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The Long Twentieth Century Giovanni Arrighi Digital
Instant Download
Author(s): Giovanni Arrighi
ISBN(s): 9781844673049, 1844673049
Edition: New and Updated Edition
File Details: PDF, 2.40 MB
Year: 2010
Language: english
The Long Twentieth Century
The Long Twentieth Century
Money, Power, and the Origins
of Our Times

G I OVA N N I A R R IGH I
 First published by Verso 1994
This edition published by Verso 2010
© Giovanni Arrighi 1994, 2010
New material © Giovanni Arrighi 2010
All rights reserved

Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
USA: 20 Jay Street, New York, NY 11201

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-304-9

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed in the USA by Maple Vail
 Contents

List of Figures vii

Preface and Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1

1 the three hegemonies of historical capitalism 28

Hegemony, Capitalism, and Territorialism 28
The Origins of the Modern Interstate System 37
British Hegemony and Free-Trade Imperialism 48
US Hegemony and the Rise of the Free Enterprise System 59
Towards a New Research Agenda 75

2 the rise of capital 86

The Antecedents of Systemic Cycles of Accumulation 86
The Genesis of High Finance 97
The First (Genoese) Systemic Cycle of Accumulation 111
The Second (Dutch) Systemic Cycle of Accumulation 130
The Dialectic of State and Capital 148

3 industry, empire, and the “endless” accumulation

of capital 163
The Third (British) Systemic Cycle of Accumulation 163
The Dialectic of Capitalism and Territorialism 179
The Dialectic of Capitalism and Territorialism (Continued) 200
Reprise and Preview 219

v
vi the long twentieth century

4 the long twentieth century 247

The Dialectic of Market and Plan 247
The Fourth (US) Systemic Cycle of Accumulation 277
The Dynamics of Global Crisis 309

epilogue: can capitalism survive success? 336

postscript to the second edition 371

References 387
Index 405
 List of Figures

1.1 Mensch’s Metamorphosis Model 10

2.1 Total Silver Coinage in England, 1273–1470 101
2.2 Trends in the Cloth Trade: Shipments from England and
Production at Ypres 101
2.3 Mediterranean Routes of Genoa and Venice in the
Middle ages 121
2.4 The Genoese Space-of-Flows, Late Sixteenth and
Early Seventeenth Centuries 136
2.5 Volume of Grain Shipments through the Sound, 1562–1780 136
3.1 British Capital Exports, 1820–1915 167
3.2 The Sixteenth-century Trade Expansion 175
3.3 The Nineteenth-century Trade Expansion 175
3.4 Long Centuries and Systemic Cycles of Accumulation 220
3.5 Ideotypical Trajectory of Mercantile Expansions 232
3.6 Hick’s Model of Mercantile Expansions 232
3.7 Bifurcation in the Trajectory of Mercantile Expansions 235
3.8 Model of Local Turbulence 242
3.9 Model of Systemic Turbulence 242
3.10 Metamorphosis Model of Systemic Cycles of Accumulation 242
4.1 US Trade Balance and Current Account, 1896–1956 280
4.2 US Gold Reserves and Short-term Liabilities, 1950–72 311
4.3 Outflow of Foreign Direct Investments of Developed
Market Economy Countries Distributed by Geographical
Regions of Origin, 1950–83 313
4.4 Long-term Interest Rates in the United States, 1965–84 327
E.1 The Rise of East Asia in Comparative Perspective 344
E.2 Income Gaps versus Industrialization Gaps 347
E.3 Rate of Increase of Accumulated Japanese Direct Foreign
Investment 361
E.4 The East Asian Space-of-Flows, Late Twentieth Century 361
P.1 Evolutionary Patterns of World Capitalism 375

vii
 To my graduate students
at SUNY-Binghamton, 1979–94
 Preface and Acknowledgements

This book began almost fifteen years ago as a study of the world
economic crisis of the 1970s. The crisis was conceptualized as the third
and concluding moment of a single historical process defined by the rise,
full expansion, and demise of the US system of capital accumulation
on a world scale. The other two moments were the Great Depression of
1873–96 and the thirty-year crisis of 1914–45. The three moments taken
together defined the long twentieth century as a particular epoch or stage
of development of the capitalist world-economy.
As I originally conceived this book, the long twentieth century
constituted its exclusive subject-matter. To be sure, I was aware from the
start that the rise of the US system could only be understood in relation
to the demise of the British system. But I felt no need or desire to take
the analysis further back than the second half of the nineteenth century.
Over the years I changed my mind, and the book turned into a study
of what have been called “the two interdependent master processes of
the [modern] era: the creation of a system of national states and the
formation of a worldwide capitalist system” (Tilly 1984: 147). This
change was prompted by the very evolution of the world economic crisis
in the 1980s. With the advent of the Reagan era, the “financialization”
of capital, which had been one of several features of the world economic
crisis of the 1970s, became the absolutely predominant feature of the
crisis. As had happened eighty years earlier in the course of the demise
of the British system, observers and scholars began once more hailing
“finance capital” as the latest and highest stage of world capitalism.
It was in this intellectual atmosphere that I discovered in the second and
third volumes of Fernand Braudel’s trilogy, Capitalism and Civilization,
the interpretative scheme that became the basis of this book. In this
interpretative scheme, finance capital is not a particular stage of world
capitalism, let alone its latest and highest stage. Rather, it is a recurrent
phenomenon which has marked the capitalist era from its earliest
beginnings in late medieval and early modern Europe. Throughout the

xi
xii the long twentieth century

capitalist era financial expansions have signalled the transition from one
regime of accumulation on a world scale to another. They are integral
aspects of the recurrent destruction of “old” regimes and the simultaneous
creation of “new” ones.
In the light of this discovery, I reconceptualized the long twentieth
century as consisting of three phases: (1) the financial expansion of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the course of which
the structures of the “old” British regime were destroyed and those of
the “new” US regime were created; (2) the material expansion of the
1950s and 1960s, during which the dominance of the “new” US regime
translated in a world-wide expansion of trade and production; and (3)
the current financial expansion, in the course of which the structures of
the now “old” US regime are being destroyed and those of a “new” regime
are presumably being created. More importantly, in the interpretative
scheme which I derived from Braudel, the long twentieth century now
appeared as the latest of four similarly structured long centuries, each
constituting a particular stage of development of the modern capitalist
world system. It became clear to me that a comparative analysis of these
successive long centuries could reveal more about the dynamic and likely
future outcome of the present crisis than an in-depth analysis of the long
twentieth century as such.
This recasting of the investigation in a much longer time frame has
resulted in a contraction of the space taken up by the overt discussion
of the long twentieth century to about one-third of the book. I have
none the less decided to retain the original title of the book to underscore
the strictly instrumental nature of my excursions into the past. That is
to say, the only purpose of reconstructing the financial expansions of
earlier centuries has been to deepen our understanding of the current
financial expansion as the concluding moment of a particular stage of
development of the capitalist world system – the stage encompassed by
the long twentieth century.
These excursions into the past brought me onto the treacherous terrain
of world historical analysis. Commenting on Braudel’s magnum opus
from which I have drawn inspiration, Charles Tilly has wisely warned us
against the dangers of venturing on this terrain:

If consistency be a hobgoblin of little minds, Braudel has no trouble escaping

the demon. When Braudel is not bedeviling us with our demands for
consistency, he parades . . . indecision. Throughout the second volume of
Civilisation matérielle, he repeatedly begins to treat the relationship between
capitalists and statemakers, then veers away . . . Precisely because the
conversation ranges so widely, a look back over the third volume’s subject matter
brings astonishment: The grand themes of the first volume – population, food,
 preface and acknowledgements xiii

clothing, technology – have almost entirely disappeared! . . . Should we have

expected anything else from a man of Braudel’s temper? He approaches a
problem by enumerating its elements; fondling its ironies, contradictions, and
complexities; confronting the various theories scholars have proposed; and
giving each theory its historical due. The sum of all theories is, alas, no
theory. . . . If Braudel could not bring off the coup, who could? Perhaps
someone else will succeed in writing a “total history” that accounts for the
entire development of capitalism and the full growth of the European state
system. At least for the time being, we are better off treating Braudel’s giant
essay as a source of inspiration rather than a model of analysis. Except with
a Braudel lending it extra power, a vessel so large and complex seems destined
to sink before it reaches the far shore. (Tilly 1984: 70–1, 73–4)

Tilly’s recommendation is that we deal with more manageable units of

analysis than entire world systems. The more manageable units he prefers
are the components of particular world systems, such as networks of
coercion that cluster in states, and networks of exchange that cluster in
regional modes of production. By systematically comparing these compo–
nents, we may be able “to fix accounts of specific structures and processes
within particular world systems to historically grounded generalizations
concerning those world systems” (Tilly 1984: 63, 74).
In this book I have sought another way out of the difficulties involved
in accounting for the full development of world capitalism and of the
modern interstate system. Instead of jumping off Braudel’s vessel of
world historical analysis, I stayed on it to do the kinds of thing that were
not in the captain’s intellectual temperament to do but were within the
reach of my weaker eyes and shakier legs. I let Braudel plow for me the
high seas of world historical fact, and chose for myself the smaller task
of processing his overabundant supply of conjectures and interpretations
into an economical, consistent, and plausible explanation of the rise and
full expansion of the capitalist world system.
It so happens that Braudel’s notion of financial expansions as closing
phases of major capitalist developments has enabled me to break down
the entire lifetime of the capitalist world system (Braudel’s longue durée)
into more manageable units of analysis, which I have called systemic
cycles of accumulation. Although I have named these cycles after
particular components of the system (Genoa, Holland, Britain, and the
United States), the cycles themselves refer to the system as a whole and
not to its components. What is compared in this book are the structures
and processes of the capitalist world system as a whole at different stages
of its development. Our focus on the strategies and structures of Genoese,
Dutch, British, and US governmental and business agencies is due
exclusively to their successive centrality in the formation of these stages.
This is admittedly a very narrow focus. As I explain in the Introduction,
xiv the long twentieth century

systemic cycles of accumulation are processes of the “commanding heights”

