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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Irish Guards in the Great War," Rudyard Kipling delivers a poignant chronicle of the experiences of the Irish Guards during World War I, interweaving personal narratives with a broader historical context. Written in an evocative literary style, Kipling utilizes vivid imagery and meticulous detail to depict the harrowing realities of trench warfare, the camaraderie of soldiers, and the profound sacrifices made. The text serves not only as a tribute to the bravery of the Irish Guards but also as an exploration of the themes of duty, honor, and loss in the face of an unprecedented global conflict. Rooted in Kipling's own experiences and sentiments, the book captures the intense emotional landscape of a generation scarred by war. Rudyard Kipling, an esteemed author and poet known for works such as "The Jungle Book," had a personal connection to the Great War through his son, John, who served and tragically lost his life in battle. This devastating loss deeply influenced Kipling's perspective, infusing his writing with a sense of urgency and reverence for those who fought. Kipling's dedication to capturing the essence of the soldiers' experiences demonstrates his commitment to commemorating their valor and humanity amidst the chaos of war. This book is highly recommended for readers interested in military history, as well as those seeking to understand the profound impact of World War I on individual lives and national identity. Kipling's masterful storytelling transcends the confines of historical documentation, offering readers an intimate glimpse into the hearts of those who fought and a timeless reflection on the nature of sacrifice and resilience. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Irish Guards in the Great War
Table of Contents
Introduction
A regiment’s long road from parade ground to battlefield and back into memory becomes the quiet epic that binds duty, loss, and remembrance into one enduring march.
The Irish Guards in the Great War (Volume 1&2 - Complete Edition) is Rudyard Kipling’s expansive regimental history of the Irish Guards from 1914 to 1918, composed in the immediate aftermath of the conflict and first published in the early 1920s. Across two volumes, Kipling assembles a meticulous account of the regiment’s experience on the Western Front, drawing on official records, diaries, and testimony. His purpose is clear and unsentimental: to preserve an accurate record of service and sacrifice, to honor the collective identity of the Guards, and to set down a measured chronicle that future readers can trust.
This work holds classic status because it marries literary craft to historical fidelity in a way few regimental histories attempt. Kipling brings narrative economy, humane observation, and an exacting sense of detail to material often treated only statistically. The book’s endurance owes to its balance: it reads as history without losing the felt reality of weather, fatigue, humor, and discipline. In literary history, it stands as a landmark where a major writer applied his art to the sober task of remembrance, shaping expectations for how war can be recorded without rhetoric, spectacle, or sentimentality.
Context deepens its significance. Kipling undertook the history after the war, during a time of public mourning and reconstruction, while he was also closely involved with the work of commemoration. The project bears the imprint of personal grief: his only son, John, served with the Irish Guards and was killed in 1915. Rather than turn inward, Kipling turned to the regiment’s collective story, focusing on the record that could be verified and shared. The result is not private elegy but public memory, a document carefully shaped to stand for all who served under the regiment’s colors.
Method distinguishes the book. Kipling builds from battalion diaries, orders, reports, letters, and eyewitness accounts, checking and cross-checking so that the narrative rests on documentary ground. He identifies movements, reliefs, and actions with clarity, yet allows space for the small textures that bring a unit to life. The pace alternates between steady administrative detail and moments of compressed intensity, mirroring the rhythms of war service. By anchoring his prose in verifiable sources, he offers a standard of reliability that has made the book an enduring point of reference for historians and general readers alike.
The complete edition unites both volumes, which follow the two battalions of the Irish Guards through the war’s full span. Volume I centers on the First Battalion, while Volume II treats the Second Battalion and broadens the account with additional material. Together they create a continuous chronicle, moving from mobilization and early encounters to the long grind of trench warfare and the shifting demands of a global conflict. Without sensationalism, the narrative traces training, routine, attrition, and renewal, showing how a regiment holds together under pressure and how its identity is sustained by discipline and shared purpose.
Kipling’s voice here is measured and collective. He steps back from the foreground to let the regiment take shape as the true protagonist, an approach that gives the narrative gravity and tact. His prose avoids flourish, favoring precision in place names, dates, and duties, yet it never becomes impersonal. Calm understatement allows human experience to emerge: the endurance required by weather and terrain, the steadiness of officers and men, the quiet adaptability that marks professional soldiers. This restraint enhances, rather than diminishes, the emotional power of the record he preserves.
Several themes course through the volumes. Duty and comradeship anchor the regiment’s life, while adaptability and resilience sustain it through prolonged strain. Memory functions as both method and meaning: the act of recording protects lives from anonymity and gives structure to grief. The book also considers leadership as a moral and practical art, testing judgment under uncertain conditions. Throughout, the tension between the individual and the unit remains central. Kipling shows how identity is forged in service, how institutions absorb shock, and how character, discipline, and habit can steady a body of men amid constant change.
The book’s influence is felt in military historiography and literary culture alike. It demonstrates that regimental history need not be a private archive but can be compelling literature without sacrificing accuracy. Later writers of military narrative have drawn from its ethos: the insistence on verifiable detail, the careful calibration of scale, and the moral seriousness that declines to dramatize what needs no adornment. For Kipling’s own body of work, it marks a culminating effort in public remembrance, extending his prose beyond fiction and verse into a lasting monument of historical testimony.
For contemporary readers, its relevance is immediate. The narrative offers clarity in a theatre often obscured by myth, presenting how a modern army actually operates day by day. It illuminates questions that remain current: how institutions balance initiative with obedience, how leadership builds trust, how morale is sustained over long campaigns, and how societies choose to remember the costs of security. Rather than argue, it shows. Rather than generalize, it particulars. That steadiness invites reflection on present challenges while grounding understanding in the hard facts of lived experience.
Key facts deserve emphasis. Rudyard Kipling, one of the most widely read English-language authors of his time, wrote this history in the early 1920s; the two volumes appeared in 1923. The complete edition gathers both into a single, continuous work. Its materials derive from regimental records and firsthand testimony, assembled with scrupulous care to establish a faithful account. The design is not to produce an anthology of episodes but to present an integrated narrative of service. In doing so, Kipling built a document meant to endure, to inform, and to honor the Irish Guards in all their ranks.
