Part 11

Our armies were brought up for the most part on their own feet and lay in trenches not in the least concreted; nor were our roads to the front wholly equal to the demands on them. The assaulting troops were the First and Fourth Army Corps (less some troops detached to make a feint at Festubert and Cuinchy) disposed in the trenches south from the line of the Béthune-La Bassée Canal to the Vermelles-Hulluch road. Their work, as laid down, was to storm Auchy-La Bassée, Haisnes, capture the Hohenzollern redoubt to the south-west of it and the immensely fortified Mine-head Pit 8 (with which it was connected), the Hulluch quarries, equally fortified, and the long strip of wood beside them, and the village of Cité St. Elie between Hulluch and Haisnes. South of the Vermelles-Hulluch road, the Fourth Army Corps was to occupy the high ground between Loos and Lens, including the redoubt on Hill 69; all the town of Loos, which was a museum of veiled deaths, the Double Crassier, the Chalk-Pit, the redoubt on Hill 70 on the Loos-Haisnes road, and the village of Cité St. Auguste. After which, doubtless, the way would be open to victory. The Eleventh Army Corps formed the main infantry reserve and included the newly formed Guards Division, the Twenty-first and Twenty-fourth Divisions of the New Army and the Twenty-eighth. The Twenty-first and Twenty-fourth were brought up between Beuvry and Nœux-les-Mines; the Twenty-eighth to Bailleul, while the Guards Division lay in reserve near Lillers, ten miles north-west or so from Souchez; the Third Cavalry Division near Sains-en-Gohelle, and the British Cavalry Corps at Bailleul-les-Pernes ten miles west of Nœux-les-Mines, in attendance on the expected break-through.

On the 21st September the Battalion was inspected by Lord Kitchener at Avroult, on the St. Omer road--the first time it was ever paraded before its Colonel-in-chief--who in a few brief words recalled what it had already done in the war and hinted at what lay before it. Lord Cavan commanding the Guards Division, in wishing the men God-speed on the eve of “the greatest battle in the world’s history,” reminded them that the fate of future generations hung on the issue and that great things were expected of the Guards Division. They knew it well enough.

By a piece of ill-luck, that might have been taken as an omen, the day before they moved from Thiembronne to the front, a bombing accident at practice caused the death of Lance-Sergeant R. Matthews and three men, which few casualties, on the eve of tens of thousands to come, were due subjects of a court of inquiry and a full report to Headquarters. Then they marched by Capelle-sur-Lys to Nedon in mist and gathering rain as the autumn weather broke on the 24th, and heard the roar of what seemed continuous bombardment from Vimy to La Bassée. But it was at dawn on the 25th September that the serious work of the heavy guns began, while the Division crawled in pouring rain along congested roads from Nedon to Nœux-les-Mines. All they could see of the battle-front was veiled in clouds of gas and the screens of covering smoke through which our attacks had been launched after two hours of preliminary bombardment. Our troops there found, as chance and accident decreed, either broken wire and half-obliterated trenches easy to overpass for a few hundred yards till they came to the uncut stuff before which the men perished as their likes had done on like fields. So it happened that day to the 6th Brigade of the First Division north of La Bassée, and the 19th Brigade south of it; to the 28th Brigade of the Ninth Division by the Hohenzollern redoubt and Pit 8. These all met wire uncut before trenches untouched, and were slaughtered. The 26th Brigade of the Ninth Division broke through at a heavy cost as far as Pit 8, and, for the moment, as far as the edge of the village of Haisnes. The Seventh Division, working between the Ninth Division and the road from Vermelles to Hulluch, had better fortune. They penetrated as far as the edge of Hulluch village, but were driven back, ere the day’s end, to the quarries a thousand yards in the rear. One brigade, the 1st of the First Division of the Fourth Army on their right, had also penetrated as far as the outskirts of Hulluch. Its 2nd Brigade was hung up in barbed wire near Lone Tree to the southward, which check again exposed the left flank of the next (Fifteenth Highland) Division as that (44th, 45th, and 46th Brigades) made its way into Loos, carried Hill 70, the Chalk Pit, and Pit 14. The Forty-seventh Division on the extreme right of the British line at its junction with the French Tenth Army had to be used mainly as a defensive flank to the operation, since the French attack, which should have timed with ours, did not develop till six hours after our troops had got away, and was then limited to Souchez and the Vimy Ridge.

