THE IRISH GUARDS: The First & the Second Battalion in the Great War (Complete Edition) E-Book
Rudyard Kipling
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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Rudyard Kipling's 'The Irish Guards: The First & the Second Battalion in the Great War' provides a detailed account of the Irish Guards' experiences during World War I. Kipling's literary style in this book is gripping and immersive, as he takes the reader through the battlefield with vivid descriptions and poignant narratives. This work not only serves as a historical record of the Irish Guards' contributions to the war effort but also delves into the personal stories of the soldiers, humanizing the conflicts of war. Kipling's writing is both engaging and informative, making this book a valuable resource for those interested in military history and the Great War. Kipling's attention to detail and personal connection to the subject matter shines through in every page, offering a unique perspective on this significant period in history. 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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THE IRISH GUARDS: The First & the Second Battalion in the Great War
(Complete Edition)
Published by
Books
Table of Contents
Introduction
A regiment’s path through the Great War is traced here as if under a steady lantern, revealing not only movements on a map but the stubborn courage, order, and cost by which a small body of men meets the convulsions of history.
Rudyard Kipling’s The Irish Guards: The First & the Second Battalion in the Great War (Complete Edition) stands as a definitive account of a famed regiment’s experience in the First World War. Bringing together the histories of both battalions in one comprehensive volume, it offers a continuous, disciplined narrative of service and endurance. Neither memoir nor fiction, it is a meticulously constructed record that reads with the immediacy of lived experience. Kipling’s authority as a major English-language author and his meticulous approach to martial detail combine to give this work a distinctive and enduring place in war literature.
Composed in the aftermath of the conflict and published in the interwar years, the book bears the clarity of hindsight without surrendering the urgency of contemporary testimony. Kipling wrote it after the guns had fallen silent, when memory and archive could be weighed against one another. The period of composition matters: it belongs to a moment when Europe confronted loss while codifying its history. The author’s devotion to accuracy, and his insistence on the texture of routine as well as crisis, make the narrative both reliable and humane, grounded in the realities of service rather than in retrospective mythmaking.
At its core, the book is a regimental history that follows the First and Second Battalions of the Irish Guards through the war’s demanding years. It charts their organization, deployments, daily duties, and combat actions, always attentive to the conditions under which soldiers worked and endured. The emphasis falls on the human framework of a regiment: officers and men, discipline and improvisation, cohesion under pressure, and the ceaseless labor that supports any moment at the front. Without dramatization, the account captures how a unit moves, adapts, suffers, and persists in a conflict that strains every institution to its limits.
Its classic status rests first on literary craft. Kipling’s prose is exacting and restrained, steering the reader through complexity with clarity and moral steadiness. He finds cadence in orders, diaries, and reports, yet avoids ornament in favor of precision. The effect is cumulative: actions and marches, logistics and losses, quietly form a portrait of character under trial. This measured artistry turns a specialized subject into lasting literature, demonstrating how a writer of narrative genius can elevate documentary material into a compelling and dignified chronicle of collective endeavor.
The work also set a standard for regimental history by uniting scrupulous documentation with readability. The narrative is built from official records, battalion diaries, and the testimony of those who served, consolidated into a coherent account that privileges accuracy without sacrificing momentum. Kipling’s method refuses sensationalism; he trusts factual detail and disciplined structure to convey severity and significance. That approach influenced later historians and biographers who took unit-level perspectives as the surest way to understand a vast war, encouraging a tradition of writing that honors both the granular and the grand.
Enduring themes give the book its lasting resonance. Duty is shown not as an abstract virtue but as the daily practice of reliability under uncertainty. Camaraderie appears in the rhythms of work, relief, and mutual reliance rather than in speeches. Identity—national, regimental, and individual—emerges through action and habit. The Irish Guards, serving within the British Army, embody a layered sense of belonging and service that complicates any simple reading of wartime loyalties and experiences, giving the history a cultural richness that continues to invite reflection.