The Irish Guards in the Great War endures because it fuses truthfulness with dignity, particularity with scope, and fact with feeling. It gives readers a disciplined story of a regiment’s life while quietly inviting contemplation of courage, loss, duty, and remembrance. As literature, it exemplifies balance; as history, it models integrity. It continues to engage because it asks for attention rather than assent, and it rewards that attention with insight. This complete edition offers the full measure of Kipling’s memorial art, a work whose moral clarity keeps it alive for every new generation that turns to it.
Synopsis (Selection)
Rudyard Kipling’s The Irish Guards in the Great War (Complete Edition, Volumes I and II) is a chronological regimental history of the 1st and 2nd Battalions from 1914 to 1918. Drawn from official war diaries, orders, reports, and personal letters, it records daily movements, actions, casualties, and decorations with documentary precision. The narrative opens with the regiment’s pre‑war origins and mobilization, then follows embarkation to France with the British Expeditionary Force. Kipling keeps commentary minimal, allowing dates, place‑names, and unit logs to structure the account. Appendices, nominal rolls, and citations supplement the text, establishing a memorial record as well as an operational chronicle.
Early chapters trace the first months of war: concentration in France, long marches, and the hard fighting that accompanied the retreat and counter‑stroke that stabilized the front. The 1st Battalion’s companies appear in alternating billets and trench lines, with repeated references to rear services, transport, and liaison with neighboring brigades. Actions around the rivers and ridges of late 1914 culminate in the attritional battles that formed the salient in Flanders. Officer casualties are carefully itemized; individual acts of steadiness under fire are noted by name, rank, and unit. The regiment’s identity is shaped amid movement, reorganization, and the onset of entrenchment.
In the first winter of trench warfare, the history emphasizes routine: wiring parties, saps, patrols, reliefs, and the constant maintenance of parapets and communication trenches. Artillery duels, sniping, and intermittent raids dominate the record, alongside weather reports detailing frost, mud, and flooded trenches. Rations, mail, and medical evacuation are logged with times and routes, illustrating the dependency on transport columns and signalers. Kipling includes early notes on protective measures against new weapons, alongside the tally of casualties from shellbursts and exposure. Rotations to rest areas describe training, kit inspection, and reinforcement drafts, showing how depleted companies were rebuilt between tours.
By 1915 the regiment expands with the formation of a 2nd Battalion and its integration into the newly organized Guards Division. Training intensifies, with map exercises, musketry, and coordinated attacks rehearsed at brigade level. The history tracks the Division’s movement into major autumn operations, detailing assembly trenches, timetables, and objectives without dramatization. In the fighting that follows, the Irish Guards advance, consolidate, and endure counter‑fire, their progress measured by captured trenches and revised orders. Subsequent chapters return to holding the line during the winter, noting improvements in trench works, the distribution of Lewis guns, and the incorporation of lessons learned.
Preparations for the 1916 offensive occupy months of entries: route‑marches, trench mortar practice, wiring, and rehearsals for set‑piece attacks. When committed on the Somme, the battalions deploy under a methodical barrage, take forward positions, and consolidate against machine‑gun fire and shelling. The text identifies battalion sectors and company tasks by grid references, recording advances, halts, and reliefs. Casualty lists, promotions, and mentions in dispatches punctuate the narrative. After the main assaults, the regiment alternates between line and support, rebuilding in rear areas. Winter chapters describe continued trench duty, the introduction of new equipment, and renewed emphasis on small‑unit leadership.
In 1917 the Irish Guards participate in stepwise attacks characteristic of the Flanders offensives, advancing over saturated ground behind carefully staged barrages. The account stresses the difficulties of movement, supply on duckboards, and the importance of localized objectives secured by platoon tactics. Later that year, the regiment features in operations associated with the Cambrai sector, where surprise and mechanical support initially alter familiar patterns before determined counterattacks restore attrition. Kipling’s entries chart rapid marches, emergency consolidations, and the reorganization that follows heavy fighting. The year closes with rotations, training, and accommodation of revised tactics, including greater firepower within platoons.
With the German offensives of early 1918, the history turns to elastic defense and fighting withdrawals. The battalions are shown moving quickly to threatened sectors, holding improvised lines, and conducting rearguard actions under persistent bombardment and gas. Entries detail the frequent changes of command as officers become casualties, and the swift incorporation of reinforcement drafts. Reorganizations standardize platoon weapons, communications, and liaison with artillery and machine‑gun companies. Despite constant pressure, the logs emphasize orderly movement, the repair of defensive works, and the restoration of units after loss, preparing the Division to shift from defense to renewed offensive operations.
From late summer 1918 the narrative depicts controlled advances during the Allied counteroffensive. The Irish Guards cross prepared obstacles, coordinate with tanks and creeping barrages, and take successive objectives by timed bounds. Reports note prisoners, captured materiel, and the clearing of villages, with precise timings and bearings. The Division’s progress through fortified zones includes bridging, road repair, and maintenance of supply under fire. As resistance stiffens then ebbs, the regiment continues forward, consolidating on new lines and preparing for further movement. The account reaches the final operations before the Armistice, recording the last casualties, orders of the day, and reliefs.
The closing sections compile honors and awards, rolls of officers and men, and summaries of each battalion’s service, reinforcing the documentary purpose of the work. Appendices present citations and dates in full, while the main text remains chronological and impersonal. Kipling’s method emphasizes verifiable detail—names, units, places—over interpretation, offering a complete regimental record from mobilization to demobilization. The essential message is preservation: to memorialize endurance, discipline, and the steady execution of duty. Across both volumes, the Irish Guards are portrayed through their own records, leaving a clear, comprehensive account of their operations in the Great War.
Historical Context
Rudyard Kipling’s The Irish Guards in the Great War is set across the Western Front from August 1914 to November 1918, in the shattered landscapes of Belgium and northern France. The regiment’s movements trace the British Expeditionary Force’s early stand at the Frontiers, the retreat, and the long attritional campaigns in Flanders and on the Somme. Towns such as Mons, Ypres, Loos, Ginchy, Lesboeufs, Cambrai, and Maubeuge anchor the narrative in specific geographies of battle. The time is one of industrialized warfare, with railheads, artillery parks, trench systems, and medical and logistical networks shaping operations. The book’s temporal focus mirrors the war’s phases from mobile warfare to stalemate and breakthrough.