of the capitalist world-economy – Braudel’s “real home of capitalism.”
Thanks to this narrow focus, I have been able to add to Braudel’s survey
of world capitalism some logical consistency and some extra mileage –
the two centuries that separate us from 1800, where Braudel ended his
journey. But the narrowing of the focus also has great costs. Class struggle
and the polarization of the world-economy in core and peripheral locales
– both of which played a prominent role in my original conception of
the long twentieth century – have almost completely dropped out of the
picture.
Many readers will be puzzled or even shocked by these and other
omissions. All I can tell them is that the construction presented here is
only one of several equally valid, though not necessarily equally relevant,
accounts of the long twentieth century. I have presented elsewhere an
interpretation of the long twentieth century which focuses on class
struggle and core-periphery relations (see Arrighi 1990b). Having
completed this book, there are many new insights that I would like to
add to that earlier interpretation. Nevertheless, there are very few things
that I would change. As far as I can tell, that account still stands from its
own angle of vision. But the account presented in this book, as indicated
by its subtitle, is the more relevant to an understanding of the relationship
between money and power in the making of our times.
In order to bring my leaner version of Braudel’s vessel to the far shores
of the late twentieth century, I had to vow to keep out of the debates and
polemics that raged in the islands of specialized knowledge that I visited
and raided. Like Arno Mayer, “I freely admit to being an ardent ‘lumper’
and master builder rather than an avid ‘splitter’ and wrecker.” And like
him, all I ask is “ ‘a patient hearing’ and that [the] book be ‘taken and
judged as a whole’ and not only in its discrete parts” (Mayer, 1981: ×).
The idea that I should write a book about the long twentieth century
was not mine but Perry Anderson’s. After a heated discussion about one
of the several long papers that I had written on the world economic crisis
of the 1970s, he convinced me, as long ago as 1981, that only a full-
length book was an adequate medium for the kind of construction I had
in mind. He then kept a watchful eye on my wanderings through the
centuries, always giving good advice on what to do and not to do.
If Perry Anderson is the main culprit for my involvement in this
overambitious project, Immanuel Wallerstein is the main culprit for
making the project even more ambitious than it originally was. In
lengthening the time horizon of the investigation to encompass Braudel’s
longue durée, I was in fact following in his footsteps. His insistence
in our daily work at the Fernand Braudel Center that the trends and
conjunctures of my long twentieth century might reflect structures
 preface and acknowledgements xv

and processes that had been in place since the sixteenth century were
sufficiently unsettling to make me check the validity of the claim. As I
checked, I saw different things than he had; and even when I saw the
same things, I gave them a different treatment and application than
he has been doing in The Modern World-System. But in insisting that
the longue durée of historical capitalism was the relevant time frame
for the kind of construction I had in mind, he was absolutely right.
Without his intellectual stimulus and provocation, I would not even
have thought of writing this book in the way I did.
Between conceiving a book like this and actually writing it, there is
a gulf that I would never have bridged were it not for the exceptional
community of graduate students with whom I have been fortunate to
work during my fifteen years at SUNY-Binghamton. Knowingly or
unknowingly, the members of this community have provided me with
most of the questions and many of the answers that constitute the
substance of this work. Collectively, they are the giant on whose shoulders
I have travelled, and to them the book is rightfully dedicated.
As mastermind of the Sociology Graduate Program at SUNY-
Binghamton, Terence Hopkins is largely responsible for turning
Binghamton into the only place where I could have written this book. He
is also responsible for anything that is valuable in the methodology I have
used. As the harshest of my critics and the strongest of my supporters,
Beverly Silver has played a central role in the realization of this work.
Without her intellectual guidance, I would have gone astray; without her
moral support, I would have settled for far less than I eventually did.
An earlier version of chapter 1 was presented at the Second ESRC
Conference on Structural Change in the West held at Emmanuel College,
Cambridge, in September 1989, and was subsequently published in
Review (Summer 1990) and reprinted in Gill (1993). Sections of chapters
2 and 3 were presented at the Third ESRC Conference on the same topic
held at Emmanuel College in September 1990. Participation in these two
conferences, as well as in the preceding one held in September 1988,
added steam to my vessel at a time when it might otherwise have sunk.
I am very grateful to Fred Halliday and Michael Mann for inviting me
to the entire series of ESRC conferences, to John Hobson for organizing
them effectively, and to all the other participants for the stimulating
discussions we had.
Perry Anderson, Gopal Balakrishnan, Robin Blackburn, Terence
Hopkins, Reşat Kasaba, Ravi Palat, Thomas Reifer, Beverly Silver, and
Immanuel Wallerstein read and commented on the manuscript before
the final round of revisions. Their different specializations and intellectual
perspectives helped me enormously in fixing what could be fixed in the
product of this hazardous enterprise. Thomas Reifer also helped me in
xvi the long twentieth century

a last-minute check of references and quotations. With greater reason

than is customary, I take full responsibility for what remains unfixed and
unchecked.
Finally, a special thanks goes to my son Andrea. When I began this
work, he was about to enter high school. By the time I was writing the last
draft, he had completed his tesi di laurea in philosophy at the Universita’
Statale in Milan. Throughout, he was truly the best of sons. But as this
work was drawing to a close, he had become also an invaluable editorial
adviser. If the book finds any readership outside the historical and social
science professions, I owe it largely to him.

giovanni arrighi
March 1994
 Introduction

Over the last quarter of a century something fundamental seems to have

changed in the way in which capitalism works. In the 1970s, many spoke
of crisis. In the 1980s, most spoke of restructuring and reorganization. In
the 1990s, we are no longer sure that the crisis of the 1970s was ever really
resolved and the view has begun to spread that capitalist history might be
at a decisive turning point.
Our thesis is that capitalist history is indeed in the midst of a
decisive turning point, but that the situation is not as unprecedented
as it may appear at first sight. Long periods of crisis, restructuring and
reorganization, in short, of discontinuous change, have been far more
typical of the history of the capitalist world-economy than those brief
moments of generalized expansion along a definite developmental path
like the one that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. In the past, these long
periods of discontinuous change ended in a reconstitution of the capitalist
world-economy on new and enlarged foundations. Our investigation is
aimed primarily at identifying the systemic conditions under which a new
reconstitution of this kind may occur and, if it does occur, what it may
look like.
Changes since about 1970 in the way capitalism functions locally
and globally have been widely noted; though the precise nature of
these changes is still a matter of some debate. But that they amount
to something fundamental is the common theme of a rapidly growing
literature.
There have been changes in the spatial configuration of processes of
capital accumulation. In the 1970s the predominant tendency appeared
to be towards a relocation of processes of capital accumulation from
high-income to low-income countries and regions (Fröbel, Heinrichs,
and Kreye 1980; Bluestone and Harrison 1982; Massey 1984;
Walton 1985). In the 1980s, in contrast, the predominant tendency
appeared to be towards the recentralization of capital in high-income
countries and regions (Gordon 1988). But whatever the direction

1
2 the long twentieth century

of the movement, the tendency since 1970 has been towards greater
geographical mobility of capital (Sassen 1988; Scott 1988; Storper
and Walker 1989).
This has been closely associated with changes in the organization
of processes of production and exchange. Some authors have claimed
that the crisis of “Fordist” mass production – based on systems of
specialized machines, operating within the organizational domains of
vertically integrated, bureaucratically managed, giant corporations –
has created unique opportunities for a revival of systems of “flexible
specialization” – based on small-batch craft production, carried out
in small and medium-sized business units coordinated by market-like
processes of exchange (Piore and Sable 1984; Sable and Zeitlin 1985;
Hirst and Zeitlin 1991). Others have focused on the legal regulation of
income-generating activities and have noted how the ever-increasing
“formalization” of economic life – that is, the proliferation of legal
constraints on the organization of processes of production and exchange
– has called forth the opposite tendency towards “informalization” –
that is, a proliferation of income-generating activities that bypass legal
regulation through one kind or another of “personal” or “familial”
entrepreneurialism (Lomnitz 1988; Portes, Castells, and Benton 1989;
Feige 1990; Portes 1994).
Partly overlapping this literature, numerous studies have followed in
the footsteps of the French “regulation school” and have interpreted
current changes in the mode of operation of capitalism as a structural
crisis of what they call the Fordist–Keynesian “regime of accumulation”
(for a survey, see Boyer 1990; Jessop 1990; Tickell and Peck 1992). This
regime is conceptualized as constituting a particular phase of capitalist
development characterized by investments in fixed capital that create the
potential for regular increases in productivity and mass consumption.
For this potential to be realized, adequate governmental policies and
actions, social institutions, norms and habits of behavior (the “mode of
regulation”) were required. “Keynesianism” is described as the mode of
regulation that enabled the emergent Fordist regime fully to realize its
potential. And this in turn is conceived of as the underlying cause of
the crisis of the 1970s (Aglietta 1979b; De Vroey 1984; Lipietz 1987;
1988).
By and large, “regulationists” are agnostic as to what the successor
of Fordism–Keynesianism might be, or indeed as to whether there
will ever be another regime of accumulation with an appropriate
mode of regulation. In a similar vein, but using a different conceptual
apparatus, Claus Offe (1985) and, more explicitly, Scott Lash and
John Urry (1987) have spoken of the end of “organized capitalism” and
of the emergence of “disorganized capitalism.” The central feature of
 introduction 3

“organized capitalism” – the administration and conscious regulation

of national economies by managerial hierarchies and government
officials – is seen as being jeopardized by an increasing spatial and
functional deconcentration and decentralization of corporate powers,
which leaves processes of capital accumulation in a state of seemingly
irremediable “disorganization.”
Taking issue with this emphasis on the disintegration rather than
coherence of contemporary capitalism, David Harvey (1989) suggests
that, in fact, capitalism may be in the midst of a “historical transition”
from Fordism–Keynesianism to a new regime of accumulation,
which he tentatively calls “flexible accumulation.” Between 1965 and
1973, he argues, the difficulties met by Fordism and Keynesianism
in containing the inherent contradictions of capitalism became more
and more apparent: “On the surface, these difficulties could best
be captured by one word: rigidity.” There were problems with the
rigidity of long-term and large-scale investments in mass production
systems, with the rigidity of regulated labor markets and contracts,
and with the rigidity of state commitments to entitlement and
defense programs.