Equally important is the theme of remembrance. The book functions as a memorial in prose: it preserves names, actions, and places with a care that resists oblivion. Kipling’s broader involvement in commemorative efforts after the war, including his work with the Imperial War Graves Commission, informs the tone without overt intrusion. The history insists that memory must be exact to be just, and that justice to the dead requires the faithful recording of what they did and endured. In this sense, it is both historical narrative and act of public mourning.
As literature, the volume has influenced how later writers approach military units and campaigns, modeling a balance between operational narrative and humane attention to the soldier’s world. It demonstrates the power of a carefully limited perspective: by staying close to one regiment, it renders the enormity of the Western Front comprehensible. Scholars, military historians, and general readers have long turned to it for its reliability, but also for its example of how to write about war without diminishing its complexity or exploiting its tragedy.
The Complete Edition yields a panoramic yet disciplined view by presenting the two battalions’ histories together. Read in tandem, their stories illuminate contrasts of circumstance and continuity of spirit. The structure allows the reader to recognize patterns—of preparation, engagement, and recovery—while also perceiving the contingency that governs every campaign. This arrangement underscores the book’s central premise: that the history of a unit, carefully told, is a prism through which to see an entire conflict’s pressures, costs, and necessities.
Its status as a classic also reflects the integrity of its purpose. Kipling does not seek to argue a thesis beyond faithful witness; the narrative’s implicit ethic is that truth, assembled with care, is argument enough. That restraint is itself a literary choice, and it has kept the book open to readers across generations and perspectives. While specialists value its detail, non-specialists find in it a clear path through the thicket of war’s language, organizations, and events, guided by a writer who never forgets the people behind the paperwork.
Today, this history speaks to concerns that transcend its time: how institutions endure shock, how communities remember loss, and how language can honor service without romanticizing violence. In an era attentive to archives, testimony, and the ethics of memory, Kipling’s book retains urgent relevance. It reminds us that large narratives are built from careful accounts of smaller ones, and that the dignity of record-keeping is itself a form of respect. For contemporary readers, the result is both a compelling work of literature and a durable instrument of understanding.
Synopsis
Rudyard Kipling’s The Irish Guards: The First & the Second Battalion in the Great War is a documentary history that follows both battalions of the regiment through the First World War. Compiled from official war diaries, orders, and contemporary papers, it proceeds chronologically and keeps close to the level of battalion and company actions. The narrative records marches, reliefs, trench routines, raids, and set-piece attacks, interlaced with notes on command changes and the effects of terrain and weather. Kipling maintains a restrained, factual tone, aiming to preserve an exact record of service rather than to offer memoir or strategy, while constantly anchoring events to dates and places on the Western Front.
The account opens with mobilization and the deployment of the First Battalion to France in 1914 alongside the early British Expeditionary forces. Initial encounters test discipline and training against the realities of modern firepower. Kipling details the battalion’s movements through defensive and offensive phases as the front stabilizes, emphasizing the strain of long marches, rapid entrenchment, and the growing importance of machine guns and accurate artillery. The opening months are marked by sharp engagements, withdrawals, and counterstrokes that establish a pattern of attrition. Throughout, the battalion’s cohesion under changing commanders and its integration within larger brigades frame the development of its wartime identity.
As the fighting settles into static warfare, the First Battalion’s daily life becomes the subject: rotation between front-line, support, and reserve trenches; incessant maintenance under shelling; and patrols to probe enemy positions. Kipling documents the routines that consumed most of a battalion’s time—wiring, carrying, and repairing—as well as the hazard of snipers and trench mortars. He traces how battlefield knowledge accumulated, refining sentry duties, relief schedules, and communication methods. Losses mount not only in major actions but through constant minor incidents. The winter periods highlight exposure and illness alongside combat, underscoring how endurance, supply discipline, and small-unit leadership kept the line intact.
