’s camp there, they heard of the fatal accident at bomb-practice to Lord Desmond FitzGerald and the wounding of Lieutenant Nugent and Father Lane-Fox. They sent Captains J. S. N. FitzGerald and Witts, and their Sergeant-Major and Drum-Major to FitzGerald’s funeral.

On the 6th March they entrained at Poperinghe for Calais, where the whole Brigade lay under canvas three miles out from the town beside the Calais-Dunkirk road. “The place would have been very nice, as the Belgian aviation ground, in the intervals of dodging the Belgian aviators, made a fine parade and recreation ground, but life in tents was necessarily marred by continued frost and snow.” More intimately: “The bell-tents are all right, but the marquees leak in the most beastly manner. There are only a few places where we can escape the drips.”

Here they diverted themselves, and here Sir Douglas Haig reviewed them and some Belgian artillery, which, as it meant standing about in freezing weather, was no diversion at all. But their “Great Calais First Spring Meeting” held on Calais Sands, in some doubt as to whether the tide would not wipe out the steeple-chase course, was an immense and unqualified success. Every soul in the Brigade who owned a horse, and several who had procured one, turned out and rode, including Father Knapp, aged fifty-eight. There were five races, and a roaring multitude who wanted to bet on anything in or out of sight. The Battalion bookmaker was a second lieutenant—at home a barrister of some distinction—who, in fur coat, brown bowler of the accepted pattern, and with a nosegay of artificial flowers in his buttonhole, stood up to the flood of bets till they overwhelmed him; and he and his clerk “simply had to trust to people for the amounts we owed them after the races.” Even so, the financial results were splendid. The mess had sent them into the fray with a capital of 1800 francs, and when evening fell on Calais Sands they showed a profit of 800 francs. The star performance of the day was that of the C.O.’s old charger “The Crump,” who won the steeple-chase held an hour after winning the mile, where he had given away three stones. His detractors insinuated that he was the only animal who kept within the limits of the very generous and ample course laid out by Captain Charles Moore. There followed a small orgy of Battalion and inter-Battalion sports and amusements—football competitions for men and officers, with a “singing competition” for “sentimental, comic, and original turns.” Oddly enough, in this last the Battalion merely managed to win a consolation prize, for a private who beat a drum, whistled, and told comic tales in brogue. It may have been he was the great and only “Cock” Burne or Byrne of whom unpublishable Battalion-history relates strange things in the early days. He was eminent, even among many originals—an elderly “old soldier,” solitary by temperament, unpredictable in action, given to wandering off and boiling tea, which he drank perpetually in remote and unwholesome corners of the trenches. But he had the gift, with many others, of crowing like a cock (hence his _nom-de-guerre_), and vastly annoyed the unhumorous Hun, whom he would thus salute regardless of time, place, or safety. To this trick he added a certain infinitely monotonous tom-tomming on any tin or box that came handy, so that it was easy to locate him even when exasperated enemy snipers were silent. He came from Kilkenny, and when on leave wore such medal-ribbons as he thought should have been issued to him—from the V.C. down; so that when he died, and his relatives asked why those medals had not been sent them, there was a great deal of trouble. Professionally, he was a “dirty” soldier, but this was understood and allowed for. He regarded authority rather as an impertinence to be blandly set aside than to be argued or brawled with; and he revolved in his remote and unquestioned orbits, brooding, crowing, drumming, and morosely sipping his tea, something between a poacher, a horse-coper, a gipsy, and a bird-catcher, but always the philosopher and man of many queer worlds. His one defect was that, though difficult to coax on to the stage, once there and well set before an appreciative audience, little less than military force could haul “Cock” Byrne off it.

They celebrated St. Patrick’s Day on the 14th March instead of the 17th, which was fixed as their date for removal; and they wound up the big St. Patrick dinners, and the Gaelic Football Inter-company Competition (a fearsome game), with a sing-song round a bonfire in the open. Not one man in six of that merry assembly is now alive.