Behind all these specific rigidities lay a rather unwieldy and seemingly
fixed configuration of political power and reciprocal relations that bound
big labor, big capital, and big government into what increasingly appeared
as a dysfunctional embrace of such narrowly defined vested interests as to
undermine rather than secure capital accumulation. (Harvey 1989: 142)

The US and British governments’ attempt to maintain the

momentum of the post-war economic boom through an extraordinarily
loose monetary policy met with some success in the late 1960s but
backfired in the early 1970s. Rigidities increased further, real growth
ceased, inflationary tendencies got out of hand, and the system of
fixed exchange rates, which had sustained and regulated the post-war
expansion, collapsed. Since that time, all states have been at the mercy
of financial discipline, either through the effects of capital flight or
by direct institutional pressures. “There had, of course, always been a
delicate balance between financial and state powers under capitalism,
but the breakdown of Fordism–Keynesianism evidently meant a shift
towards the empowerment of finance capital vis-à-vis the nation state”
(Harvey 1989: 145, 168).
This shift, in turn, has led to an “explosion in new financial
instruments and markets, coupled with the rise of highly sophisticated
systems of financial coordination on a global scale.” It is this
“extraordinary efflorescence and transformation in financial markets”
4 the long twentieth century

that Harvey, not without hesitation, takes as the real novelty of

capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s and the key feature of the emerging
regime of “flexible accumulation.” The spatial reshuffling of processes
of production and accumulation, the resurgence of craft production
and of personal/familial business networks, the spread of market-like
coordinations at the expense of corporate and governmental planning
– all, in Harvey’s view, are different facets of the passage to the new
regime of flexible accumulation. However, he is inclined to see them as
expressions of the search for financial solutions to the crisis tendencies
of capitalism (Harvey 1989: 191–4).
Harvey is fully aware of the difficulties involved in theorizing the
transition to flexible accumulation – assuming that that is what capitalism
is actually experiencing – and points to several “theoretical dilemmas.”

Can we grasp the logic, if not the necessity, of the transition? To what
degree do past and present theoretical formulations of the dynamics of
capitalism have to be modified in the light of the radical reorganizations
and restructurings taking place in both the productive forces and social
relations? And can we represent the current regime sufficiently well to
get some grip on the probable course and implications of what appears
to be an ongoing revolution? The transition from Fordism to flexible
accumulation has . . . posed serious difficulties for theories of any sort.
. . . The only general point of agreement is that something significant
has changed in the way capitalism has been working since about 1970.
(Harvey 1989: 173)

The questions that have informed this study are similar to Harvey’s.
But the answers are sought in an investigation of current tendencies in
the light of patterns of recurrence and evolution, which span the entire
lifetime of historical capitalism as a world system. Once we stretch the
space–time horizon of our observations and theoretical conjectures in
this way, tendencies that seemed novel and unpredictable begin to look
familiar.
More specifically, the starting point of our investigation has been
Fernand Braudel’s contention that the essential feature of historical
capitalism over its longue durée – that is, over its entire lifetime –
has been the “flexibility” and “eclecticism” of capital rather than the
concrete forms assumed by the latter at different places and at different
times:

Let me emphasize the quality that seems to me to be an essential feature

of the general history of capitalism: its unlimited flexibility, its capacity for
change and adaptation. If there is, as I believe, a certain unity in capitalism,
from thirteenth-century Italy to the present-day West, it is here above all that
Other documents randomly have
different content
for “the splendid services they had rendered” and was “much
impressed with their soldier-like bearing.”
Major-General Horne’s special farewell order ran as follows:
18th August 1915.
The 4th (Guards) Brigade leaves the Second Division to-morrow. The G.O.C.
speaks not only for himself, but for every officer, non-commissioned officer, and
man of the Division when he expresses sorrow that certain changes in
organisation have rendered necessary the severance of ties of comradeship
commenced in peace and cemented by war.
For the past year, by gallantry, devotion to duty, and sacrifice in battles and
in the trenches the Brigade has maintained the high traditions of His Majesty’s
Guards and equally by thorough performance of duties, strict discipline, and
the exhibition of many soldier-like qualities, has set an example of smartness
which has tended to raise the standard and elevate the morale of all with
whom it has been associated.
Major-General Horne parts from Brigadier-General Feilding, the officers, non-
commissioned officers, and men of the 4th (Guards) Brigade with lively regret
—he thanks them for their loyal support, and he wishes them good fortune in
the future.
(Sd.) J. W. Robinson,
Lieut.-Colonel,
A.A. & Q.M.G. Second Division.

General Haig on the 20th August handed the following Special

Order of the Day to the Brigade Commander:
Headquarters 1st Army,
20th August 1915.
The 4th (Guards) Brigade leaves my command to-day after over a year of
active service in the field. During that time the Brigade has taken part in
military operations of the most diverse kind and under very varied conditions of
country and weather, and throughout all ranks have displayed the greatest
fortitude, tenacity, and resolution.
I desire to place on record my high appreciation of the services rendered by
the Brigade and my grateful thanks for the devoted assistance which one and
all have given me during a year of strenuous work.
(Sd.) D. Haig,
General Commanding 1st Army.
 And the reward of their confused and unclean work among the
craters and the tunnels of the past weeks came in the Commander-
in-Chief’s announcement:
Guards Division,
The Commander-in-Chief has intimated that he has read with great interest
and satisfaction the reports of the mining operations and crater fighting which
have taken place in the Second Division Area during the last two months.
He desires that his high appreciation of the good work performed be
conveyed to the troops, especially to the 170th and 176th Tunnelling Cos. R.E.,
the 2nd Battalion Irish Guards, the 1st Battalion K.R.R.C., and the 2nd Battalion
South Staffordshire Regiment.
The G.O.C. Second Division has great pleasure in forwarding this
announcement.
(Sd.) H. P. Horne,
Major-General,
Commanding Second Division.
Second Division,
21.8.15.