The Second Battalion enters the narrative with its formation and training, then movement to France in 1915. Kipling interweaves its story with that of the First, showing how regimental standards were transplanted to a newly raised unit. Their first major offensive test comes in the battles of that year, notably during the operations around Loos. Preparation, rehearsals, and staff coordination receive careful attention, as do the difficulties of communication and direction in smoke and shellfire. The costs of assault, and the challenges of consolidating newly taken ground, are laid out in sober detail. Lessons learned from these engagements begin to shape the regiment’s methods for subsequent campaigns.
By 1916, both battalions operate within increasingly sophisticated offensive frameworks on the Somme. Kipling tracks the interplay of barrages, creeping advances, and mopping-up tactics, and he notes the expanding role of Lewis guns, bombing sections, and platoon-level initiative. The narrative follows successive attacks and the strain of holding exposed salients under counter-bombardment. Terrain—traversed trenches, shattered villages, and observation points—becomes a decisive factor in success or failure. The book emphasizes how repeated operations demanded a continuous cycle of rebuilding units with drafts, promoting experienced non-commissioned officers, and reconstituting companies after heavy fighting.
In 1917 the battalions pivot between set-piece attacks and defensive stances in operations that include spring offensives, the protracted fighting over waterlogged ground in Flanders, and the late-year battles that introduce more extensive use of tanks. Kipling describes improved artillery planning, counter-battery work, and the difficulty of maintaining direction and momentum in adverse conditions. When fronts shift quickly, the battalions must adapt to captured trench systems and improvised positions. The narrative stresses coordination with neighboring units and supporting arms, showing how success depended on signals, reconnaissance, and the precise timing of reliefs amid persistent enemy shelling and counterattacks.
The spring of 1918 brings the German offensives, with the Irish Guards engaged in rapid moves to threatened sectors, stubborn rear-guard actions, and the reestablishment of defensive lines under pressure. Kipling records withdrawals conducted with discipline, the plugging of gaps, and piecemeal counterattacks to regain tactically vital features. As the year turns, the narrative follows the Allied counteroffensives and a return to movement warfare, including river and canal crossings and the breaching of successive defensive belts. Mobilized logistics and more flexible infantry tactics feature prominently. The approach to the Armistice is charted through continuing casualties and the unremitting pace of operations.
Alongside battle narratives, the book dwells on the mechanisms that sustained the battalions: training cadres, drafts from depots, medical evacuation chains, and the routine of mail, rations, and pay. Kipling often pauses to register individual distinctions, noting how decorations reflect specific duties—patrol leadership, runners under fire, or steadying influence in the line. He also attends to courts-martial and discipline as elements of order in extreme conditions. Portraits of officers and men are concise and functional, tied to their roles in operations. Throughout, inter-battalion comparisons underline continuity of regimental standards despite losses and reorganizations.
The work closes by situating the Irish Guards’ experience within the broader transformation of the British Army from a small expeditionary force to a mass, professionalized instrument. Kipling’s methodical treatment, avoiding rhetorical flourishes, preserves the immediacy of the record while honoring collective effort over individual anecdote. The enduring significance lies in its precise depiction of battalion-level warfare and the way institutional memory is built from daily practice under fire. Without venturing into wider verdicts, the book offers a durable memorial and a primary source for understanding how steadfastness, adaptation, and routine shaped survival and success on the Western Front.
Historical Context
Rudyard Kipling’s Irish Guards: The First & the Second Battalion in the Great War unfolds within the early twentieth-century British Empire, when Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom and the British Army was a central imperial institution. The Irish Guards, created in 1900 by Queen Victoria to honor Irish service in South Africa, embodied both Irish and imperial identities under the Crown. Their motto, Quis Separabit, echoed the Order of St. Patrick. In August 1914, Britain entered a continental war that would mobilize millions. Kipling’s narrative places the regiment amid this vast structure—monarchy, War Office, and the British Expeditionary Force—tracing how a prestigious Guards unit met industrialized warfare.