The work, published in the early 1920s, distills battalion war diaries, orders, letters, and survivor testimony from the 1st and 2nd Battalions Irish Guards. It reflects a postwar Britain struggling with remembrance, mourning, and imperial identity, while Ireland itself convulsed in political change. Kipling writes as a bereaved father and an official chronicler, attentive to detail and procedure. The settings include billets behind the lines, training grounds in England, and devastated front-line sectors. The narrative’s place is thus both operational and social: the firesteps and dugouts, but also casualty clearing stations, transport columns, and rest camps whose rhythms the book captures as part of the regiment’s world.
The Irish Guards were created by Queen Victoria in 1900 to honor Irish service in the Second Boer War; by 1914 they embodied complex Anglo-Irish loyalties. The Home Rule crisis (1912–1914) split Ireland between Ulster unionists and nationalists, both raising volunteer forces. When war began in August 1914, leaders such as John Redmond urged enlistment, and Irish recruitment surged. Over 200,000 from Ireland served in British forces during the war. The book mirrors these cross-currents by recording Catholic and Protestant Irishmen serving side by side and emphasizes regimental loyalty transcending factional divides, while noting hometowns and counties that reveal the island’s political geography.
In August 1914, the British Expeditionary Force mobilized and crossed to France. The 1st Battalion Irish Guards, as part of a Guards brigade within the 2nd Division, fought in the opening actions around Mons on 23 August and then endured the Great Retreat toward the Marne. In September 1914, the BEF counterattacked on the Marne (5–12 September) and dug in on the Aisne (from 12 September), marking the shift to trench warfare. Kipling’s history ties the regiment’s early losses, forced marches, and rearguards to this transformation, using dates and orders of battle to anchor the battalion within the wider BEF narrative.
The First Battle of Ypres (October–November 1914) stabilized the front in Flanders at enormous cost. The Guards helped hold the line around Gheluvelt and Nonne Bosschen as German forces sought to break through to the Channel ports. Fighting peaked on 31 October at Gheluvelt and again on 11 November. Casualties decimated regular battalions, including the Irish Guards, whose junior officers and NCOs took on command. The book records the attrition, the piecemeal commitments, and the strain of defensive actions, illustrating how the regiment’s character was forged in this crucible and how veteran cadres carried institutional memory forward.
The winter of 1914–1915 embedded trench systems from the North Sea to Switzerland. In the Artois sector under First Army, the Irish Guards served in siege-like conditions of mining, artillery harassment, and patrols. In May 1915, at the Battle of Festubert (15–25 May), the 2nd Division attacked to straighten salients near Givenchy-lès-la-Bassée. Casualties were heavy for limited gains, highlighting the challenges of artillery coordination and wire-cutting. Kipling’s account reproduces orders, maps, and timings to show how the battalion executed set-piece attacks, and it catalogs losses by company, illuminating the human cost and the learning curve imposed by attrition.
In mid-1915, the Guards Division was formed to concentrate elite infantry. A second battalion of the Irish Guards was raised that year, and both battalions joined Guards brigades in France. The new division, with dedicated artillery and engineers, improved combined-arms capacity. This reorganization framed subsequent operations, allowing Guards brigades to undertake complex assaults and counterattacks. The book details this structural change, marking a transition from scattered brigade work to divisional assaults, and uses it to explain the regiment’s roles in later offensives. It also tracks how reinforcement drafts reshaped company rosters and leadership in the expanded regiment.
The Battle of Loos (25 September–8 October 1915) was Britain’s largest offensive to date on the Western Front, launched by First Army under Douglas Haig against German positions north of Lens. The plan employed a massive artillery bombardment and the British Army’s first large-scale use of chlorine gas, released from cylinders. Ground conditions were flat, industrial, and cut by mining villages such as Loos-en-Gohelle and Hulluch, overlooked by the slag heaps known as the Double Crassier. On 25 September, initial assaults captured parts of Loos, but reserves faltered, and counterattacks stiffened German resistance. In the days following, attacks continued toward Hulluch and the Hohenzollern Redoubt. The Irish Guards took part in the renewed fighting on 26–27 September, advancing under fire through wire and enfilade. Lieutenant John Kipling, the author’s only son, recently commissioned into the 2nd Battalion after medical waivers, was reported missing in action on 27 September 1915 near Hulluch during an attack. His body was not identified at the time. British casualties in the Loos operations exceeded 60,000, with limited territorial gains and serious command-and-control problems, including ineffective gas deployment due to wind shifts. In the regimental history, Loos occupies a central place: operational orders, timings, and company narratives converge with personal loss. Kipling’s prose adopts a restrained, documentary tone, yet the meticulous reconstruction of the battalion’s movements functions as an act of recovery for the missing. The battle shaped the work’s purpose, transforming it from a conventional chronicle into a memorialized ledger for a regiment and a generation.
In 1916, attritional warfare peaked on the Somme. The Guards Division fought in the mid and late phases, notably at Flers–Courcelette (15–22 September) and at Morval and Lesboeufs (25–28 September), where the division helped capture Lesboeufs on 25 September. New tactics included the creeping barrage and the debut of British tanks. The Irish Guards advanced over shattered ground under heavy machine-gun fire, consolidating beyond initial objectives at severe cost. Kipling integrates detailed timings and after-action reports to show how the battalions coordinated with artillery and tanks, and he registers the casualties that recalibrated platoon and company leadership across the regiment.
Technological and tactical transformations defined 1915–1917: massed artillery, counter-battery fire, aerial reconnaissance, gas, Stokes mortars, Lewis guns, and platoon-level fire-and-maneuver. The British Army revised infantry training, emphasizing sections with bombers, riflemen, and Lewis gunners. Communications improved via telephone, runners, and flares but remained fragile under shellfire. The Irish Guards’ war diary extracts show how barrage timings, trench maps, and compass bearings governed movement, while medical evacuation chains from regimental aid posts to casualty clearing stations evolved. Kipling’s methodical inclusion of equipment, logistics, and tactical notes connects the regiment’s experience to wider operational developments that reshaped the Western Front.
Third Ypres (Passchendaele), from July to November 1917, aimed to break the German line in Flanders, beginning with the Battle of Pilckem Ridge (31 July) and continuing through Poelcappelle (9 October) into the mire around Passchendaele. The Guards Division participated in several phases, advancing on waterlogged ground where artillery destroyed drainage. Casualties mounted for small gains, and logistical difficulties impeded consolidation. The Irish Guards’ actions in stepped advances under barrages illustrate the grinding nature of the campaign. Kipling’s account emphasizes terrain, weather, and supply fatigue, mirroring the strategic controversy of the offensive while honoring tactical persistence and discipline within the regiment.