They lay at Eperlecques for a day or two on their way to

Thiembronne, a hot nineteen-mile march during which only five men
fell out. It was at St. Pierre between Thiembronne and Acquin that
they met and dined with the 2nd Battalion of the Regiment which
had landed in France on the 18th August. There are few records of
this historic meeting; for the youth and the strength that gathered
by the cookers in that open sunlit field by St. Pierre has been several
times wiped out and replaced. The two battalions conferred
together, by rank and by age, on the methods and devices of the
enemy; the veterans of the First enlightening the new hands of the
Second with tales that could lose nothing in the telling, mixed with
practical advice of the most grim. The First promptly christened the
Second “The Irish Landsturm,” and a young officer, who later rose to
eminent heights and command of the 2nd Battalion sat upon a table
under some trees, and delighted the world with joyous songs upon a
concertina and a mouth-organ. Then they parted.
 Loos
The next three weeks were spent by the 1st Battalion at or near
Thiembronne in training for the great battle to come. They were
instructed in march-discipline, infantry attack, extended-order drill
and field-training, attacks on villages (Drionville was one of them
selected and the French villagers attended the field-day in great
numbers) as well as in bussing and debussing against time into
motor-buses which were then beginning to be moderately plentiful.
Regimental sports were not forgotten—they were a great success
and an amusement more or less comprehensible to the people of
Thiembronne—and, since the whole world was aware that a
combined attack would be made shortly by the English and French
armies, the officers of the Guards Brigade were duly informed by
Lieutenant-General Haking, commanding the Eleventh Army Corps,
to which the Guards Division belonged, that such, indeed, was the
case.
The domestic concerns of the Battalion during this pause include
the facts that 2nd Lieutenant Dames-Longsworth from the 2nd
Middlesex was attached on the 9th September “prior to transfer” to
the Irish Guards; Captain C. D. Wynter, Lieutenant F. H. Witts, and
2nd Lieutenant W. B. Stevens were transferred (September 10, from
the 1st to the 2nd Battalion) and 2nd Lieutenant T. K. Walker and T.
H. Langrishe transferred on the same day from the 2nd to the 1st,
while Orderly-Room Quartermaster-Sergeant J. Halligan, of whom
later, was gazetted a 2nd Lieutenant to the Leinster Regiment.
Captain L. R. Hargreaves was on the 13th “permitted to wear the
badge of Captain pending his temporary promotion to that rank
being announced in the London Gazette,” and the C. O., Major G. H.
C. Madden, was on the 6th September gazetted a temporary
Lieutenant-Colonel. These were the first grants of temporary rank in
the Battalion.
On the 18th September the C.O.’s of all the battalions in the
Guards Division motored to the Béthune district, where a
reconnaissance was made “from convenient observation-posts” of
the country between Cuinchy and Loos that they might judge the
weight of the task before them.
It was a jagged, scarred, and mutilated sweep of mining-villages,
factories, quarries, slag-dumps, pit-heads, chalk-pits, and railway
embankments—all the plant of an elaborate mechanical civilization
connected above ground and below by every means that ingenuity
and labour could devise to the uses of war. The ground was
trenched and tunnelled with cemented and floored works of
terrifying permanency that linked together fortified redoubts,
observation-posts, concealed batteries, rallying-points, and
impregnable shelters for waiting reserves. So it ran along our front
from Grenay north of the plateau of Notre Dame de Lorette, where
two huge slag-heaps known as the Double Crassier bristled with
machine-guns, across the bare interlude of crop land between Loos
and Hulluch, where a high German redoubt crowned the slopes to
the village of Haisnes with the low and dangerous Hohenzollern
redoubt south of it. Triple lines of barbed wire protected a system of
triple trenches, concrete-faced, holding dug-outs twenty feet deep,
with lifts for machine-guns which could appear and disappear in
emplacements of concrete over iron rails; and the observation-posts
were capped with steel cupolas. In the background ample railways
and a multitude of roads lay ready to launch fresh troops to any
point that might by any chance be forced in the face of these
obstacles.
Our armies were brought up for the most part on their own feet
and lay in trenches not in the least concreted; nor were our roads to
the front wholly equal to the demands on them. The assaulting
troops were the First and Fourth Army Corps (less some troops
detached to make a feint at Festubert and Cuinchy) disposed in the
trenches south from the line of the Béthune-La Bassée Canal to the
Vermelles-Hulluch road. Their work, as laid down, was to storm
Auchy-La Bassée, Haisnes, capture the Hohenzollern redoubt to the
south-west of it and the immensely fortified Mine-head Pit 8 (with
which it was connected), the Hulluch quarries, equally fortified, and
the long strip of wood beside them, and the village of Cité St. Elie
between Hulluch and Haisnes. South of the Vermelles-Hulluch road,
the Fourth Army Corps was to occupy the high ground between Loos
and Lens, including the redoubt on Hill 69; all the town of Loos,
which was a museum of veiled deaths, the Double Crassier, the
Chalk-Pit, the redoubt on Hill 70 on the Loos-Haisnes road, and the
village of Cité St. Auguste. After which, doubtless, the way would be
open to victory. The Eleventh Army Corps formed the main infantry
reserve and included the newly formed Guards Division, the Twenty-
first and Twenty-fourth Divisions of the New Army and the Twenty-
eighth. The Twenty-first and Twenty-fourth were brought up
between Beuvry and Nœux-les-Mines; the Twenty-eighth to Bailleul,
while the Guards Division lay in reserve near Lillers, ten miles north-
west or so from Souchez; the Third Cavalry Division near Sains-en-
Gohelle, and the British Cavalry Corps at Bailleul-les-Pernes ten miles
west of Nœux-les-Mines, in attendance on the expected break-
through.
On the 21st September the Battalion was inspected by Lord
Kitchener at Avroult, on the St. Omer road—the first time it was ever
paraded before its Colonel-in-chief—who in a few brief words
recalled what it had already done in the war and hinted at what lay
before it. Lord Cavan commanding the Guards Division, in wishing
the men God-speed on the eve of “the greatest battle in the world’s
history,” reminded them that the fate of future generations hung on
the issue and that great things were expected of the Guards
Division. They knew it well enough.
By a piece of ill-luck, that might have been taken as an omen, the
day before they moved from Thiembronne to the front, a bombing
accident at practice caused the death of Lance-Sergeant R.
Matthews and three men, which few casualties, on the eve of tens of
thousands to come, were due subjects of a court of inquiry and a full
report to Headquarters. Then they marched by Capelle-sur-Lys to
Nedon in mist and gathering rain as the autumn weather broke on
the 24th, and heard the roar of what seemed continuous
bombardment from Vimy to La Bassée. But it was at dawn on the
25th September that the serious work of the heavy guns began,
while the Division crawled in pouring rain along congested roads
from Nedon to Nœux-les-Mines. All they could see of the battle-front
was veiled in clouds of gas and the screens of covering smoke
through which our attacks had been launched after two hours of
preliminary bombardment. Our troops there found, as chance and
accident decreed, either broken wire and half-obliterated trenches
easy to overpass for a few hundred yards till they came to the uncut
stuff before which the men perished as their likes had done on like
fields. So it happened that day to the 6th Brigade of the First
Division north of La Bassée, and the 19th Brigade south of it; to the
28th Brigade of the Ninth Division by the Hohenzollern redoubt and
Pit 8. These all met wire uncut before trenches untouched, and were
slaughtered. The 26th Brigade of the Ninth Division broke through at
a heavy cost as far as Pit 8, and, for the moment, as far as the edge
of the village of Haisnes. The Seventh Division, working between the
Ninth Division and the road from Vermelles to Hulluch, had better
fortune. They penetrated as far as the edge of Hulluch village, but
were driven back, ere the day’s end, to the quarries a thousand
yards in the rear. One brigade, the 1st of the First Division of the
Fourth Army on their right, had also penetrated as far as the
outskirts of Hulluch. Its 2nd Brigade was hung up in barbed wire
near Lone Tree to the southward, which check again exposed the
left flank of the next (Fifteenth Highland) Division as that (44th,
45th, and 46th Brigades) made its way into Loos, carried Hill 70, the
Chalk Pit, and Pit 14. The Forty-seventh Division on the extreme
right of the British line at its junction with the French Tenth Army
had to be used mainly as a defensive flank to the operation, since
the French attack, which should have timed with ours, did not
develop till six hours after our troops had got away, and was then
limited to Souchez and the Vimy Ridge.
At noon on the 25th September the position stood thus: The First
Army Corps held up between the Béthune-La Bassée Canal and the
Hohenzollern redoubt; the Seventh Division hard pressed among the
quarries and houses by Hulluch; the Ninth in little better case as
regarded Pit 8 and the redoubt itself; the Highland Division pushed
forward in the right centre holding on precariously in the shambles
round Loos and being already forced back for lack of supports.
All along the line the attack had spent itself among uncut wire and
unsubdued machine-gun positions. There were no more troops to
follow at once on the heels of the first, nor was there time to dig in
before the counter-attacks were delivered by the Germans, to whom
every minute of delay meant the certainty of more available reserves
fresh from the rail. A little after noon their pressure began to take
effect, and ground won during the first rush of the advance was
blasted out of our possession by gun-fire, bombing, and floods of
enemy troops arriving throughout the night.
Both sides were now bringing up reserves: but ours seem to have
arrived somewhat more slowly than the Germans’.
The Guards Division had come up on foot as quickly as the traffic
on the roads allowed, and by the morning of the 26th the 1st
Brigade (2nd Grenadiers, 2nd and 3rd Coldstream, and 1st Irish)
were marched to Sailly-Labourse. The weather had improved,
though the ground was heavy enough. Loos still remained to us,
Hulluch was untaken. The enemy were well established on Hill 70
and had driven us out of Pit 14 and the Chalk Pit quarry on the Lens-
La Bassée road which had been won on the previous day. It was this
sector of the line to which the 2nd and 3rd Brigades of the Guards
Division were directed. The local reserves (21st and 24th Divisions)
had been used up, and as the Brigade took over the ground were
retiring directly through them. The 1st Guards Brigade was
employed in the work of holding the ground to the left, or north, of
the other two brigades. Their own left lay next what remained of the
Seventh Division after the furious wastage of the past two days.
On the afternoon of the 26th September the 2nd and 3rd
Coldstream, with the 2nd Grenadiers in support, occupied some
trenches in a waste of cut-up ground east of a line of captured
German trenches opposite Hulluch. The 1st Irish Guards lay in
trenches close to the wrecked water-tower of the village of
Vermelles, while the confused and irregular attacks and counter-
attacks broke out along the line, slackened and were renewed again
beneath the vault of the overhead clamour built by the passage of
countless shells.
The field of battle presented an extraordinary effect of dispersion
and detachment. Gas, smoke, and the continuous splash and sparkle
of bombs marked where the lines were in actual touch, but behind
and outside this inferno stretched a desolation of emptiness, peopled
with single figures “walking about all over the place,” as one
observer wrote, with dead and wounded on the ground, and
casualties being slowly conveyed to dressing-stations—every one
apparently unconcerned beneath shell-fire, which in old-time battles
would have been reckoned heavy, but which here, by comparison,
was peace.
A premature burst of one of our own shells wounded four men of
the Battalion’s machine-gun group as it was moving along the
Hulluch road, but there were no other casualties reported, and on
Sunday 27th, while the village of Vermelles was being heavily
shelled, No. 2 and half of No. 3 Company were sent forward to fetch
off what wounded lay immediately in front of them on the battle-
field. There was need. Throughout that long Sunday of “clearing up”
at a slow pace under scattered fire, the casualties were but eleven in
all—2nd Lieutenant Grayling-Major, slightly wounded, one man killed
and nine wounded. Three thousand yards to the left their 2nd
Battalion, which, with the 2nd and 3rd Guards Brigades, had been
set to recapture Pit 14 and Chalk-Pit Wood, lost that evening eight
officers and over three hundred men killed and wounded. Officer-
losses had been very heavy, and orders were issued, none too soon,
to keep a reserve of them, specially in the junior ranks. Lieutenants
Yerburgh and Rankin, with 2nd Lieutenants Law, Langrishe, and
Walker, were thus sent back to the first-line Transport to be saved
for contingencies. 2nd Lieutenant Christie and twenty men from the
base joined on the same day. The Battalion lay at that time behind
the remnants of the 20th Brigade of the Seventh Division, whose
Brigadier, Colonel the Hon. J. Trefusis, had been their old C.O. His
brigade, which had suffered between two and three thousand
casualties, was in no shape for further fighting, but was hanging on
in expectation of relief, if possible, from the mixed duties of trying to
establish a line and sending out parties to assist in repelling the
nearest counter-attack. Fighting continued everywhere, especially on
the left of the line, and heavy rain added to the general misery.
By the 28th September we might have gained on an average three
thousand yards on a front of between six and seven thousand, but
there was no certainty that we could hold it, and the front was alive
with reports—some true, others false—that the enemy had captured
a line of trench here, broken through there, or was massing in force
elsewhere. As a matter of fact, the worst of the German attacks had
spent themselves, and both sides were, through their own
difficulties, beginning to break off their main engagements for the
bitter localised fightings that go to the making of a new front.
In rain, chalky slime, and deep discomfort, after utter exhaustion,
the broken battalions were comparing notes of news and
imperturbably renewing their social life. Brigadier-General Trefusis
slips, or wades, through rain and mud to lunch with his old battalion
a few hundred yards away, and one learns indirectly what cheer and
comfort his presence brings. Then he goes on with the remnants of
his shattered brigade, to take over fresh work on a quieter part of
the line and en route “to get his hair cut.”
The Battalion, after (Sept. 29) another day’s soaking in Vermelles
trenches, relieved the 3rd Brigade, First Division, in front-line
trenches just west of Hulluch.
The ground by Le Rutoire farm and Bois Carré between the
battered German trenches was a sea of shell craters and wreckage,
scorched with fires of every sort which had swept away all
landmarks. Lone Tree, a general rendezvous and clearing-station for
that sector of the line and a registered mark for enemy guns, was
the spot where their guides met them in the rainy, windy darkness.
The relief took four hours and cost Drill-Sergeant Corry, another
N.C.O., and a private wounded. All four company commanders went
ahead some hours before to acquaint themselves with the
impassable trenches, the battalions being brought on, in artillery
formation, by the Adjutant.
On the 30th September, the English losses having brought our
efforts to a standstill, the troops of the Ninth French Army Corps
began to take over the trenches defending Loos and running out of
the ruins of that town to Hill 70. Foch and D’Untal in their fighting
since the 27th had driven, at a price, the Germans out of Souchez,
and some deceptive progress had been made by the Tenth French
Army Corps up the Vimy heights to the right of the English line. In
all, our armies had manufactured a salient, some five miles wide
across the bow of it, running from Cuinchy Post, the Hohenzollern
redoubt, the Hulluch quarries, the edge of Hill 70, the south of Loos,
and thence doubling back to Grenay. On the other hand, the enemy
had under-driven a section south of this at the junction of the Allied
forces running through Lens, Liévin, Angres by Givenchy-en-Gohelle
over the Vimy heights to the Scarpe below Arras. There may, even
on the 30th, have remained some hope on our part of “breaking
through” into the plain of the Scheldt, with its chance of open
warfare to follow. The enemy, however, had no intention of allowing
us any freedom of movement which localised attacks on his part
could limit and hold till such time as his reserves might get in a
counter-attack strong enough to regain all the few poor hundreds of
yards which we had shelled, bombed, and bayoneted out of his
front. The fighting was specially severe that day among the rabbit-
warrens of trenches by the Hohenzollern redoubt. Sections of
trenches were lost and won back or wiped out by gun-fire all along a
front where, for one instance of recorded heroism among the
confusion of bombs and barricades, there were hundreds unrecorded
as the spouting earth closed over and hid all after-knowledge of the
very site of the agony.
A section of trench held by the Scots Fusiliers on the immediate
left of the Irish Guards was attacked and a hundred yards or so of it
were captured, but the Battalion was not called upon to lend a hand.
It lay under heavy shell and sniping fire in the wet, till it was time to
exchange the comparative security of a wet open drain for the
unsheltered horrors of a relief which, beginning in the dusk at six,
was not completed till close on two in the morning. The last
company reached their miserable billets at Mazingarbe, some three
miles’ away across a well-searched back-area at 6 a. m. One N.C.O.
was killed and ten N.C.O.’s and men were wounded.
They spent the next three days in the battered suburbs of
Mazingarbe while the Twelfth Division took over the Guards’ line and
the Ninth French Army Corps relieved the British troops who were
holding the south face of the Cuinchy-Hulluch-Grenay salient. The
1st Battalion itself was now drawn upon to meet the demands of the
2nd Battalion for officers to make good losses in their action of the
27th. Five officers, at least, were badly needed, but no more than
four could be spared—Captain J. S. N. FitzGerald, as Adjutant,
Lieutenant R. Rankin, Lieutenant H. Montgomery, who had only
arrived with a draft on the 1st October, and 2nd Lieutenant
Langrishe. Officers were a scarce commodity; for, though there was
a momentary lull, there had been heavy bomb and trench work by
the Twenty-eighth Division all round the disputed Hohenzollern
redoubt which was falling piece by piece into the hands of the
enemy, and counter-attacks were expected all along the uncertain
line.