At noon on the 25th September the position stood thus: The First Army Corps held up between the Béthune-La Bassée Canal and the Hohenzollern redoubt; the Seventh Division hard pressed among the quarries and houses by Hulluch; the Ninth in little better case as regarded Pit 8 and the redoubt itself; the Highland Division pushed forward in the right centre holding on precariously in the shambles round Loos and being already forced back for lack of supports.

All along the line the attack had spent itself among uncut wire and unsubdued machine-gun positions. There were no more troops to follow at once on the heels of the first, nor was there time to dig in before the counter-attacks were delivered by the Germans, to whom every minute of delay meant the certainty of more available reserves fresh from the rail. A little after noon their pressure began to take effect, and ground won during the first rush of the advance was blasted out of our possession by gun-fire, bombing, and floods of enemy troops arriving throughout the night.

Both sides were now bringing up reserves: but ours seem to have arrived somewhat more slowly than the Germans’.

The Guards Division had come up on foot as quickly as the traffic on the roads allowed, and by the morning of the 26th the 1st Brigade (2nd Grenadiers, 2nd and 3rd Coldstream, and 1st Irish) were marched to Sailly-Labourse. The weather had improved, though the ground was heavy enough. Loos still remained to us, Hulluch was untaken. The enemy were well established on Hill 70 and had driven us out of Pit 14 and the Chalk Pit quarry on the Lens-La Bassée road which had been won on the previous day. It was this sector of the line to which the 2nd and 3rd Brigades of the Guards Division were directed. The local reserves (21st and 24th Divisions) had been used up, and as the Brigade took over the ground were retiring directly through them. The 1st Guards Brigade was employed in the work of holding the ground to the left, or north, of the other two brigades. Their own left lay next what remained of the Seventh Division after the furious wastage of the past two days.

On the afternoon of the 26th September the 2nd and 3rd Coldstream, with the 2nd Grenadiers in support, occupied some trenches in a waste of cut-up ground east of a line of captured German trenches opposite Hulluch. The 1st Irish Guards lay in trenches close to the wrecked water-tower of the village of Vermelles, while the confused and irregular attacks and counter-attacks broke out along the line, slackened and were renewed again beneath the vault of the overhead clamour built by the passage of countless shells.

The field of battle presented an extraordinary effect of dispersion and detachment. Gas, smoke, and the continuous splash and sparkle of bombs marked where the lines were in actual touch, but behind and outside this inferno stretched a desolation of emptiness, peopled with single figures “walking about all over the place,” as one observer wrote, with dead and wounded on the ground, and casualties being slowly conveyed to dressing-stations--every one apparently unconcerned beneath shell-fire, which in old-time battles would have been reckoned heavy, but which here, by comparison, was peace.

A premature burst of one of our own shells wounded four men of the Battalion’s machine-gun group as it was moving along the Hulluch road, but there were no other casualties reported, and on Sunday 27th, while the village of Vermelles was being heavily shelled, No. 2 and half of No. 3 Company were sent forward to fetch off what wounded lay immediately in front of them on the battle-field. There was need. Throughout that long Sunday of “clearing up” at a slow pace under scattered fire, the casualties were but eleven in all--2nd Lieutenant Grayling-Major, slightly wounded, one man killed and nine wounded. Three thousand yards to the left their 2nd Battalion, which, with the 2nd and 3rd Guards Brigades, had been set to recapture Pit 14 and Chalk-Pit Wood, lost that evening eight officers and over three hundred men killed and wounded. Officer-losses had been very heavy, and orders were issued, none too soon, to keep a reserve of them, specially in the junior ranks. Lieutenants Yerburgh and Rankin, with 2nd Lieutenants Law, Langrishe, and Walker, were thus sent back to the first-line Transport to be saved for contingencies. 2nd Lieutenant Christie and twenty men from the base joined on the same day. The Battalion lay at that time behind the remnants of the 20th Brigade of the Seventh Division, whose Brigadier, Colonel the Hon. J. Trefusis, had been their old C.O. His brigade, which had suffered between two and three thousand casualties, was in no shape for further fighting, but was hanging on in expectation of relief, if possible, from the mixed duties of trying to establish a line and sending out parties to assist in repelling the nearest counter-attack. Fighting continued everywhere, especially on the left of the line, and heavy rain added to the general misery.