The Battle of Cambrai (20 November–7 December 1917) showcased massed tanks and surprise against the Hindenburg Line near Havrincourt and Graincourt. Initial breakthroughs on 20 November gave way to German counterattacks from 30 November. On 1 December, the Guards mounted a notable counter-attack near Gouzeaucourt, recapturing ground and guns in confused fighting. The Irish Guards, operating within Guards brigades, handled rapid reliefs, reorganization, and counter-moves. Kipling records the tempo shift from set-piece to fluid battle, illustrating how battalions reformed under fire and how junior leaders exploited fleeting opportunities to stabilize the front in a rapidly changing tactical environment.
The German Spring Offensive of 1918 opened with Operation Michael on 21 March, seeking to split the British and French armies on the Somme. Subsequent blows fell on the Lys (Operation Georgette, April) toward Hazebrouck and the Channel ports. The Guards Division was rushed to threatened sectors and fought defensive battles that absorbed shock and bought time. The Irish Guards endured intense bombardments, infiltration tactics, and withdrawals under pressure, then counterattacked to seal gaps. Kipling’s narrative highlights the regiment’s role in elastic defense, the strain on communication lines, and the attrition of experienced cadres during the March–April crisis.
The Allied Hundred Days (August–November 1918) combined improved artillery, tanks, airpower, and logistics to drive the Germans back. While the opening at Amiens on 8 August involved other formations, the Guards Division participated in later phases: the Second Battle of Arras, the crossing of the Canal du Nord, the renewed Battle of Cambrai (1918), operations along the Selle, and the Sambre–Oise Canal on 4 November. The Irish Guards advanced through fortified lines, captured villages, and pushed toward Maubeuge before the Armistice of 11 November. Kipling ties company objectives to operational breakthroughs, marking the regiment’s shift from static warfare to sustained pursuit.
Irish political upheaval shadowed the regiment’s service. The Easter Rising in Dublin (24–29 April 1916) and subsequent executions catalyzed a shift toward separatist politics, while the 1918 conscription crisis in Ireland hardened opposition to the British state. Nonetheless, Irish service continued, with over 200,000 from Ireland in British uniform and around 35,000 Irish-born dead by 1918. The Irish Guards’ roster included men from Ulster and the south, reflecting a spectrum of identities. Kipling’s history acknowledges places of origin and home front tensions indirectly, presenting the regiment as a microcosm of Irish society whose sacrifice complicates simple national narratives.
Kipling’s regimental chronicle functions as social and political critique by exposing how industrial warfare consumed a professional elite alongside wartime volunteers, and by recording the administrative apparatus that both supported and failed them. In its sober presentation of casualty lists, muddled orders, and the cruel arithmetic of attacks for minimal ground, the book critiques strategic optimism and the bureaucratic distance between high command and the platoon trench. It foregrounds competence and responsibility at junior levels while hinting at systemic shortcomings. The emphasis on the missing and on exact places of death challenges official euphemism, insisting that remembrance be precise, public, and accountable.
For an Irish regiment serving the Crown amid Ireland’s fracturing politics, the book implicitly interrogates loyalty, class, and empire. Guards status conferred prestige, yet the narrative dignifies enlisted labor and rural Irish recruits, unsettling class hierarchies by centering their endurance. The treatment of gas at Loos, mud at Passchendaele, and exposed attacks underlines the moral cost of strategic choices. By documenting the ordinary soldier’s world and the long tail of recovery, burial, and commemoration, the work participates in the war graves movement and elevates collective sacrifice into a claim upon the state, turning regimental history into a critique of the era’s governance and priorities.
Author Biography
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was a British writer of poetry, fiction, and journalism whose work bridged the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Born in British India and educated in England, he became one of the most widely read authors in English, celebrated for vigorous storytelling, memorable verse, and an ear for colloquial speech. His range ran from children’s classics such as The Jungle Book and Just So Stories to the novel Kim and the soldierly poems of Barrack-Room Ballads. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first English-language laureate. Admired and contested in equal measure, he remains central to debates about empire, modernity, and literary craft.
Born in Bombay (now Mumbai) to parents connected to the Anglo-Indian community, Kipling spent his earliest years amid the sights and languages of the subcontinent. As was common for colonial families, he was sent to Britain for schooling and later attended the United Services College in Devon, a formative experience he would rework in Stalky & Co. Trained as a journalist, he returned to India in the mid-1880s and joined the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, then the Pioneer in Allahabad. The rhythms of newsroom deadlines, exposure to military and administrative life, and oral storytelling traditions shaped his concise prose, technical vocabulary, and interest in frontier settings.
In India he quickly found a readership. Departmental Ditties introduced his satirical verse about bureaucratic life, while Plain Tales from the Hills and later story collections drew vivid, often unsentimental portraits of colonial society, soldiers, and civilians. Pieces such as The Man Who Would Be King consolidated his reputation for brisk plotting and ironic turns. Barrack-Room Ballads, publishing in the early 1890s, brought a distinctive demotic voice to poetry, memorializing common soldiers in poems like “Tommy,” “Gunga Din,” and “Mandalay.” Critics praised his energy and craft even as some recoiled at the politics implicit in his subjects, a tension that would accompany him throughout his career.
During the 1890s he traveled widely and experienced a run of international success. He lived for a period in New England, where he wrote much of The Jungle Book and Captains Courageous, children’s and sea-adventure tales that broadened his audience. The Light That Failed demonstrated his ambitions as a novelist, and the school stories of Stalky & Co. distilled public-school codes of loyalty and cunning. In the early 1900s he issued Just So Stories and Kim, the latter often regarded as his most accomplished work of Indian espionage and coming-of-age. His books circulated globally in serial and volume form, securing a readership across Britain, India, and North America.
Kipling’s worldview combined fascination with technology and craft, admiration for discipline and duty, and a forthright defense of empire that stirred controversy then and now. The poem “The White Man’s Burden,” published in the late 1890s, crystallized debates about imperial mission and paternalism. At the same time, his work often honors practical expertise—engineers, sailors, telegraphers—and dramatizes moral choices under pressure. “If—,” later collected in Rewards and Fairies, distilled a stoic ethic that became one of the best-known poems in English. Critical responses have ranged from celebration of his formal mastery to sustained critique of colonial ideology, a duality that frames much contemporary engagement with his writing.