The Hohenzollern Trenches

On October 3 the Guards Division relieved the Twenty-eighth
round the Hohenzollern and the Hulluch quarries. The 3rd Brigade of
the Division was assigned as much of the works round the
Hohenzollern as yet remained to us; the 1st Brigade lay on their
right linking on to the First Division which had relieved the Twelfth
on the right of the Guards Division. The 2nd Guards Brigade was in
reserve at Vermelles. The 1st Battalion acted as reserve to its own,
the 1st, Brigade, and moving from Mazingarbe on the afternoon of
the 3rd bivouacked in misery to the west of the railway line just
outside Vermelles. The 2nd Grenadiers, in trenches which had
formed part of the old British front line north-east of the Chapel of
Notre Dame de Consolation, supported the 2nd and 3rd Coldstream
who held the firing-line in a mass of unsurveyed and unknown
German trenches running from St. Elie Avenue, a notorious and most
dismal communication-trench, northwards towards the Hohenzollern
redoubt, one face of which generously enfiladed our line at all times.
The whole was a wilderness of muck and death, reached through
three thousand yards of foul gutters, impeded by loops and knots of
old telephone cables, whose sides bulged in the wet, and where,
with the best care in the world, reliefs could go piteously astray and
isolated parties find themselves plodding, blind and helpless, into the
enemy’s arms.
Opinions naturally differ as to which was the least attractive period
of the war for the Battalion, but there was a general feeling that,
setting aside the cruel wet of The Salient and the complicated barren
miseries of the Somme, the times after Loos round the Hohenzollern
Redoubt and in the Laventie sector were the worst. Men and officers
had counted on getting forward to open country at last, and the
return to redoubled trench-work and its fatigues was no comfort to
them. But the work had to be done, and the notice in the Diary that
they were “responsible for improving and cleaning up the trenches
as far as the support battalions”—which meant as far as they could
get forward—implied unbroken labour in the chalky ground, varied
by carrying up supplies, bombs, and small-arm ammunition to the
front line. There were five bombing posts in their sector of the front
with as many sap-heads, all to be guarded. Most of the trenches
needed deepening, and any work in the open was at the risk of a
continuous stream of bullets from the Hohenzollern’s machine-guns.
High explosives and a few gas-shells by day, aerial torpedoes by
night, and sniping all round the clock, made the accompaniment to
their life for the nine days that they held the line.
Here is the bare record. On the 6th October, two men killed and
three wounded, while strengthening parapets. On the 7th,
Lieutenant Heard and three men with him wounded, while
superintending work in the open within range of the spiteful
Hohenzollern. On the 8th, six hours’ unbroken bombardment,
culminating, so far as the Battalion knew, in an attack on the 2nd
Coldstream whom they were supporting and the 3rd Grenadiers on
their left. The Grenadiers, most of their bombers killed, borrowed
No. 1 Company’s bombers, who “did good work,” while No. 1
Company itself formed a flank to defend the left of the Brigade in
case the Germans broke through, as for a time seemed possible.
Both Grenadiers and Coldstream ran out of bombs and ammunition
which the Battalion sent up throughout the evening until it was
reported that “all was normal again” and that the Germans had
everywhere been repulsed with heavy loss. The Battalion then
carried up rations to the Coldstream and spent the rest of the night
repairing blown-in ammunition trenches. They had had no time to
speculate or ask questions, and not till long afterwards did they
realise that the blast of a great battle had passed over them; that
the Germans had counter-attacked with picked battalions all along
the line of the Cuinchy-Hulluch-Grenay Salient and that their dead
lay in thousands on the cut-up ground from Souchez to
Hohenzollern. In modern trench-warfare any attack extending
beyond the range of a combatant’s vision, which runs from fifty
yards to a quarter of a mile, according to the ground and his own
personal distractions, may, for aught he can tell, be either an
engagement of the first class or some local brawl for the details of
which he can search next week’s home papers in vain.
The battalions got through the day with only six men killed, eleven
wounded, and one gassed, and on the 9th, when they were busiest
in the work of repairing wrecked trenches, they were informed that
certain recesses which they had been cutting out in the trenches for
the reception of gas-cylinders would not be required and that they
were to fill them in again. As a veteran of four years’ experience put
it, apropos of this and some other matters: “Men take more notice,
ye’ll understand, of one extra fatigue, than any three fights.”
A few aerial torpedoes which, whether they kill or not, make
unlimited mess, fell during the night, and on the morning of the 10th
October Lieutenant M. V. Gore-Langton—one of the Battalion’s best
and most efficient officers—was shot through the head and killed by
a German sniper while looking for a position for a loop-hole in the
parapet. He was buried six hours later in the British Cemetery at
Vermelles, and the command of his company devolved on Lieutenant
Yerburgh. Our own artillery spent the day in breaking German wire
in front of the Hulluch quarries at long range and a little more than a
hundred yards ahead of our trenches. Several of our shells dropped
short, to the discomfort of the Irish, but the wire was satisfactorily
cut, and two companies kept up bursts of rapid fire during the night
to stay the enemy from repairing it. Only 5 men were killed and 5
wounded from all causes this day.
On the 11th our guns resumed wire-cutting and, besides making it
most unpleasant for our men in the front trenches, put one of our
own machine-guns out of action, but luckily with no loss of life.
The tragedy of the day came later when, just after lunch, a shell
landed in the doorway of Headquarters dug-out, breaking both of
Colonel Madden’s legs, and mortally wounding the Rev. Father John
Gwynne, the Battalion’s R.C. chaplain (Colonel Madden died in
England a few weeks later). The Adjutant, Lord Desmond FitzGerald,
was slightly wounded also. The other two occupants of the dug-out,
Captain Bailie, who had gone through almost precisely the same
experience in the same spot not three days before, and the Medical
Officer, were untouched. It was difficult to get two wounded men
down the trenches to the Headquarters of the supporting battalion,
where they had to be left till dark. And then they were carried back
in the open—or “overland” as the phrase was. Father Gwynne died
next day in hospital at Béthune, and the Battalion lost in him “not
merely the chaplain, but a man unusually beloved.” He had been
with them since November of the previous year. He feared nothing,
despised no one, betrayed no confidence nor used it to his own
advantage; upheld authority, softened asperities, and cheered and
comforted every man within his reach. If there were any blemish in
a character so utterly selfless, it was no more than a tendency,
shared by the servants of his calling, to attach more importance to
the administration of the last rites of his Church to a wounded man
than to the immediate appearance of the medical officer, and to
forget that there are times when Supreme Unction can be a
depressant. Per contra , Absolution at the moment of going over the
top, if given with vigour and good cheer, as he gave it, is a powerful
tonic. At all times the priest’s influence in checking “crime” in a
regiment is very large indeed, and with such priests as the Irish
Guards had the good fortune to possess, almost unbounded.
Colonel Madden was succeeded by Captain Lord Desmond
FitzGerald as commanding officer, and the rest of the day was spent
in suffering a bombardment of aerial torpedoes, very difficult to
locate and not put down by our heavy guns till after dark. Besides
the 3 wounded officers that day 3 men were wounded and, 3 killed.
On the morning of the 13th, after heavy shelling, a bomb attack
on the 2nd Grenadiers developed in the trenches to the right, when
the Battalion brought up and detonated several boxes for their
comrades. Their work further included putting up 120 scaling-ladders
for an attack by the 35th Brigade.
Next day they were relieved by the 7th Norfolks, 35th Brigade of
the North Midland Division of Territorials, and went to rest at
Verquin, five or six miles behind the line. It took them nearly seven
hours to clear the trenches; Colonel Madden, on account of his
wounds, being carried out on a sitting litter; Lord Desmond
FitzGerald, who, as Adjutant, had been wounded when Father
Gwynne had been killed, overdue for hospital with a piece of
shrapnel in his foot, and all ranks utterly done after their nine days’
turn of duty. They laid them down as tired animals lie, while behind
them the whole north front of the Cuinchy-Hulluch Salient broke into
set battle once again.
A series of holding attacks were made all along the line almost
from Ypres to La Bassée to keep the enemy from reinforcing against
the real one on the Hohenzollern redoubt, Fosse 8, the Hulluch
quarries and the heart of the Loos position generally. It was
preceded by bombardments that in some cases cut wire and in some
did not, accompanied by gas and smoke, which affected both sides
equally; it was carried through by men in smoke-helmets, half-
blinding them among blinding accompaniments of fumes and flying
earth, through trenches to which there was no clue, over the wrecks
of streets of miners’ cottages, cellars and underground machine-gun
nests, and round the concreted flanks of unsuspected artillery
emplacements. Among these obstacles, too, it died out with the
dead battalions of Regulars and Territorials caught, as the chances
of war smote them, either in bulk across open ground or in detail
among bombs and machine-gun posts.
There was here, as many times before, and very many times after,
heroism beyond belief, and every form of bravery that the spirit of
man can make good. The net result of all, between the 27th of
September and the 15th of October, when the last groundswell of
the long fight smoothed itself out over the unburied dead, was a loss
to us of 50,000 men and 2000 officers, and a gain of a salient seven
thousand yards long and three thousand two hundred yards deep.
For practical purposes, a good deal of this depth ranked as “No
Man’s Land” from that date till the final break-up of the German
hosts in 1918. The public were informed that the valour of the new
Territorial Divisions had justified their training, which seemed
expensive; and that our armies, whatever else they lacked at that
time—and it was not a little—had gained in confidence: which
seemed superfluous.