By the 28th September we might have gained on an average three thousand yards on a front of between six and seven thousand, but there was no certainty that we could hold it, and the front was alive with reports--some true, others false--that the enemy had captured a line of trench here, broken through there, or was massing in force elsewhere. As a matter of fact, the worst of the German attacks had spent themselves, and both sides were, through their own difficulties, beginning to break off their main engagements for the bitter localised fightings that go to the making of a new front.

In rain, chalky slime, and deep discomfort, after utter exhaustion, the broken battalions were comparing notes of news and imperturbably renewing their social life. Brigadier-General Trefusis slips, or wades, through rain and mud to lunch with his old battalion a few hundred yards away, and one learns indirectly what cheer and comfort his presence brings. Then he goes on with the remnants of his shattered brigade, to take over fresh work on a quieter part of the line and _en route_ “to get his hair cut.”

The Battalion, after (Sept. 29) another day’s soaking in Vermelles trenches, relieved the 3rd Brigade, First Division, in front-line trenches just west of Hulluch.

The ground by Le Rutoire farm and Bois Carré between the battered German trenches was a sea of shell craters and wreckage, scorched with fires of every sort which had swept away all landmarks. Lone Tree, a general rendezvous and clearing-station for that sector of the line and a registered mark for enemy guns, was the spot where their guides met them in the rainy, windy darkness. The relief took four hours and cost Drill-Sergeant Corry, another N.C.O., and a private wounded. All four company commanders went ahead some hours before to acquaint themselves with the impassable trenches, the battalions being brought on, in artillery formation, by the Adjutant.

On the 30th September, the English losses having brought our efforts to a standstill, the troops of the Ninth French Army Corps began to take over the trenches defending Loos and running out of the ruins of that town to Hill 70. Foch and D’Untal in their fighting since the 27th had driven, at a price, the Germans out of Souchez, and some deceptive progress had been made by the Tenth French Army Corps up the Vimy heights to the right of the English line. In all, our armies had manufactured a salient, some five miles wide across the bow of it, running from Cuinchy Post, the Hohenzollern redoubt, the Hulluch quarries, the edge of Hill 70, the south of Loos, and thence doubling back to Grenay. On the other hand, the enemy had under-driven a section south of this at the junction of the Allied forces running through Lens, Liévin, Angres by Givenchy-en-Gohelle over the Vimy heights to the Scarpe below Arras. There may, even on the 30th, have remained some hope on our part of “breaking through” into the plain of the Scheldt, with its chance of open warfare to follow. The enemy, however, had no intention of allowing us any freedom of movement which localised attacks on his part could limit and hold till such time as his reserves might get in a counter-attack strong enough to regain all the few poor hundreds of yards which we had shelled, bombed, and bayoneted out of his front. The fighting was specially severe that day among the rabbit-warrens of trenches by the Hohenzollern redoubt. Sections of trenches were lost and won back or wiped out by gun-fire all along a front where, for one instance of recorded heroism among the confusion of bombs and barricades, there were hundreds unrecorded as the spouting earth closed over and hid all after-knowledge of the very site of the agony.

A section of trench held by the Scots Fusiliers on the immediate left of the Irish Guards was attacked and a hundred yards or so of it were captured, but the Battalion was not called upon to lend a hand. It lay under heavy shell and sniping fire in the wet, till it was time to exchange the comparative security of a wet open drain for the unsheltered horrors of a relief which, beginning in the dusk at six, was not completed till close on two in the morning. The last company reached their miserable billets at Mazingarbe, some three miles’ away across a well-searched back-area at 6 A. M. One N.C.O. was killed and ten N.C.O.’s and men were wounded.