During the First World War, Kipling supported the British war effort through journalism, verse, and public lectures. He worked with the Imperial War Graves Commission on inscriptions and commemorative language, and a close family loss in the conflict deepened the gravity of his wartime poetry and prose. Epitaphs of the War and his regimental history The Irish Guards in the Great War register grief, remembrance, and duty in characteristic plain style. His later fiction and essays, including Debits and Credits and Limits and Renewals, mingle fable, technical lore, and elegy, reflecting a writer grappling with the costs of modernity and the fading of the imperial world he had chronicled.
Kipling remained a prominent public figure into the 1930s. He died in 1936 and was interred in Westminster Abbey, a mark of institutional esteem that coexists with the enduring ambivalence surrounding his politics. His legacy is twofold: he is a foundational figure in the short story in English and among the most quoted of poets, while his imperial attitudes invite scrutiny and rebuttal. Children continue to encounter The Jungle Book and Just So Stories in print and adaptation, and writers of adventure, fantasy, and reportage acknowledge his techniques. Today he is read both as a master craftsman and as a key witness to the culture of empire.
The Irish Guards in the Great War (Volume 1&2 - Complete Edition)
The Irish Guards in the Great War – I
Introduction
These volumes try to give soberly and with what truth is possible, the experiences of both battalions of the Irish Guards from 1914 to 1918. The point of view is the battalions’, and the facts mainly follow the Regimental Diaries, supplemented by the few private letters and documents which such a war made possible, and by some tales that have gathered round men and their actions.
As evidence is released, historians may be able to reconstruct what happened in or behind the battle-line; what motives and necessities swayed the actors; and who stood up or failed under his burden. But a battalion’s field is bounded by its own vision. Even within these limits, there is large room for error. Witnesses to phases of fights die and are dispersed; the ground over which they fought is battered out of recognition in a few hours; survivors confuse dates, places, and personalities, and in the trenches, the monotony of the waiting days and the repetition-work of repairs breed mistakes and false judgments. Men grow doubtful or oversure, and, in all good faith, give directly opposed versions. The clear sight of a comrade so mangled that he seems to have been long dead is burnt in on one brain to the exclusion of all else that happened that day. The shock of an exploded dump, shaking down a firmament upon the landscape, dislocates memory throughout half a battalion; and so on in all matters, till the end of laborious enquiry is too often the opening of fresh confusion. When to this are added the personal prejudices and misunderstandings of men under heavy strain, carrying clouded memories of orders half given or half heard, amid scenes that pass like nightmares, the only wonder to the compiler of these records has been that any sure fact whatever should be retrieved out of the whirlpool of war.
It seemed to him best, then, to abandon all idea of such broad and balanced narratives as will be put forward by experts, and to limit himself to matters which directly touched the men’s lives and fortunes. Nor has he been too careful to correct the inferences of the time by the knowledge of later events. From first to last, the Irish Guards, like the rest of our armies, knew little of what was going on round them. Probably they knew less at the close of the war than at the beginning when our forces were so small that each man felt himself somebody indeed, and so stood to be hunted through the heat from Mons to Meaux, turned again to suffer beneath the Soupir ridges, and endured the first hideous winter of the Salient where, wet, almost weaponless, but unbroken, he helped in the long miracle of holding the line.
But the men of ’14 and ’15, and what meagre records of their day were safe to keep, have long been lost; while the crowded years between remove their battles across dead Belgian towns and villages as far from us as the fights in Homer.
Doubtless, all will be reconstructed to the satisfaction of future years when, if there be memory beyond the grave, the ghosts may laugh at the neatly groomed histories. Meantime, we can take it for granted that the old Regular Army of England passed away in the mud of Flanders in less than a year. In training, morale, endurance, courage, and devotion the earth did not hold its like, but it possessed neither the numbers, guns, nor equipment necessary for the type of war that overtook it. The fact of its unpreparedness has been extolled as proof of the purity of its country’s ideals, which must be great consolation to all concerned. But, how slowly that equipment was furnished, how inadequate were our first attempts at bombs, trench-mortars, duck-boards, wiring, and the rest, may be divined through the loyal and guarded allusions in the Diaries. Nor do private communications give much hint of it, for one of the marvels of that marvellous time was the silence of those concerned on everything that might too much distress their friends at home. The censorship had imposed this as a matter of precaution, but only the spirit of the officers could have backed the law so completely; and, as better days came, their early makeshifts and contrivances passed out of remembrance with their early dead. But the sufferings of our Armies were constant. They included wet and cold in due season, dirt always, occasional vermin, exposure, extreme fatigue, and the hourly incidence of death in every shape along the front line and, later in the furthest back-areas where the enemy aeroplanes harried their camps. And when our Regular troops had been expended, these experiences were imposed upon officers and men compelled to cover, within a few months, the long years of training that should go to the making of a soldier—men unbroken even to the disturbing impact of crowds and like experiences, which the conscript accepts from his youth. Their short home-leaves gave them sudden changes to the tense home atmosphere where, under cover of a whirl of “entertainment” they and their kin wearied themselves to forget and escape a little from that life, on the brink of the next world, whose guns they could hear summoning in the silences between their talk. Yet, some were glad to return—else why should youngsters of three years’ experience have found themselves upon a frosty night, on an ironbound French road, shouting aloud for joy as they heard the stammer of a machine-gun over the rise, and turned up the well-known trench that led to their own dug-out and their brethren from whom they had been separated by the vast interval of ninety-six hours? Many have confessed to the same delight in their work, as there were others to whom almost every hour was frankly detestable except for the companionship that revealed them one to another till the chances of war separated the companions. And there were, too, many, almost children, of whom no record remains. They came out from Warley with the constantly renewed drafts, lived the span of a Second Lieutenant’s life and were spent. Their intimates might preserve, perhaps, memories of a promise cut short, recollections of a phrase that stuck, a chance-seen act of bravery or of kindness. The Diaries give their names and fates with the conventional expressions of regret. In most instances, the compiler has let the mere fact suffice; since, to his mind, it did not seem fit to heap words on the doom.
For the same reason, he has not dealt with each instance of valour, leaving it to stand in the official language in which it was acknowledged. The rewards represent but a very small proportion of the skill, daring, and heroism actually noted; for no volume could hold the full tale of all that was done, either in the way of duty, under constraint of necessity and desire to keep alive, or through joy and pleasure in achieving great deeds.