After Loos
But the Battalion lay at Verquin, cleaning up after its ten days’
filth, and there was Mass on the morning of the 14th, when Father
S. Knapp came over from the 2nd Battalion and “spoke to the men
on the subject of Father Gwynne’s death,” for now that the two
battalions were next-door neighbours, Father Knapp served both. No
written record remains of the priest’s speech, but those who survive
that heard it say it moved all men’s hearts. Mass always preceded
the day’s work in billets, but even on the first morning on their
return from the trenches the men would make shift somehow to
clean their hands and faces, and if possible to shave, before
attending it, no matter what the hour.
Then on the 14th October they moved from Verquin to unpleasing
Sailly-Labourse, four miles or so behind the line, for another day’s
“rest” in billets, and so (Oct. 17) to what was left of Vermelles, a
couple of miles from the front, where the men had to make the
wrecked houses habitable till (Oct. 19) they took over from the
Welsh Guards some reserve-trenches on the old ground in front of
Clerk’s Keep, a quarter of a mile west of the Vermelles railway line.
The 20th October was the day when the 2nd Battalion were
engaged in a bombing attack on the Hohenzollern, from which they
won no small honour, as will be told in their story. The 1st Battalion
lay at Vermelles, unshelled for the moment, and had leisure to make
“light overhead cover for the men against the rain.” The Division was
in line again, and the Battalion’s first work was to improve a new line
of trenches which, besides the defect of being much too close to the
Hohenzollern, lacked dug-outs. In Lord Desmond FitzGerald’s
absence, Major the Hon. H. R. Alexander from the 2nd Battalion took
command of the Battalion, and they relieved the 2nd Coldstream on
the 21st and resumed the stale routine—digging saps under fire,
which necessitated shovelling the earth into sand-bags, and
emptying it out by night; dodging snipers and trench-mortars, and
hoping that our own shells, which were battering round the
Hohenzollern, would not fall too short; fixing wire and fuses till the
moon grew and they had to wait for the dawn-mists to cloak their
work; discovering and reconnoitring old German communication-
trenches that ran to ever-new German sniping-posts and had to be
blocked with wire tangles; and losing in three days, by
minenwerfers, sniping, the fall of dug-outs and premature bursts of
our own shells, 7 men killed and 18 wounded. The two companies (1
and 2) went back to Vermelles, while 3 and 4 took over the support-
trenches from the 3rd Coldstream, reversing the process on the 24th
October.
 When letters hint at “drill” in any connection, it is a sure sign that
a battalion is on the eve of relief. For example, on the 24th, 2nd
Lieutenant Levy arrived with a draft of fifty-eight men, a sergeant,
and two corporals, who were divided among the companies. The
Diary observes that they were a fair lot of men but “did not look too
well drilled.” Accordingly, after a couple of days’ mild shelling round
and near Vermelles Church and Shrine, we find the Battalion relieved
by the Norfolks (Oct. 26). All four companies worked their way
cautiously out of the fire-zone—it is at the moment of relief that
casualties are most felt—picked up their Headquarters and transport,
and marched for half of a whole day in the open to billets at
pleasant, wooded Lapugnoy, where they found clean straw to lie
down on and were promised blankets. After the usual clean-up and
payment of the men, they were ordered off to Chocques to take part
in the King’s review of the Guards Division at Haute Rièze on the
afternoon of the 28th, but, owing to the accident to His Majesty
caused by the horse falling with him, the parade was cancelled.
“Steady drill” filled the next ten days. Lieutenant the Hon. B.
O’Brien started to train fresh bombing-squads with the Mills bomb,
which was then being issued in such quantities that as many as
twenty whole boxes could be spared for instruction. Up till then,
bombs had been varied in type and various in action. As had been
pointed out, the Irish took kindly to this game and produced many
notable experts. But the perfect bomber is not always docile out of
the line. Among the giants of ’15 was a private against whom order
had gone forth that on no account was he to be paid on pay-days,
for the reason that once in funds he would retire into France at large
“for a day and a night and a morrow,” and return a happy, hiccuping
but indispensable “criminal.” At last, after a long stretch of enforced
virtue, he managed, by chicane or his own amazing personality, to
seduce five francs from his platoon sergeant and forthwith
disappeared. On his return, richly disguised, he sought out his
benefactor with a gift under his arm. The rest is in his Sergeant’s
own words: “‘No,’ I says, ‘go away and sleep it off,’ I says, pushin’ it
away, for ’twas a rum jar he was temptin’ me with. ‘’Tis for you,
Sergeant,’ he says. ‘You’re the only man that has thrusted me with a
centime since summer.’ Thrust him! There was no sergeant of ours
had not been remindin’ me of those same five francs all the time
he’d been away—let alone what I’d got at Company Orders. So I
loosed myself upon him, an’ I described him to himself the way he’d
have shame at it, but shame was not in him. ‘Yes, Sergeant,’ he says
to me, ‘full I am, and this is full too,’ he says, pattin’ the rum jar
(and it was!), an’ I know where there’s plenty more,’ he says, ‘and
it’s all for you an’ your great thrustfulness to me about them five
francs.’ What could I do? He’d made me a laughing-stock to the
Battalion. An awful man! He’d done it all on those five unlucky
francs! Yes, he’d lead a bombin’ party or a drinkin’ party—his own or
any other battalion’s; and he was worth a platoon an’ a half when
there was anything doing, and I thrust in God he’s alive yet—him
and his five francs! But an awful man!”
Drunkenness was confined, for the most part, to a known few
characters, regular and almost privileged in their irregularities. The
influence of the Priest and the work of the company officers went
hand in hand here. Here is a tribute paid by a brother officer to
Captain Gore-Langton, killed on the 10th October, which explains the
secret. “The men liked him for his pluck and the plain way in which
he dealt with them, always doing his best for the worst, most idle,
and stupidest men in our company.... One can’t really believe he’s
gone. I always expect to see him swinging round a traverse.” The
Battalion did not forget him, and while at Lapugnoy, sent a party to
Vermelles to attend to his grave there.
On the 31st October Lieut.-Colonel R. C. McCalmont arrived from
commanding a battalion of the New Ulster Army Division and took
over the command from Major Alexander who reverted to the 2nd
Battalion, from which he had been borrowed.