Prewar, the Guards stood as elite infantry, drilled for precision, ceremonial duty, and battlefield shock. The Irish Guards’ 1st Battalion was part of the small professional Army that sailed with the British Expeditionary Force in 1914. The wartime expansion of the Army, after heavy casualties, led to the raising of additional battalions across many regiments; the 2nd Battalion Irish Guards was formed during 1915. Kipling’s history reflects this transition from a tight-knit prewar cadre to a larger, war-tempered formation, documenting how training, discipline, and regimental traditions helped absorb drafts and maintain cohesion amid rapid growth.
With the outbreak of war in August 1914, the Irish Guards moved to the Western Front in northern France and Belgium. They endured the mobile fighting of the war’s opening—advance, retreat, rearguard actions—before the front solidified. The first winter brought entrenchment, sniping, and attrition. Kipling’s account captures the sudden shift from parade-ground professionalism to the mud and confusion of modern battle. Without romantic flourish, he follows battalion movements across the early engagements that defined the British Expeditionary Force’s survival and the establishment of a continuous trench line stretching from the North Sea to Switzerland.
The book documents the emergence of trench warfare during 1914–1915: deep defensive systems, barbed wire, machine guns, and massive artillery bombardments that shaped every hour of a soldier’s day. It notes the routine—working parties, wiring, patrols, ration-carrying—and the perils of shellfire and snipers. As chlorine gas appeared on the front in 1915, protective equipment evolved from improvised cloths to more effective respirators. Kipling writes from unit diaries and orders, showing how the Irish Guards learned to live and fight within a landscape transformed by technology, where success often depended on small-unit initiative and steady nerves under ceaseless fire.
Irish politics framed enlistment and identity. The prewar Home Rule crisis (1912–1914) split Ireland between nationalist and unionist camps, each raising volunteer forces. When war began, John Redmond urged nationalists to support the British war effort, while unionists had already organized strongly in Ulster. Irish service in the British Army—regulars, reservists, and volunteers—thus had multiple motivations. Kipling’s regimental lens does not dwell on parliamentary debates, but the presence of Irish Catholics and Protestants, as well as British-born men of Irish descent, shows how the Irish Guards became a meeting point of loyalties under the regimental colors.
During 1914–1915 the British fought costly actions across Flanders and Artois, seeking to pierce German lines. Attacks near Givenchy, Neuve Chapelle, and Festubert introduced larger artillery programs and more systematic planning, though success was limited. The Irish Guards held trenches, launched local assaults, and absorbed reliefs in bleak weather. Kipling tracks this grind without grand strategy, emphasizing orders received, ground gained or lost, and casualty lists. The narrative mirrors the Army’s learning curve, from hurried advances to methodical set-pieces, where even partial objectives—capturing a trench, a farm, or a road embankment—mattered in a war of position.
In mid-1915 a Guards Division was formed to concentrate elite battalions, and a new 2nd Battalion Irish Guards joined the order of battle. That autumn, the British launched the Loos offensive, a major effort employing gas and massed infantry. Among the dead was Kipling’s son, John, a young officer of the Irish Guards, whose loss profoundly marked the author. The book addresses Loos with stark restraint, focusing on unit tasks and the aftermath rather than personal lament. It illustrates the limits of contemporary tactics—thin artillery preparation, inadequate wire-cutting—and the human cost borne by assaulting Guards battalions.
The Munitions Crisis of 1915 spurred British industrial mobilization, leading to the Ministry of Munitions and rising output of shells, rifles, and machine guns. By 1916, improved artillery schedules, more reliable fuzes, and creeping barrages aimed to coordinate fire and movement. Steel helmets and better grenades (such as Mills bombs) became standard, while Lewis guns multiplied in infantry platoons. Kipling’s history registers these changes through orders of battle, equipment issues, and evolving training notes. Technology reshaped daily routines: carrying parties moved ammunition forward by night, sappers expanded trenches, and signalers maintained fragile telephone lines under bombardment.