Here the Irish rank and file by temperament excelled. They had all their race’s delight in the drama of things; and, whatever the pinch-whether ambushed warfare or hand-to-hand shock, or an insolently perfect parade after long divorce from the decencies—could be depended upon to advance the regimental honour. Their discipline, of course, was that of the Guards, which, based upon tradition, proven experience, and knowledge of the human heart, adjusts itself to the spirit of each of its battalions. Though the material of that body might be expended twice in a twelvemonth, the leaven that remained worked on the new supplies at once and from the first. In the dingy out-of-date barracks at Warley the Regimental Reserves gathered and grew into a full-fledged Second Battalion with reserves of its own, and to these the wounded officers and men sent home to be repatched, explained the arts and needs of a war which, apparently always at a stand, changed character every month. After the utter inadequacy of its opening there was a period of handmade bombs and of loaded sticks for close work; of nippers for the abundant wire left uncut by our few guns; of remedies for trench-feet; or medicaments against lockjaw from the grossly manured Belgian dirt, and of fancy timberings to hold up sliding trenches. In due course, when a few set battles, which sometimes gained several hundred yards, had wasted their many thousand lives, infallible forms of attack and defence developed themselves, were tried and generally found wanting, while scientific raids, the evolution of specialists, and the mass of regulated detail that more and more surrounded the life of the trenches, occupied their leisure between actions. Our battalions played themselves into the game at the awful price that must be paid for improvisation, however cheery; enduring with a philosophy that may have saved the war, the deviations and delays made necessary by the demands of the various political and other organisations at home.
In the same spirit they accepted the inevitable breakdowns in the business of war-by-experiment; for it is safe to say that there was hardly an operation in which platoons, companies, regiments, brigades, or divisions were not left with one or both flanks in the air. Among themselves, officers and men discussing such matters make it quite clear how and why such and such units broke, were misled, or delayed on their way into the line. But when a civilian presumes to assist, all ranks unite against his uninformed criticisms. He is warned that, once over the top, no plans hold, for the machine-gun and the lie of the ground dictate the situation to the platoon-commander on whom all things depend and who sees, perhaps, fifty yards about him. There are limits, too, of shock and exhaustion beyond which humanity cannot be pressed without paying toll later. For which cause it may happen that a Division that has borne long agony unflinching, and sincerely believes itself capable of yet more, will, for no reason then apparent (at almost the mere rumour of noises in the night) collapse ignominiously on the same ground where, a month later, with two thirds of its strength casualties, it cuts coolly and cleanly to its goal. And its fellows, who have borne the same yoke, allow for this.
The compiler of these records, therefore, has made little attempt to put forward any theory of what might or should have happened if things had gone according to plan; and has been scrupulous to avoid debatable issues of bad staff-work or faulty generalship. They were not lacking in the war, but the broad sense of justice in all who suffered from them, recognising that all were equally amateurs, saved the depression of repeated failures from turning into demoralisation.
Here, again, the Irish were reported by those who knew them best, to have been lenient in their judgments, though their private speech was as unrestrained as that of any other body of bewildered and overmastered men. “Wearing down” the enemy through a period of four years and three months, during most of which time that enemy dealt losses at least equal to those he received, tested human virtue upon a scale that the world had never dreamed of. The Irish Guards stood to the test without flaw.
They were in no sense any man’s command. They needed minute comprehension, quick sympathy, and inflexible justice, which they repaid by individual devotion and a collective good-will that showed best when things were at their utter worst. Their moods naturally varied with the weather and the burden of fatigues (actions merely kill, while fatigue breaks men’s hearts), but their morale was constant because their unofficial life, on which morale hinges, made for contentment. The discipline of the Guards, demanding the utmost that can be exacted of the man, requires of the officer unresting care of his men under all conditions. This care can be a source of sorrow and friction in rigid or over-conscientious hands, till, with the best will in the world, a battalion may be reduced to the mental state of nurse-harried children. Or, conversely, an adored company commander, bold as a lion, may, for lack of it, turn his puzzled company into a bear-garden. But there is an elasticity in Celtic psychology that does not often let things reach breaking-point either way; and their sense of humour and social duty—it is a race more careful to regard each other’s feelings than each other’s lives—held them as easily as they were strictly associated. A jest; the grave hearing out of absurd complaints that might turn to tragedy were the hearing not accorded; a prompt soothing down of gloomy, inured pride; apiece of flagrant buffoonery sanctioned, even shared, but never taken advantage of, went far in dark days to build up that understanding and understood inner life of the two battalions to which, now, men look back lovingly across their civilian years. It called for a devotion from all, little this side of idolatry; and was shown equally by officers, N.C.O.’s, and men, stretcher-bearers, cooks, orderlies, and not least by the hard-bit, fantastic old soldiers, used for odd duties, who faithfully hobbled about France alongside the rush of wonderful young blood.
Were instances given, the impression might be false, for the tone and temper of the time that set the pace has gone over. But while it lasted, the men made their officers and the officers their men by methods as old as war itself; and their Roman Catholic priests, fearless even in a community none too regardful of Nature’s first law, formed a subtle and supple link between both. That the priest, ever in waiting upon Death or pain, should learn to magnify his office was as natural as that doctors and front-line commanders should find him somewhat under their feet when occasion called for the secular, not the spiritual, arm. That Commanding Officers, to keep peace and save important pillars of their little society, should first advise and finally order the padre not to expose himself wantonly in forward posts or attacks, was equally of a piece with human nature; and that the priests, to the huge content of the men, should disregard the order (“What’s a casualty compared to a soul?”) was most natural of all. Then the question would come up for discussion in the trenches and dug-outs, where everything that any one had on his mind was thrashed out through the long, quiet hours, or dropped and picked up again with the rise and fall of shell-fire. They speculated on all things in Heaven and earth as they worked in piled filth among the carcases of their fellows, lay out under the stars on the eves of open battle, or vegetated through a month’s feeding and idleness between one sacrifice and the next.
But none have kept minutes of those incredible symposia that made for them a life apart from the mad world which was their portion; nor can any pen recreate that world’s brilliance, squalor, unreason, and heaped boredom. Recollection fades from men’s minds as common life closes over them, till even now they wonder what part they can ever have had in the shrewd, man-hunting savages who answered to their names so few years ago.