Laventie
On the 10th of the month the Guards Division were for duty again
on the Laventie sector, which at every time of the year had a bad
reputation for wet. The outcome of Loos had ended hope of a break-
through, and a few thousand yards won there against a few
thousand lost out Ypres way represented the balance of the account
since November 1914. Therefore, once again, the line had to be held
till more men, munitions and materials could be trained,
manufactured and accumulated, while the price of making war on
the spur of the moment was paid, day in and day out, with the
bodies of young men subject to every form of death among the slits
in the dirt along which they moved. It bored them extremely, but
otherwise did not much affect their morale. They built some sort of
decent life out of the monotonous hours; they came to know the
very best and the very worst in themselves and in their comrades
upon whom their lives and well-being depended; and they formed
friendships that lasted, as fate willed, for months or even years.
They lied persistently and with intent in their home letters
concerning their discomforts and exposure, and lent themselves to
the impression, cultivated by some sedulous newspapers, that the
trenches were electrically-lighted abodes of comfort and jollity,
varied with concerts and sports. It was all part of the trial which the
national genius calls “the game.”
The Battalion (Lieut.-Colonel R. C. McCalmont commanding) was
at Pacaut, due north of Béthune, on the 11th, at Merville on the
14th, training young soldiers how to use smoke-helmets—for gas
was a thing to be expected anywhere now—and enjoying every
variety of weather, from sodden wet to sharp frost. The effects of
the gas-helmet on the young soldiers were quaintly described as
“very useful on them. ’Twas like throwin’ a cloth over a parrot-cage.
It stopped all their chat.”
On the 20th November they took over reserve-billets from the 1st
Scots Guards near Bout Deville, and the next day, after inspection of
both battalions by General Feilding, commanding the Division, and
the late Mr. John Redmond, M.P., went into trenches with the happy
fore-knowledge that they were likely to stay there till the 2nd of
January and would be lucky if they got a few days out at Christmas.
It was a stretch of unmitigated beastliness in the low ditch-riddled
ground behind Neuve Chapelle and the Aubers Ridge, on the
interminable La Bassée-Estaires road, with no available
communication-trenches, in many places impassable from wet, all
needing sandbags and all, “in a very neglected state, except for the
work done by the 2nd Guards Brigade the week before the Battalion
moved in.” (It is nowhere on record that the Guards Division, or for
that matter, any other, was ever contented with trenches that it took
over.) The enemy, however, were quiet, being at least as
uncomfortable as our people. Even when our field-guns blew large
gaps in their parapets a hundred yards away there was very little
retaliation, and our casualties on relief—the men lay in scattered
billets at Riez Bailleul three miles or so up the road—were relatively
few.
In one whole week not more than four or five men were killed and
fifteen or sixteen wounded, two of them by our own shrapnel
bursting short while our guns experimented on block-houses and
steel cupolas, as these revealed themselves. Even when the Prince
of Wales visited the line at the Major-General’s inspection of it, and
left by the only possible road, “Sign Post Lane,” in broad daylight in
the open, within a furlong of the enemy, casualties did not occur!
There is no mention, either, of any of the aeroplane-visitations which
sometimes followed his appearances. As a personal friend of one of
the officers, he found reason to visit along that sector more often
than is officially recorded.
At the beginning of the month the 1st Guards Brigade was
relieved by the 3rd of its Division, and the Battalion handed its line
over to the 4th Grenadiers, not without some housewifely pride at
improvements it had effected. But, since pride ever precedes a fall,
the sharp frost of the past week dissolved in heavy rain, and the
neat new-made breastworks with their aligned sandbags collapsed.
If the 4th Grenadiers keep veracious diaries, it is probable that that
night of thaw and delayed reliefs is strongly recorded in them.
La Gorgue, under Estaires, upon the sluggish Lys in sodden wet
weather (December 3-8) gave them a breathing space for a general
wash-up and those “steady drills” necessary to mankind. The new
stretch that they took over from their own 2nd Battalion was about
two miles north of their previous one and south-east of Laventie,
running parallel to the Rue Tilleloy, that endless road, flanked, like all
others hereabouts, with farm-houses, which joins Armentières to
Neuve Chapelle. The ground was, of course, sop, the parapets were
perforable breastworks, but reliefs could arrive unobserved within
five hundred yards of the front, and the enemy’s line lay in most
places nearly a quarter of a mile from ours. More important still,
there was reasonable accommodation for Battalion Headquarters in
a farm-house (one of the many “Red Houses” of the war) which, by
some accident, had been untouched so far, though it stood less than
a mile from the front line. Where Headquarters are comfortable,
Headquarters are happy, and by so much the more placable. Only
very young soldiers grudge them protection and warmth.
For a few days it was a peaceful stretch of the great line that
buttressed on Switzerland and the sea. Christmas was coming, and,
even had the weather allowed it, neither side was looking too
earnestly for trouble.
A company of Welsh Fusiliers with their C.O. and Adjutant came
up for eight days’ instruction, and were distributed through the
Battalion. The system in the front line at that moment was one of
gangs of three, a digger, an armed man, and a bomber, relieving
each other by shifts; and to each of these trios one Welshman was
allotted.
The Welsh were small, keen and inquisitive. The large Irish
praised their Saints aloud for sending them new boys to talk to
through the long watches. It is related of one Welshman that,
among a thousand questions, he demanded if his tutor had ever
gone over the top. The Irishman admitted that he had. “And how
often does one go over?” the Welshman continued. “I’ll show you.
Come with me,” replied the other Celt, and, moving to a gap in the
parapet, lifted the Welshman in his arms that he might the better
see what remained, hung up in German wire, of a private of some
ancient fight—withered wreckage, perhaps, of Neuve Chapelle. “He
went over wanst,” said the Irishman. The working-party resumed
their labours and, men say, that that new boy put no more questions
“for the full of the half an hour—an’ that’s as long as a week to a
Welshman.”
All four companies were held in the first line except for three posts
—Picantin, Dead End, and Hougoumont—a few hundred yards
behind that were manned with a platoon apiece, but on the 12th
December rumours of a mine made it wise to evacuate a part of the
right flank till one of our 9.2’s should have searched for the
suspected mine-shaft. Its investigations roused the enemy to mild
retaliation, which ended next day in one of our men being wounded
by our own 9.2, and three by the enemy’s shrapnel—the first
casualties in four days.
The wet kept the peace along the line, but it did not altogether
damp the energies of our patrols. For a reason, not explained
officially, Lieutenant S. E. F. Christy was moved to go out with a
patrol and to hurl into the German lines a printed message (was it
the earliest workings of propaganda?) demanding that the Germans
“should surrender.” There is no indication whether the summons was
to the German army at large or merely to as many of them as lay
before the Battalion; but, the invitation being disregarded,
Lieutenants Christy and Law made themselves offensive in patrol-
work to the best of their means. On one excursion the latter officer
discovered (December 15) a water-logged concrete-built loop-hole
dug-out occupied by Germans. Being a hardened souvenir-hunter, he
is reported to have removed the official German name-board of the
establishment ere he went back for reinforcements with a view of
capturing it complete. On his return he found it abandoned. The
water had driven the enemy to a drier post, and the cutting-out
expedition had to be postponed. Too long in the line without incident
wears on every one’s temper, but luck was against them and an
attempt on the 20th December by a “selected party” under some
R.E.’s and Lieutenants Law and Christy was ruined by the moonlight
and the fact that the enemy had returned to their concrete hutch
and were more than on the alert. By the light of later knowledge the
Battalion was inclined to believe that the dug-out had been left as
bait and that there were too many spies in our lines before Laventie.
On the 21st December the Battalion came out for Christmas and
billeted at Laventie, as their next turn would be in the old sector that
they had handed over to the 4th Grenadiers three weeks ago. The
same Battalion relieved them on this day, and, as before, were an
hour late in turning up—a thing inexcusable except on one’s own
part.
Their Adjutant’s preoccupations with officers sick and wounded;
N.C.O.’s promoted to commissions in line battalions, and the
catching and training of their substitutes; and with all the
housekeeping work of a battalion in the field, had not prevented him
from making strict and accurate inquiries at Headquarters as to
“what exactly is being sent out for Christmas Day. Is it plum-pudding
only or sausages alone? Last year we had both, but I should like to
know for certain.”
All things considered (and there was no shelling), Christmas
dinner at La Gorgue 1915 was a success, and “the C.O. and other
officers went round the dinners as at home” in merciful ignorance
that those of them who survived would attend three more such
festivals.
Major-General Lord Cavan, commanding the Guards Division, who
had been appointed to command the newly formed Fourteenth
Corps,[7] addressed the officers after dinner and half-promised them
the Christmas present they most desired. He spoke well of the
Battalion, as one who had seen and shared their work had right to
do, saying that “there might be as good, but there were none
better,” and added that “there was just a hope that the Guards
Division might eventually go to his corps.” They cheered.
The quiet that fell about Christmastide held till the birth of the
New Year, which the inscrutable Hun mind celebrated punctually on
the hour (German time) with twenty minutes’ heavy machine-gun
and rifle-fire in the darkness. One killed and one wounded were all
their casualties.
Here is the roll of the Officers and Staff of the Battalion as the
year ended in mud, among rotten parapets and water-logged
trenches, with nothing to show for all that had gone before save
time gained and ground held to allow of preparation for the real
struggle, on the edge of which these thousand soldiers and all their
world stood ignorant but unshaken:
HEADQUARTERS
Lieut.-Colonel R. C. A. McCalmont Commanding Officer.
Major Lord Desmond FitzGerald Adjutant.
Lieut. T. E. G. Nugent a./Adjutant.
Hon. Lieut. H. Hickie Quartermaster.
Capt. P. H. Antrobus Transport.
Lieut. C. Pease Brigade Company.
Lieut. L. C. Whitefoord “
Lieut. J. Grayling-Major Depot.
Capt. Rev. A. H. A. Knapp, O.P. Chaplain.
Capt. P. R. Woodhouse, R.A.M.C. Medical Officer.
No. 108 Sgt. Major Kirk Sgt. Major.
No. 176 Q.M.S. J. M. Payne Q.M.S.
No. 918 Drill-Sgt. T. Cahill Senior Drill Sgt.
No. 2666 Drill-Sgt. G. Weeks Junior Drill Sgt.
No. 1134 O.R.Cr. Sgt. P. Matthews Orderly-Room Sgt. at Base.
No. 3933 Sgt. Dr. W. Cherry Sgt. Drummer.
No. 1119 Sgt. R. Nugent a./Pioneer Sgt.
No. 837 Armr. Q.M.S. S. Bradley Armr. Q.M.S.
No. 3874 Sgt. M. Greaney Transport Sgt.
No. 4166 Sgt. J. Fawcett Signalling Sgt.
No. 2900 Sgt. P. J. Curtis Orderly-Room Clerk.

No. 1 Company.
Capt. R. G. C. Yerburgh. (3726 C.Q.M.S. P. M’Goldrick.)
Lieut. D. J. B. FitzGerald. 3303 a./C.Q.M.S. J. Glynn.
2562 C.S.M. P. A. Carroll.
 No. 2 Company.
Capt. V. C. J. Blake. 3949 C.S.M. D. Voyles.
Lieut. C. E. R. Hanbury. 999 C.Q.M.S. H. Payne.

No. 3 Company.
Capt. T. M. D. Bailie. (2112 C.S.M. H. M’Veigh.)
Capt. A. F. L. Gordon. 3972 C.Q.M.S. R. Grady.
Lieut. S. E. F. Christy. 2922 a./C.S.M. J. Donolly.
Lieut. K. E. Dormer.