They spent the next three days in the battered suburbs of Mazingarbe while the Twelfth Division took over the Guards’ line and the Ninth French Army Corps relieved the British troops who were holding the south face of the Cuinchy-Hulluch-Grenay salient. The 1st Battalion itself was now drawn upon to meet the demands of the 2nd Battalion for officers to make good losses in their action of the 27th. Five officers, at least, were badly needed, but no more than four could be spared--Captain J. S. N. FitzGerald, as Adjutant, Lieutenant R. Rankin, Lieutenant H. Montgomery, who had only arrived with a draft on the 1st October, and 2nd Lieutenant Langrishe. Officers were a scarce commodity; for, though there was a momentary lull, there had been heavy bomb and trench work by the Twenty-eighth Division all round the disputed Hohenzollern redoubt which was falling piece by piece into the hands of the enemy, and counter-attacks were expected all along the uncertain line.

THE HOHENZOLLERN TRENCHES

On October 3 the Guards Division relieved the Twenty-eighth round the Hohenzollern and the Hulluch quarries. The 3rd Brigade of the Division was assigned as much of the works round the Hohenzollern as yet remained to us; the 1st Brigade lay on their right linking on to the First Division which had relieved the Twelfth on the right of the Guards Division. The 2nd Guards Brigade was in reserve at Vermelles. The 1st Battalion acted as reserve to its own, the 1st, Brigade, and moving from Mazingarbe on the afternoon of the 3rd bivouacked in misery to the west of the railway line just outside Vermelles. The 2nd Grenadiers, in trenches which had formed part of the old British front line north-east of the Chapel of Notre Dame de Consolation, supported the 2nd and 3rd Coldstream who held the firing-line in a mass of unsurveyed and unknown German trenches running from St. Elie Avenue, a notorious and most dismal communication-trench, northwards towards the Hohenzollern redoubt, one face of which generously enfiladed our line at all times. The whole was a wilderness of muck and death, reached through three thousand yards of foul gutters, impeded by loops and knots of old telephone cables, whose sides bulged in the wet, and where, with the best care in the world, reliefs could go piteously astray and isolated parties find themselves plodding, blind and helpless, into the enemy’s arms.

Opinions naturally differ as to which was the least attractive period of the war for the Battalion, but there was a general feeling that, setting aside the cruel wet of The Salient and the complicated barren miseries of the Somme, the times after Loos round the Hohenzollern Redoubt and in the Laventie sector were the worst. Men and officers had counted on getting forward to open country at last, and the return to redoubled trench-work and its fatigues was no comfort to them. But the work had to be done, and the notice in the Diary that they were “responsible for improving and cleaning up the trenches as far as the support battalions”--which meant as far as they could get forward--implied unbroken labour in the chalky ground, varied by carrying up supplies, bombs, and small-arm ammunition to the front line. There were five bombing posts in their sector of the front with as many sap-heads, all to be guarded. Most of the trenches needed deepening, and any work in the open was at the risk of a continuous stream of bullets from the Hohenzollern’s machine-guns. High explosives and a few gas-shells by day, aerial torpedoes by night, and sniping all round the clock, made the accompaniment to their life for the nine days that they held the line.

Here is the bare record. On the 6th October, two men killed and three wounded, while strengthening parapets. On the 7th, Lieutenant Heard and three men with him wounded, while superintending work in the open within range of the spiteful Hohenzollern. On the 8th, six hours’ unbroken bombardment, culminating, so far as the Battalion knew, in an attack on the 2nd Coldstream whom they were supporting and the 3rd Grenadiers on their left. The Grenadiers, most of their bombers killed, borrowed No. 1 Company’s bombers, who “did good work,” while No. 1 Company itself formed a flank to defend the left of the Brigade in case the Germans broke through, as for a time seemed possible. Both Grenadiers and Coldstream ran out of bombs and ammunition which the Battalion sent up throughout the evening until it was reported that “all was normal again” and that the Germans had everywhere been repulsed with heavy loss. The Battalion then carried up rations to the Coldstream and spent the rest of the night repairing blown-in ammunition trenches. They had had no time to speculate or ask questions, and not till long afterwards did they realise that the blast of a great battle had passed over them; that the Germans had counter-attacked with picked battalions all along the line of the Cuinchy-Hulluch-Grenay Salient and that their dead lay in thousands on the cut-up ground from Souchez to Hohenzollern. In modern trench-warfare any attack extending beyond the range of a combatant’s vision, which runs from fifty yards to a quarter of a mile, according to the ground and his own personal distractions, may, for aught he can tell, be either an engagement of the first class or some local brawl for the details of which he can search next week’s home papers in vain.