THE SALIENT FOR THE FIRST TIME

They marched out of Calais early on the 17th March, through Cassel, and Major the Hon. A. C. S. Chichester joined on transfer from the 1st Battalion as Second in Command. Poperinghe was reached on the afternoon of the 18th, a sixteen-mile march in suddenly warm weather, but nobody fell out. The town, crowded with troops, transport, and traffic of every conceivable sort, both smelt and looked unpleasant. It was bombed fairly regularly by enemy planes, so windows had long since ceased to be glazed; and at uncertain intervals a specially noxious gun, known as “Silent Susy,” sent into its populated streets slim shells that arrived unfairly before the noise of their passage. But neither bombs nor shells interfered with the cinemas, the “music hall,” the Y.M.C.A. or other diversions, for every one in “Pop” was _ipso facto_ either going into the Salient or coming out, and in both cases needed the distraction of the words and pictures of civilised life. They lay there for a few days, and on the 26th March about midnight, in a great quiet, they entered Ypres, having entrained, also with no noise whatever, from Poperinghe. The Diary, rarely moved to eloquence, sets down: “It was an impressive sight not to be forgotten by those who were present, as we threaded our way through the wrecked and shattered houses. Those of the Battalion who knew it before had not seen it since the dark days of November ’14, when with the 1st Battalion they played their part in the glorious First Battle of Ypres, a fight never to be forgotten in the annals of the Irish Guards.”

_Second Battalion Actions_

_Emery Walker Ltd. del. et sc._]

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY EMERY WALKER LTD., LONDON

The impression on the new hands, that is, the majority of men and officers, struck in and stayed for years after. Some compared their stealthy entry to tip-toeing into the very Cathedral of Death itself; and declared that heads bowed a little and shoulders hunched, as in expectation of some stroke upon the instant. Also that, mingled with this emotion, was intense curiosity to know what the place might look like by day. (“And God knows Ypres was no treat to behold, then or after—day or night. The way most of us took it, was we felt ’twas The Fear itself—the same as meeting up with the Devil. I do not remember if ’twas moonlight or dark when we came in that first time. Dark it must have been though, or we felt it was, and there was a lot of doings going on in that darkness, such as Military Police, and men whispering where we was to go, and stretchers, and parties carrying things in the dark, in and out where the houses had fallen by lumps. And there was little blue lights showing here and there and around, and the whole stink of the Salient, blowing back and forth upon us, the way we’d get it up our noses for ever. Yes—and there was transport on the pavé, wheels going dam’ quick and trying, at the same time, not to make a noise, if ye understand.

“And I remember, too, voices out of holes low down betwixt the rubbish-heaps. They would be the troops in cellars over against the Cloth Hall, I expect. And ye could hear our men breathing at the halts, and the kit squeaking on their backs, and we marching the way we was striving not to break eggs. I know _I_ was.”)

At the time no one seemed to have noticed the peculiarity of the Salient, which, like Verdun, appears at night surrounded by a ring of searchlights and artillery; so that on going forward one feels as though one were altogether cut off from the rest of the front, a target open to every fire.

They were welcomed on the morning of the 27th March by three shells well and truly placed, one after the other, in the courtyard of the Convent where Battalion H.Q. stood. Six N.C.O.’s and men were wounded, of whom Sergeant McGuinn died a few hours later. This was the prelude to a night-long bombardment from a battery evidently told off for the job, which opening at eleven kept it up till ten of the morning of the 28th, when it ceased, and the remainder of the day was quiet. One must remember that the enemy used Ypres through the years as their gunnery school officers’ training-ground.

The 29th March was also a quiet day for the Battalion. There was, naturally, no walking about, or any distraction from the wonder where the next blast of fire would choose to fall, a sensation of helplessness which is not good for the nerves. They were the right Reserve Battalion of the Right Brigade, which, elsewhere, would have been equivalent to being in the front line, but Ypres had its own scale of sufferings. They worked quietly on repairs from dusk till the first light of dawn in their trenches beyond the Canal. From daylight to dusk again they lay up in dug-outs for the most part, and all fires that showed smoke were forbidden. But a race accustomed to peat can miraculously make hot tea over a few fragments of ammunition-boxes or a fistful of stolen coke, even in the inner bowels of a sealed dug-out. Any signs of life were punished by visits from observation-planes or a shelling from one flank or the other; for the enemy commanded practically all their trenches, and this implied a constant building and repair of traverses and blindages. It took them three hours to relieve the 1st Coldstream in the front line on the night of the 30th March, and during relief the reserve trench which was being taken over by No. 4 Company under Captain Eric Greer (he had reverted to Company Officer on Major Chichester’s arrival as Second in Command) was shelled and badly knocked about. There were only eight men wounded, however, and the company was “perfectly cool throughout.” (“When you know ye may be for it every minute, you can _not_ be more frightened than frightened. The same as getting drunk, _I_ think. After a while—dead-drunk ye get, and dead-drunk ye stay. Ah, but they was genteel trenches and pleasant-spoken Jerries down at Laventie where we’d come from, in front of Red House and all!”)