It is for the sake of these initiated that the compiler has loaded his records with detail and seeming triviality, since in a life where Death ruled every hour, nothing was trivial, and bald references to villages, billets, camps, fatigues, and sports, as well as hints of tales that can never now fully be told, carry each their separate significance to each survivor, intimate and incommunicable as family jests.
As regards other readers, the compiler dares no more than hope that some of those who have no care for old history, or that larger number who at present are putting away from themselves odious memories, may find a little to interest, or even comfort, in these very details and flatnesses that make up the unlovely, yet superb, life endured for their sakes.
Mons To La Bassée
At 5 P.M. on Tuesday, August 4, 1914, the 1st Battalion of the Irish Guards received orders to mobilize for war against Germany. They were then quartered at Wellington Barracks and, under the mobilization scheme, formed part of the 4th (Guards) Brigade, Second Division, First Army Corps. The Brigade consisted of:
The 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards. The 2nd Battalion Coldstream Guards. The 3rd Battalion Coldstream Guards. The 1st Battalion Irish Guards.
Mobilization was completed on August 8. Next day, being Sunday, the Roman Catholics of the Battalion paraded under the Commanding Officer, Lieut.Colonel the Hon. G. H. Morris, and went to Westminster Cathedral where Cardinal Bourne preached; and on the morning of the 11th August Field-Marshal Lord Roberts and Lady Aileen Roberts made a farewell speech to them in Wellington Barracks. This was the last time that Lord Roberts saw the Battalion of which he was the first Commander-in-Chief.
On the 12th August the Battalion entrained for Southampton in two trains at Nine Elms Station, each detachment being played out of barracks to the station by the band. They were short one officer, as 2nd Lieutenant St. J. R. Pigott had fallen ill, and an officer just gazetted—2nd Lieutenant Sir Gerald Burke, Bart.—could not accompany them as he had not yet got his uniform. They embarked at Southampton on a hot still day in the P.&0. S.S. Novara. This was a long and tiring operation, since every one was new to embarkation-duty, and, owing to the tide, the ship’s bulwarks stood twenty-five feet above the quay. The work was not finished till 4 P.M. when most of the men had been under arms for twelve hours. Just before leaving, Captain Sir Delves Broughton, Bart., was taken ill and had to be left behind. A telegram was sent to Headquarters, asking for Captain H. Hamilton Berners to take his place, and the Novara cleared at 7 P.M. As dusk fell, she passed H.M.S. Formidable off Ryde and exchanged signals with her. The battle ship’s last message to the Battalion was to hope that they would get “plenty of fighting.” Many of the officers at that moment were sincerely afraid that they might be late for the war!
The following is the list of officers who went out with the Battalion that night:
Lieut.-Col. Hon. G. H. Morris
Commanding Officer.
Major H. F. Crichton
Senior Major.
Captain Lord Desmond FitzGerald
Adjutant.
Lieut. E. J. F. Gough
Transport Officer.
Lieut. E. B. Greer
M. Gun Officer.
Hon. Lieut. H. Hickie
Quartermaster.
Lieut. H. J. S. Shields (R.A.M.C.)
Medical. Officer.
Lieut. Hon. Aubrey Herbert, M.P.
Interpreter.
No. 1 Company.
Capt. Hon. A. E. Mulholland.
Lieut. C. A. S. Walker.
Capt. Lord John Hamilton.
2nd Lieut. N. L. Woodroffe.
Lieut. Hon. H. R. Alexander.
2nd Lieut. J. Livingstone-Learmonth.
No. 2 Company.
Major H. A. Herbert Stepney.
Lieut. J. S. N. FitzGerald.
Lieut. W. E. Hope.
Capt. J. N. Guthrie.
2nd Lieut. O. Hughes-Onslow.
Lieut. E. J. F. Gough.
No. 3 Company.
Capt. Sir Delves Broughton, Bart. (replaced by Capt. H. Hamilton Berners).
Lieut. Hon. Hugh Gough.
Lieut. Lord Guernsey.
2nd Lieut. Viscount Castlerosse.
Capt. Hon. T. E. Vesey.
No. 4 Company.
Capt. C. A. Tisdall.
Lieut. Lord Robert Innes-Ker.
Capt. A. A. Perceval.
Lieut. W. C. N. Reynolds.
2nd Lieut. J. T. P. Roberts.
Lieut. R. Blacker-Douglass.
Details at the Base.
Capt. Lord Arthur Hay.
2nd Lieut. Sir Gerald Burke, Bart.
They reached Havre at 6 A.M. on August 13, a fiercely hot day, and, tired after a sleepless night aboard ship, and a long wait, in a hot, tin-roofed shed, for some missing men, marched three miles out of the town to Rest Camp No. 2 “in a large field at Sanvic, a suburb of Havre at the top of the hill.” Later, the city herself became almost a suburb to the vast rest-camps round it. Here they received an enthusiastic welcome from the French, and were first largely introduced to the wines of the country, for many maidens lined the steep road and offered bowls of drinks to the wearied.
Next day (August 14) men rested a little, looking at this strange, bright France with strange eyes, and bathed in the sea; and Captain H. Berners, replacing Sir Delves Broughton, joined. At eleven o’clock they entrained at Havre Station under secret orders for the Front. The heat broke in a terrible thunderstorm that soaked the new uniforms. The crowded train travelled north all day, receiving great welcomes everywhere, but no one knowing what its destination might be. After more than seventeen hours’ slow progress by roads that were not revealed then or later, they halted at Wassigny, at a quarter to eleven on the night of August 15, and, unloading in hot darkness, bivouacked at a farm near the station.
On the morning of August 16 they marched to Vadencourt, where, for the first time, they went into billets. The village, a collection of typical white-washed tiled houses with a lovely old church in the centre, lay out pleasantly by the side of a poplar-planted stream. The 2nd Coldstream Guards were also billeted here; the Headquarters of the 4th Guards Brigade, the 2nd Grenadier Guards, and 3rd Coldstream being at Grougis. All supplies, be it noted, came from a village of the ominous name of Boue, which—as they were to learn through the four winters to follow—means “mud.”
At Vadencourt they lay three days while the men were being inoculated against enteric. A few had been so treated before leaving Wellington Barracks, but, in view of the hurried departure, 90 per cent. remained to be dealt with. The Diary remarks that for two days “the Battalion was not up to much.” Major H. Crichton fell sick here.