The Somme campaign of 1916 marked a decisive, if costly, phase of British expansion. The Guards Division participated in later Somme operations, including set-piece attacks that captured fortified villages such as Lesboeufs. The Irish Guards suffered heavy casualties but gained tactical experience with barrages, consolidation, and counter-attack drills. Parallel Irish narratives unfolded: the 36th (Ulster) Division’s sacrifices and the 16th (Irish) Division’s actions elsewhere on the front highlighted the breadth of Irish service. Kipling keeps a regimental focus, yet the broader picture is clear: grinding offensives forged a mass citizen army and reshaped British military doctrine.
Events in Ireland altered the backdrop to service. The Easter Rising in Dublin in April 1916 and the executions that followed accelerated support for advanced nationalism. Irish recruitment declined after mid-1916, and a proposed extension of conscription to Ireland in 1918 provoked strong resistance and was not implemented. The Irish Guards continued to fight, drawing replacements from across the British Isles. Kipling’s narrative rarely comments directly on politics, but by meticulously recording discipline, routine, and sacrifice, it implicitly asserts a regimental identity that persisted while the political ground at home shifted toward independence.
In 1917 the British fought major operations at Arras, in Flanders during the Third Battle of Ypres, and in the late-year offensive at Cambrai, where tanks featured prominently. The Guards Division took part in demanding attacks and defensive actions under severe conditions—waterlogged ground, gas shelling, and relentless counter-battery fire. Kipling’s treatment is factual: he recites objectives, timings, and companies on the line, highlighting endurance over rhetoric. The narrative shows how combined-arms ideas—artillery coordination, machine-gun barrages, and the cautious use of armor—were still evolving, while battalions like the Irish Guards paid the price in blood for incremental gains.
Strategic leadership changed as Sir Douglas Haig replaced Sir John French late in 1915, and debates over attrition versus breakthrough shaped operations. Kipling does not write a polemic about high command; instead, he lets orders, after-action reports, and ground-level results illustrate strategy’s consequences. The book shows the rhythm of reliefs, overstretched logistics, and the tension between ambitious objectives and the realities of weather, morale, and enemy defenses. In this sense, the regimental chronicle quietly critiques overreach, not by argument but by documenting the repeated patterns that governed success or failure in set-piece battles.
In spring 1918, Germany launched major offensives, exploiting freed divisions after Russia’s exit. British units reeled but held key sectors, then stabilized the front. The Irish Guards faced rapid withdrawals, hasty rearguards, and the reorganization of depleted companies. Newer tactics—more autonomous platoons, Lewis-gun bases of fire, rifle grenades, and flexible counter-attacks—had matured by necessity. Kipling’s history captures these pressures: the confusion of shifting lines, the critical importance of junior leaders, and the endurance required to absorb shocks until reserves and artillery could restore the defense. It is a portrait of survival under strategic crisis.
From late summer 1918, Allied forces advanced in the Hundred Days campaign, breaking the Hindenburg Line and liberating occupied towns. The Irish Guards participated in methodical attacks supported by improved artillery and air reconnaissance. The pace of operations increased, but so did exhaustion. Kipling narrates crossings of canals, captures of trench systems, and the consolidation of gains that preceded the Armistice of November 1918. Though celebratory moments appear, the tone remains measured—each success is tallied against losses, and the transition from fighting to quiet sectors underscores that victory arrived through cumulative, disciplined effort rather than a single decisive blow.
Demobilization in 1919 brought slow, bureaucratic returns to civilian life, posting to occupation duties for some units in the Rhineland, and the reduction of wartime establishments. The Irish Guards, like other regiments, processed men through dispersal centers, while memorial practices took shape at home and in former battle zones. War graves were standardized by the Imperial (later Commonwealth) War Graves Commission, where Kipling served as literary adviser, helping shape inscriptions and commemorative language. The book fits squarely within this culture of remembrance, providing named rolls, honors, and precise locations to anchor private grief within a collective, public record.