The last day of March brought them for one breathless half-hour the heaviest shelling they had yet undergone; but it ended, as so many such outbursts did, in nothing but a few slight wounds, and a searching of the Menin road by night with big stuff that roared and rattled on what remained of the tortured stones. One could always know when Ypres city had been shelled afresh, by the pools of blood on the pavé in the raw morning or some yet undisposed-of horse which told that the night-hawking processions of the transport had caught it once again. Their daily lives in the front and reserve line were dark, confined, and unsavoury. One officer was ill-advised enough to pry into the vitals of his dug-out. (“When I arrived, it did not look so bad, as the floor was covered with sand-bags as usual.”) A strong-stomached orderly turned in to remove a few. He found no less than six layers of them, progressively decaying; then floor-boards of a fabulous antiquity, and last the original slime of ’14’s corruption. It was neglectful, but men who may be blown out of this life any hour of the twenty-four do not devote themselves to the continuities of house-cleaning.

In Ypres city that spring not one single building was habitable, though many of them still retained the shapes of human dwellings. The Battalion messes were all underground in cellars, a couple of which, with a hole knocked through the dividing walls, make a good anteroom; but their sole light came from a small window which also gave passage to the stove-pipe. A tired man could doze down there, in gross fuggy warmth and a brooding stillness broken only by the footsteps of small parties moving without ostentation till the triple whistle of the aeroplane-watchers sent feet scurrying loudly to cover.

Those who have known of both terrains say Verdun Salient, by reason of its size, contours, and elevation was less of a permanent tax on the morale than the flatness and confinement of Ypres. One could breathe in certain spots round Verdun; look out over large horizons from others; and solid, bold features of landscape interposed between oneself and the enemy. The thickness and depth, too, of all France lay behind for support. In the Salient it was so short a distance from Calais or Boulogne that one could almost hear the Channel threatening at one’s back, and wherever wearied eyes turned, forwards or flank wise, the view was closed by low, sullen rises or swells of ground, held and used in comfort and at leisure by an established enemy.

They reckoned time in the trenches by the amount of shelling that fell to their share. A mere passage of big stuff overhead seeking its butts in the town did not count any more than excited local attacks to left or right of the immediate sector; and two or three men wounded by splinters and odds-and-ends would not spoil the record of “a quiet day.” Occasionally, as the tides and local currents of attack shifted, our guns behind them would wake up to retaliation or direct punishment. Sometimes the enemy’s answer would be immediate; sometimes he accepted the lashing in silence till nightfall, and then the shapeless town would cower and slide still lower into its mounds and rubbish-heaps. Most usually a blow on one side or the other would be countered, it seemed to the listeners in the trenches between, exactly as in the prize-ring. But the combatants were heavy-, middle-, and light-weight guns, and in place of the thump of body blows, the jar and snap of jabs and half-hooks, or the patter of foot-work on the boards, one heard the ponderous Jack Johnsons arrive, followed by the crump of the howitzers, and then the in-and-out work of field artillery quickening to a clinch, till one side or the other broke away and the silence returned full of menaces of what would happen next time “if you hit my little brother again.” A local and concentrated shelling of the Battalion’s second line one day, which might have developed bloodily, was damped down in three minutes, thanks to a telephone and guns that worked almost simultaneously. Nobody but themselves noticed it in the big arena.

Suddenly on the morning of the 9th April (it was due, perhaps, to some change of troops on the front) the enemy snipers and machine-guns woke up; and Lieutenant Kinahan, a keen, well-trusted, and hard-working officer, was shot through the head by a sniper, and died at once. By next day, Captain Greer of No. 4 Company had the pleasure to report that his C.S.M.’s little party of snipers had “accounted” for the killer. Sniping on that front just then was of a high order, for the local enemy had both enterprise and skill, with rifle and bomb.