The battalions got through the day with only six men killed, eleven wounded, and one gassed, and on the 9th, when they were busiest in the work of repairing wrecked trenches, they were informed that certain recesses which they had been cutting out in the trenches for the reception of gas-cylinders would not be required and that they were to fill them in again. As a veteran of four years’ experience put it, apropos of this and some other matters: “Men take more notice, ye’ll understand, of one extra fatigue, than any three fights.”

A few aerial torpedoes which, whether they kill or not, make unlimited mess, fell during the night, and on the morning of the 10th October Lieutenant M. V. Gore-Langton--one of the Battalion’s best and most efficient officers--was shot through the head and killed by a German sniper while looking for a position for a loop-hole in the parapet. He was buried six hours later in the British Cemetery at Vermelles, and the command of his company devolved on Lieutenant Yerburgh. Our own artillery spent the day in breaking German wire in front of the Hulluch quarries at long range and a little more than a hundred yards ahead of our trenches. Several of our shells dropped short, to the discomfort of the Irish, but the wire was satisfactorily cut, and two companies kept up bursts of rapid fire during the night to stay the enemy from repairing it. Only 5 men were killed and 5 wounded from all causes this day.

On the 11th our guns resumed wire-cutting and, besides making it most unpleasant for our men in the front trenches, put one of our own machine-guns out of action, but luckily with no loss of life.

The tragedy of the day came later when, just after lunch, a shell landed in the doorway of Headquarters dug-out, breaking both of Colonel Madden’s legs, and mortally wounding the Rev. Father John Gwynne, the Battalion’s R.C. chaplain (Colonel Madden died in England a few weeks later). The Adjutant, Lord Desmond FitzGerald, was slightly wounded also. The other two occupants of the dug-out, Captain Bailie, who had gone through almost precisely the same experience in the same spot not three days before, and the Medical Officer, were untouched. It was difficult to get two wounded men down the trenches to the Headquarters of the supporting battalion, where they had to be left till dark. And then they were carried back in the open--or “overland” as the phrase was. Father Gwynne died next day in hospital at Béthune, and the Battalion lost in him “not merely the chaplain, but a man unusually beloved.” He had been with them since November of the previous year. He feared nothing, despised no one, betrayed no confidence nor used it to his own advantage; upheld authority, softened asperities, and cheered and comforted every man within his reach. If there were any blemish in a character so utterly selfless, it was no more than a tendency, shared by the servants of his calling, to attach more importance to the administration of the last rites of his Church to a wounded man than to the immediate appearance of the medical officer, and to forget that there are times when Supreme Unction can be a depressant. _Per contra_, Absolution at the moment of going over the top, if given with vigour and good cheer, as he gave it, is a powerful tonic. At all times the priest’s influence in checking “crime” in a regiment is very large indeed, and with such priests as the Irish Guards had the good fortune to possess, almost unbounded.

Colonel Madden was succeeded by Captain Lord Desmond FitzGerald as commanding officer, and the rest of the day was spent in suffering a bombardment of aerial torpedoes, very difficult to locate and not put down by our heavy guns till after dark. Besides the 3 wounded officers that day 3 men were wounded and, 3 killed.

On the morning of the 13th, after heavy shelling, a bomb attack on the 2nd Grenadiers developed in the trenches to the right, when the Battalion brought up and detonated several boxes for their comrades. Their work further included putting up 120 scaling-ladders for an attack by the 35th Brigade.