Kipling’s authorship matters. A leading imperial writer who had suffered personal loss at Loos, he approached the regimental history as a duty of accuracy and commemoration. Published in the early 1920s, the two-volume work drew on battalion diaries, after-action reports, letters, and interviews. He prioritized exactness—dates, map references, unit dispositions—over polemic. Compared with trench memoirs or war poetry that emphasized disillusionment, Kipling’s tone is controlled and documentary. Yet the restraint is eloquent: by letting the facts speak, he acknowledges the cost of the war and the dignity of ordinary soldiers, including those with no known grave.
The book arrived as Ireland moved toward independence: the 1918 electoral landslide for Sinn Féin, the War of Independence (1919–1921), and the Anglo-Irish Treaty that created the Irish Free State. In this contested memory landscape, Irish service in British uniforms could be politically fraught. Kipling neither apologizes for nor agitates about such debates. Instead, he presents the Irish Guards as a professional community whose experiences mirror the British Army’s wider transformation. The work functions both as a mirror and a subtle critique of its era—honoring duty and endurance while exposing, through meticulous detail, the human cost of industrial war and political upheaval.
Author Biography
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was a British writer of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, born in Bombay in British India. Renowned for poetry, short stories, and novels, he became one of the most widely read authors in English at the turn of the twentieth century. His work ranges from adventures for young readers to intricate tales that examine empire, service, and identity. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first English-language laureate and, at the time, its youngest. Kipling’s vigorous narrative drive, ballad rhythms, and sharp ear for colloquial speech made him a formative figure in modern popular and literary culture.
Kipling spent early childhood in India before schooling in Britain, where he attended the United Services College in Devon. The discipline, camaraderie, and satire of British school life later fed his fiction. In the early 1880s he returned to the subcontinent and learned the craft of journalism on the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, later writing for the Pioneer in Allahabad. Reporting routines, close observation, and compressed prose shaped his literary methods. His imagination drew on the multilingual, urban and military worlds around him, the ballad tradition, and storytelling currents that moved between bazaars, barracks, and offices, providing subjects and voices for early work.
While still a young reporter he published verse and short fiction with striking regularity. Departmental Ditties and Other Verses (1886) and Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) captured colonial bureaucracies, soldiers, and city life with a brisk, ironic tone. In 1888 he issued several story volumes, including pieces later gathered under titles such as Soldiers Three, and wrote enduring tales like The Man Who Would Be King. These works rapidly found readers well beyond India. By the end of the decade he had relocated to London, where publishers and periodicals amplified his reputation as a master of the concise, vividly observed short story.
In the 1890s he broadened his range across continents and genres. Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) brought popular poems in the voices of ordinary soldiers. For several years he lived in the United States before settling again in England, and during this period he produced major prose for younger audiences and general readers alike. The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book (1894–1895) combined fable-like structure with precise natural observation. He followed with The Seven Seas (1896), Captains Courageous (1897), and Stalky & Co. (1899), consolidating his prominence. His technical command—swift pacing, refrains, and vivid set pieces—made these volumes fixtures of anglophone reading.
The new century brought work now central to his reputation. Kim (1901) offered a panoramic vision of the subcontinent and imperial service. Just So Stories (1902) displayed playful narrative invention and a distinctive prose cadence for younger readers. Collections such as The Five Nations (1903), Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), and Rewards and Fairies (1910) interlaced folklore, history, and lyricism; the latter included the poem If—, long one of the most quoted in English. In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Public lectures and essays reinforced his stature as a global literary figure whose reach extended across newspapers, books, and recitation.
Kipling’s public positions were closely bound to his writing. He argued for imperial responsibility and duty in works such as The White Man’s Burden (1899), views that have since drawn sustained criticism. He also celebrated craft and technology, ships and engines, and the professionalism of soldiers and engineers. During the First World War he wrote journalism and verse in support of the war effort and endured the loss of a son in the conflict. He later served the Imperial War Graves Commission, helping to select inscriptions used on memorials and headstones, including Their Name Liveth For Evermore and Known unto God.