Their trenches were a little below the average of those parts, that is to say, almost impossible. A consoling local legend had it, indeed, that they were so vile that a conference of generals had decided to abandon them, but that, hearing the Guards Division were under orders for the Salient, forebore, saying: “We’ll put the Guards in ’em and if _they_ can’t make ’em decent we’ll give ’em away to Jerry.” And in addition to repairs and drainage (“County Council work,” as one sufferer called it) there were the regular fatigues which, as has been pointed out many times, more than any battle break down and tire the body and soul of the soldier. Here is one incidental, small job, handed out as all in a night’s work. The officer speaks. “It was particularly beastly. We were supposed to make a dummy machine-gun emplacement for the enemy to shell. I took forty men to meet the R.E. officer at a pleasant little rendezvous ‘two hundred yards north-west from Hell Fire Corner.’ Of course, we were sent to the wrong place to look for that Sapper; and, of course, the Boche was shelling the road on both sides of us. That was about half-past nine. Then we drew our stuff to carry up. There were two sheets of iron, each 12 by 6, and any quantity of sand-bags, shovels, and timber. We had to travel a mile and a half by road, then up a communication-trench, and then a few hundred yards across the open. That was all. Well, it took four men to carry each of those cursed pieces of iron on the level, open road. You couldn’t get ’em up a trench at all. But we hung on to ’em, and about one o’clock we had covered the road-bit of the journey and were half-way from the road to the place where we had to build our blasted dummy. Then we got on to ground absolutely chewed up by shell-holes and old trenches. You couldn’t go a foot without falling. When we’d struggled a bit longer with those sheets, we simply had to chuck ’em as unshiftable; and make the best dummy we could of sand-bags only. Imagine two parties of four tottering Micks apiece trying to sweat those tin atrocities across that sort of country! And then, of course, a mist got up and we were lost in the open—lovely!—and our guide, who swore he knew the way, began to lead us round in circles. The R.E. and I spotted what he was doing, because we kept an eye on the stars when we could see ’em. So, after any amount of bother, we all got home. There were bullets flying about occasionally (that’s part of the job), and we ran into some shelling on our way back at four in the morning when the Huns could see. But what I mean to say is that if it hadn’t been for those two dam’ sheets which weren’t really needed at all, a dozen men could have done the whole business straight off. And that was just one small fatigue!”

Nothing of all this worried the morale of the men. They took it all as a part of the inexplicable wonder of war, which orders that the soldier shall do what he is told, and shall stay where he may be put.

A platoon was being inspected that month in Ypres. Suddenly shelling opened some distance off, at first, but methodically drawing nearer to dredge the town, till at last the shrapnel burst almost directly overhead. The men stood rigidly to attention without moving a muscle, till the officer gave them orders to take cover. Then they disappeared into the nearest cellar. Later on, it occurred to the officer that the incident “though commonplace was not without its interesting aspect.”

They lay at Poperinghe in divisional rest from the 13th till the 19th April, during which time Lieutenant Nutting, and 2nd Lieutenant Reford from the 11th Notts and Derby Regiment, joined for duty. Thence they shifted over to camp near Vlamertinghe in Brigade Reserve as left Battalion of the left Brigade.

On the 21st April Lieutenant R. McNeill joined, and on the 24th they went into the line to relieve the 1st Coldstream in the left sector—as unpleasing a piece of filth as even the Salient could furnish. Five days before their entry it had been raided and blown in, till it was one muddled muck-heap of wreckage and corpses. Front-line repairs, urgently needed, could only be effected in the dark; traffic- and communication-trenches had to be spasmodically cleaned out between “crumps,” and any serious attack on them during their first turn would have meant ruin.

The enemy tried a bombing raid on the night of the 28th-29th, which was beaten off, without casualty, by our bombs, rifles, and machine-guns. Nothing worse overtook them, and the bill for their five days’ turn was one man killed and ten wounded, of whom three did not quit duty. But the mere strain was poisonous heavy. They handed over thankfully to their opposite number, the Coldstream, on the 29th, and lay up in Ypres Gaol. “The prison is a fine example of the resistance to shell-fire of brick walls if they are thick enough.” Verdun forts, at the far end of the line, were learning by now that the best and thickest stone-facings fly and flake beneath the jar of the huge shell that the enemy used against them, while ancient and unconsidered brick-work over deep earth cores, though it collapses into lumps hardly distinguishable from mould, yet gives protection to the men in the galleries beneath.

May-Day at Ypres opened with “a good exhibition” of German shooting. The enemy spent the whole day shelling the water-tower—a metal tank on a brick pedestal—close to the prison. Every shell fell within fifty yards, till the sole object that escaped—for a while—was the tower itself. The “weather being hot and dry,” some of our officers thought good to bathe in the Canal, but, not being water-towers, found it better to come out before a flight of “crumps” found them. Looking back upon this, one of the bathers counted that bath as his own high-water mark of heroism. (“There were things in the Canal, you know.”)