No. 4 Company.
Capt. P. S. Long-Innes. 2nd Lieut. M. B. Levy.
Lieut. Hon. H. B. O’Brien 3632 C.S.M. M. Moran.
(Bombing Officer). (2122 C.Q.M.S. T. Murphy.)
Lieut. R. J. P. Rodakowski. 798 a./C.Q.M.S. J. Scanlon.
 1916
T H E SA L I E N T TO T H E S O M M E
Brigadier-General G. Feilding, D.S.O., as we know, succeeded Lord
Cavan in the command of the Guards Division, and the enemy woke
up to a little more regular shelling and sniping for a few days till
(January 4) the 1st Guards Brigade was unexpectedly relieved by a
fresh brigade (the 114th), and the Battalion moved to billets in St.
Floris which, as usual, were “in a very filthy condition.” There they
stayed, under strong training at bombing and Lewis gunnery, till the
12th. Thence to Merville till the 23rd, when Lieutenant Hon. H. B.
O’Brien, a specialist in these matters, as may have been noticed
before, was appointed Brigade Bombing Officer. The bomb was to be
the dominant factor of the day’s work for the next year or so, and
the number of students made the country round billets
unwholesome and varied. There is a true tale of a bombing school
on a foggy morning who, hurling with zeal over a bank into the mist,
found themselves presently being cursed from a safe distance by a
repairing party who had been sent out to discover why one whole
system of big-gun telephone-wires was dumb. They complained that
the school had “cut it into vermicelli.”
The instruction bore fruit; for, so soon as they were back in the
trenches at Ebenezer farm, which they had quitted on the 4th,
bombing seems to have been forced wherever practicable. A weak,
or it might be more accurate to say, a sore point had developed on
the front in a crater thrown up by one of our own mines, which it
was necessary to sap out to and protect by intermittent bombing.
This brought retaliation and a few casualties nightly. A trench-mortar
battery was imported to deal with the nuisance and, as might be
expected, drew the enemy’s artillery.
On the 28th January a single stray bullet in the dark found and
killed Captain V. C. J. Blake, No. 2 Company, while he was laying out
some work in wire for his company, and a bombing attack round the
mine-crater ended in three other ranks killed and one wounded.
On February 1 our mine-shaft in the same locality flooded without
warning and drowned a couple of men in a listening-post. Our
pumps could make no impression on the water; it was difficult to put
up any head-cover for the men in the forward sap, and the enemy’s
wire was being strengthened nightly and needed clearing away. This
was routine-work undertaken by our artillery who blew gaps in it in
three places, which the Battalion covered with machine-gun fire. It
kept the enemy reasonably quiet, and H.R.H. Prince Albert, who was
out on a tour from England, breakfasted with Battalion Headquarters
the same morning (February 5). Once again the enemy’s information
must have been inaccurate or delayed since there is no mention of
any shelling or aeroplane work on Headquarters.
They came out of the line on the 7th and billeted near Merville.
Reckoned by their standards it had been an uneventful stretch of
duty, and those officers who could be spared had gone on short
leave; for there was a rumour that leave would be stopped after the
20th of the month. The French and their English allies knew well
that the great German attack on Verdun was ripening (it opened in
the third week of February) and the world had no doubt of the
issues that depended upon that gate to the heart of France holding
fast. The whole long line stiffened to take the weight of any sudden
side-issue or main catastrophe that the chance of war might bring
about. But a battalion among hundreds of battalions knows as little
what its own movements mean as a single truck in a goods yard
knows of the import and export trade of Great Britain. The young
officers snatched their few hours’ leave at home, loyally told their
people that all was going well, returned—“to a most interesting
lecture on the Battle of Neuve Chapelle,” delivered at La Gorgue by a
Divisional Staff Officer, and to an inspection of the 1st Guards
Brigade by Lord Kitchener on a vile wet day when they were all
soaked to the skin (February 10), and “to the usual routine in very
poor weather.”
Lord Desmond FitzGerald, being now second in command by
seniority, resigned his adjutancy and was succeeded by Lieutenant T.
E. G. Nugent; No. 2, Captain Blake’s, Company was commanded by
Major the Hon. A. C. S. Chichester, fresh from home, and Father S.
Knapp, their priest, who had been transferred to the 1st London
Irish, was followed by Father J. Lane-Fox from the same Battalion.
Of the six Fathers who served the two battalions, two—Fathers
Gwynne and S. Knapp, D.S.O., M.C.—were killed, one—Father F. M.
Browne, M.C.—wounded twice, and one—Father F. S. Browne, M.C.—
wounded once.
On the face of it nothing could have been quieter and more
domestic than their daily life round Merville, and after a week of it
they were moved (February 16) north towards Steenvoorde, in a
hurricane of wind and rain, to the neighbourhood of Poperinghe, on
the Ypres-Poperinghe-Dunkirk road, and a camp of tents, mostly
blown down, and huts connected, for which small ease they were
grateful, by duck-boards. This brought them into the Second Army
area and into the Fourteenth Corps under Lord Cavan, precisely as
that officer had hoped. He explained to them there was “a small
German offensive” on the left of the line here, and that “if it came to
anything” the Brigade might be wanted.
The “small offensive” had opened on the 13th with a furious
bombardment of the extreme southern end of the Ypres Salient
between the Ypres-Comines Canal and Ypres-Comines railway, a little
to the south of Hill 60, followed by the springing of five mines under
the British front line and an infantry attack, which ended in the
capture by the enemy of four or five hundred yards of trench and
the low ridge called “The Bluff,” over which they ran. The affair
bulked big in the newspaper-press of the day; for a battalion, the
10th Lancashire Fusiliers, was literally buried by one of the mine
explosions. The German gain was well held, but prevented from
extending by a concentration of our artillery, and later on (March 2)
the whole position was recaptured after desperate fighting and the
line there came to rest.
For the first time the Battalion seems impressed by the hostile
aircraft with which the Salient was filled. Poperinghe and Hazebrouck
were bombed almost as soon as they came in, and their camp was
visited by four aeroplanes at high noon, after a snow-fall, which
showed up everything below. They had been attending a
demonstration to prove the harmlessness of a Flammenwerfer if only
one lay flat on the ground and let the roaring blast hiss over. Ribald
men have explained, since, that these demonstrations were more
demoralising than the actual machine in action, especially when, as
occasionally happened, the nozzle of the flame-shooter carried away
and, in the attempts to recontrol the thing, the class, bombed from
above and chased by fire below, broke and fled.
But the whole Salient was a death-trap throughout. The great
shells crossed each other’s path at every angle, back and forth,
single or in flights. For no certain cause that our side could guess,
fire would concentrate itself on some half-obliterated feature of the
landscape—a bank, the poor stumpage of a wood, a remnant of a
village or the angle of a road, that went out in smoke, dust, and
flying clods, as though devils were flinging it up with invisible
spades. The concentrated clamours would die down and cease; the
single shells would resume their aimless falling over a line of fields,
with the monotony of drips from a tap, till, again, it seemed as
though one of them had found something worthy of attention and
shouted back the news to its fellows who, crowding altogether in
one spot, roared, overturned, and set alight for five or ten wild
minutes or through a methodical half-hour. If the storm fell on bare
ground, that was churned and torn afresh into smoking clods; if
upon men in trenches, on relief, or with the transport, no eye could
judge what harm had been done; for often where it had seemed as
though nothing could live, dispersed units picked themselves up and
reformed, almost untouched, after inconceivable escapes.
Elsewhere, a few spurts of stinking smoke in a corner might cover all
that remained of a platoon or have ripped the heart out of a silent,
waiting company. By night, fantastic traceries of crossing fire-lines
ran along the shoulder of a ridge; shrapnel, bursting high, jetted a
trail of swift sparks, as it might be steel striking flint; dropping flares
outlined some tortured farm-house among its willow-stumps, or the
intolerable glare of a big shell framed itself behind a naked doorway;
and coloured lights dyed the bellies of the low clouds till all sense of
distance and direction was lost, and the bewildered troops stumbled
and crawled from pavé to pot-hole, treading upon the old dead.
Dawn brought dirty white desolation across yellow mud pitted with
slate-coloured water-holes, and confused by senseless grey and
black lines and curled tangles of mire. There was nothing to see,
except—almost pearl-coloured under their mud-dyed helmets—the
tense, preoccupied faces of men moving with wide spaces between
their platoons, to water-floored cellars and shelters chillier even than
the grave-like trenches they had left, always with the consciousness
that they were watched by invisible eyes which presently would
choose certain of them to be killed. Those who came through it, say
that the sense of this brooding Death more affected every phase of
life in the Salient than in any other portion of the great war-field.
The German offensive on the Bluff and the necessary measures of
retaliation did not concern the Battalion for the moment. After a few
days’ aimless waiting they were sent, in bitter cold and snow, to
rest-camp at Calais for a week. They were seven hours slipping and
sliding along the snow-covered roads ere they could entrain at
Bavichore Street, and untold hours detraining at the other end; all of
which annoyed them more than any bombing, even though the C.O.
himself complimented them on their march “under very trying
circumstances.” The Irish, particularly in their own battalions, have
not the relief of swearing as other races do. Their temperament runs
to extravagant comparisons and appeals to the Saints, and ordinary
foul language, even on night-reliefs in muddy trenches choked with
loose wires and corpses, is checked by the priests. But, as one said:
“What we felt on that cruel Calais road, skatin’ into each other, an’—
an’ apologisin’, would have melted all the snows of Europe that
winter.”
Bombing instruction and inter-platoon bombing matches on Calais
beach kept them employed.
On March 3, during practice with live bombs, one exploded
prematurely, as several others of that type had done in other
battalions, and Major Lord Desmond FitzGerald was so severely
wounded that he died within an hour at the Millicent Sutherland (No.
9. Red Cross) Hospital. Lieutenant T. E. G. Nugent was dangerously
wounded at the same time through the liver, though he did not
realise this at the time, and stayed coolly in charge of a party till
help came. Lieutenant Hanbury, who was conducting the practice,
was wounded in the hand and leg, and Father Lane-Fox lost an eye
and some fingers.
Lord Desmond FitzGerald was buried in the public cemetery at
Calais on the 5th. As he himself had expressly desired, there was no
formal parade, but the whole Battalion, of which he was next for the
command, lined the road to his grave. His passion and his loyalty
had been given to the Battalion without thought of self, and among
many sad things few are sadder than to see the record of his
unceasing activities and care since he had been second in command
cut across by the curt announcement of his death. It was a little
thing that his name had been at the time submitted for a well-
deserved D.S.O. In a hard-pressed body of men, death and sickness
carry a special sting, because the victim knows—and in the very
articles of death feels it—what confusion and extra work,
rearrangement and adjustments of responsibilities his enforced
defection must lay upon his comrades. The winter had brought a
certain amount of sickness and minor accidents among the officers,
small in themselves, but cumulatively a burden. Irreplaceable
N.C.O.’s had gone, or were going, to take commissions in the Line;
others of unproven capacities had to be fetched forward in their
place. Warley, of course, was not anxious to send its best N.C.O.’s
away from a depot choked with recruits. The detail of life was hard
and cumbersome. It was a lengthy business even to draw a
typewriting machine for use in the trenches. Companies two thirds
full of fresh drafts had to be entrusted to officers who might or
might not have the divine gift of leadership, and, when all was set,
to-morrow’s chance-spun shell might break and bury the most
carefully thought-out combinations. “Things change so quickly
nowadays,” Desmond FitzGerald wrote not long before his death; “it
is impossible to see ahead.” And Death took him on Calais beach in
the full stride of his power.
He had quietly presented the Battalion the year before with
service drums. “No mention need be made of who paid.” They were
the only battalion of the Brigade which lacked them at that time, and
they had been the only battalion to bring them out of the beginning
of the war, when, during the retreat from Mons, “the artillery drove
over the big drum at Landrecies.”
Temporary Captain A. F. L. Gordon followed Lieutenant Nugent as
Adjutant, and the Rev. F. M. Browne from G.H.Q. replaced Father
Lane-Fox. They moved into the Salient again on the 6th March,
billeting at Wormhoudt, and were told several unpleasant things
about the state of the line and the very limited amount of
“retaliation” that they might expect from their own artillery.
The snow stopped all training except a little bombing. Opinion as
to the value of bombs differed even in those early days, but they
were the order of the day, and gave officers the chance to put in
practice their pet theories of bowling. A commanding officer of great
experience wrote, a year later, after the Battle of Arras, thanking
Heaven that that affair had “led to the rediscovery of the rifle as a
suitable weapon for infantry,” adding, “I swear a bomb is of all
weapons the most futile in which to specialize.”
The French were as keen on the bomb as the rest of the world,
and parties of officers visited our bombing competitions at
Wormhoudt, where the Battalion lay till the 16th March, moving to
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