In later years he continued to publish accomplished stories and poems—among them Debits and Credits (1926) and Limits and Renewals (1932)—while living in Sussex. He died in 1936 and was interred in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. Kipling’s legacy remains double-edged: he is admired for economical storytelling, ballad craft, and memorable characters, and scrutinized for his imperial rhetoric. The Jungle Book has echoed through theatre, film, and the Scouting movement, and poems like If— circulate widely. His technical influence on short fiction and narrative verse continues to shape writers and popular culture.
THE IRISH GUARDS: The First & the Second Battalion in the Great War (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[1] 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[2] 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[3] preached; and on the morning of the 11th August Field-Marshal Lord Roberts[4] 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[1q].” 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[6], 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[5]. 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[2q]. 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[7] 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.
At Etreux, where with the rest of the Brigade the Battalion entrenched itself after the shallow pattern of the time, it had its first sight of a German aeroplane which flew over its trenches and dropped a bomb that “missed a trench by twenty yards.” The Battalion fired at it, and it “flew away like a wounded bird and eventually came down and was captured by another division.” Both sides were equally inexperienced in those days in the details of air war. All that day they heard the sound of what they judged was “a battle in the direction of Le Cateau.” This was the Second Army Corps and a single Division of the Third Corps under Smith-Dorrien interrupting our retirement to make a stand against four or more German Army Corps and six hundred guns. The result of that action caused the discerning General von Kluck to telegraph that he held the Expeditionary Force “surrounded by a ring of steel,” and Berlin behung itself with flags. This also the Battalion did not know. They were more interested in the fact that they had lost touch with the Second Division; and that their Commanding Officer had told the officers that, so far as he could make out, they were surrounded and had better dig in deeper and wait on. As no one knew particularly where they might be in all France, and as the night of the 26th was very wet, the tired men slept undisturbedly over the proposition, to resume their retreat next day (August 27) down the valley of the Sambre, through Vénérolles, Tupigny, Vadencourt, Noyales, to the open glaring country round Mont d’Origny where the broad road to St. Quentin crosses the river. It was in reserve that day, and the next (August 28) was advance-guard to the Brigade as the retirement continued through Châtillon, Berthenicourt, and Moy to Vendeuil and the cross-roads west of the Vendeuil–La Fère road while the Brigade marched on to Bertaucourt. After the Brigade had passed, the Battalion acted as rear-guard into Bertaucourt. Here No. 2 Company, under Major Stepney, was sent to Beautor to assist a section of the Royal Engineers in demolishing a bridge across the river there—an operation performed without incident—and in due course joined up with the Battalion again. By this time, the retreat, as one who took part in it says, had become “curiously normal”—the effect, doubtless, of that continued over-exertion which reduces men to the state of sleep-walkers. There was a ten minutes’ halt every hour, on which the whole Battalion dropped where it stood and slept. At night, some of them began to see lights, like those of comfortable billets by the roadside which, for some curious reason or other, could never be reached. Others found themselves asleep, on their feet, and even when they lay down to snatch sleep, the march moved on, and wearied them in their dreams. Owing to the heat and the dust, many suffered from sore feet and exhaustion, and, since ambulance accommodation was limited, they had to be left behind to follow on if, and as best, they could. But those who fell out were few, and the Diary remarks approvingly that “on the whole the Battalion marched very well and march-discipline was good.” Neither brigade nor battalion commanders knew anything of what was ahead or behind, but it seemed that, since they could not get into Paris before the Germans and take first-class tickets to London, they would all be cut off and destroyed; which did not depress them unduly. At all events, the Battalion one evening forgot its weariness long enough to take part in the chase and capture of a stray horse of Belgian extraction, which, after its ample lack of manners and mouth had been proved, they turned over for instruction and reformation to the Transport.