On the 20th August the march towards Belgium of the Brigade began, via Etreux and Fesmy (where Lieutenant and Quartermaster Hickie went sick and had to be sent back to railhead) to Maroilles, where the Battalion billeted, August 21, and thence, via Pont sur Sambre and Hargnies, to La Longueville, August 22. Here, being then five miles east of Malplaquet, the Battalion heard the first sound of the guns of the war, far off; not knowing that, at the end of all, they would hear them cease almost on that very spot.
At three o’clock in the morning of August 23 the Brigade marched via Riez de l’Erelle into Belgian territory and through Blaregnies towards Mons where it was dimly understood that some sort of battle was in the making. But it was not understood that eighty thousand British troops with three hundred guns disposed between Condé, through Mons towards Binche, were meeting twice that number of Germans on their front, plus sixty thousand Germans with two hundred and thirty guns trying to turn their left flank, while a quarter of a million Germans, with close on a thousand guns, were driving in the French armies on the British right from Charleroi to Namur, across the Meuse and the Sambre. This, in substance, was the situation at Mons. It supplied a sufficient answer to the immortal question, put by one of the pillars of the Battalion, a drill sergeant, who happened to arrive from home just as that situation had explained itself, and found his battalion steadily marching south. “Fwhat’s all this talk about a retreat?” said he, and strictly rebuked the shouts of laughter that followed.1
The Brigade was first ordered to take up a position at Bois Lahant, close to the dirtier suburbs of Mons which is a fair city on a hill, but the order was cancelled when it was discovered that the Fifth Division was already there. Eventually, the Irish Guards were told to move from the village of Quevy le Petit, where they had expected to go into billets, to Harveng. Here they were ordered, with the 2nd Grenadier Guards, to support the Fifth Division on a chalk ridge from Harmignies to the Mons road, while the other two battalions of the Brigade (the 2nd and 3rd Coldstream Guards) took up position north-east of Harveng. Their knowledge of what might be in front of them or who was in support was, naturally, small. It was a hot, still evening, no Germans were visible, but shrapnel fell ahead of the Battalion as it moved in artillery formation across the rolling, cropped lands. One single far-ranging rifle-bullet landed with a phtt in the chalk between two officers, one of whom turning to the other laughed and said, “Ah! Now we can say we have been under fire.” A few more shells arrived as the advance to the ridge went forward, and the Brigade reached the seventh kilometre-stone on the Harmignies–Mons road, below the ridge, about 6 P.M. on the 23rd August. The Irish Rifles, commanded by Colonel Bird, D.S.O., were fighting here, and Nos. 1 and 2 Companies of the Irish Guards went up to reinforce it. This was the first time that the Battalion had been personally shelled and five men were wounded. The guns ceased about dusk, and there was very little fire from the German trenches, which were rather in the nature of scratch-holes, ahead of them. That night, too, was the first on which the troops saw a searchlight used. They enjoyed also their first experience of digging themselves in, the which they did so casually that veterans of after years would hold up that “trench” as a sample of “the valour of ignorance.” At midnight, the Irish Rifles were ordered to retire while the Irish Guards covered their retirement; but so far they had been in direct contact with nothing.
The Battalion heard confusedly of the fall of Namur and, it may be presumed, of the retirement of the French armies on the right of the British. There was little other news of any sort, and what there was, not cheering. On front and flank of the British armies the enemy stood in more than overwhelming strength, and it came to a question of retiring, as speedily as might be, before the flood swallowed what remained. So the long retreat of our little army began.
The large outlines of it are as follows: The entire British Force, First and Second Army Corps, fell back to Bavai—the First without serious difficulty, the Second fighting rear-guard actions through the day. At Brava the two Corps diverged, not to unite again till they should reach Betz on the 1st September. The Second Army Corps, reinforced by the Fourth Division, took the roads through Le Quesnoy, Solesme, Le Cateau, St. Quentin, Ham, Nesle, Noyon, and Crépy-en-Valois; the First paralleling them, roughly, through Landrecies, Vadencourt, La Fère, Pasly by Soissons, and Villers-Cotterêts.
At 2 o’clock in the morning of August 24 the Battalion, “having covered the retirement of all the other troops,” retired through the position which the 2nd and 3rd Coldstream Guards had taken up, to Quevy le Petit, where it was ordered, with the 2nd Grenadiers, to entrench another position north of Quevy le Petit (from the third kilometre-stone on the Genly–Quevy le Petit road to the tenth kilometre-stone on the Mons–Bettignies road). This it did while the whole of the Second Division retired through the position at 4 P.M., the Battalion acting as rear-guard. Their notion of “digging-in” was to cut fire-steps in the side of the handy bank of any road. At nine o’clock that night the Battalion “came out of Belgium by the same road that it had marched into Belgium” through Blaregnies, past Bavai where the First and Second Army Corps diverged, and through La Longueville to Malgarni, where they bivouacked in an orchard “having been forty-four hours under arms.” Here the first mail from England arrived, and was distributed by torchlight under the apple-trees in the warm night.
On the afternoon of August 25 the Battalion reached Landrecies, an unlovely, long-streeted town in closely cultivated country. The German pressure was heavy behind them, and that evening the 3rd Coldstream Guards on outpost duty to the north-west of Landrecies, on the Mormal road, were attacked, and, as history shows, beat off that attack in a night-fight of some splendour. The Battalion turned out and blocked the pavé entrance to the town with improvised barricades, which they lined, of stones, tables, chairs, carts, and pianos; relieved the Coldstream at 1.30 A.M., August 26; and once again covered the retirement of the Brigade out of the town towards Etreux. The men were very tired, so weary indeed that many of them slept by the roadside while waiting to relieve the Coldstreams at Landrecies fight. That night was the first they heard wounded men scream. A couple of Irish Guards officers, sleeping so deeply that only the demolition by shell-fire of the house next door waked them, were left behind here, but after twenty-four hours of fantastic and, at that time, almost incredible adventures, rejoined safely next day. It was recorded also that one of the regimental drums was seen and heard going down Landrecies main street in the darkness, strung on the fore-leg of a gun-horse who had stepped into it as a battery went south. A battalion cooker, the sparks flying from it, passed like a fire-engine hastening to a fire, and men found time to laugh and point at the strange thing.
