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The Irish Guards in the Great War, Volume 2 (of 2) cover

The Irish Guards in the Great War, Volume 2 (of 2)

Chapter 39: FOOTNOTES:
By Rudyard Kipling
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About This Book

A regiment-level narrative assembled from diaries, reports, and papers, the volume follows the formation and maturation of a Guards battalion and its service on the Western Front. It describes training, life in billets and camps, marches to the trenches, frontline operations and major offensives, and the toll of casualties and exhaustion on officers and men, while noting unit discipline, camaraderie, and improvised coping. Detailed appendices and maps provide itineraries, action summaries, and documentary excerpts that support the chronological account of deployments and engagements.

THE END

FOOTNOTES:

[1] This was pure prophecy. Captain, as he was then, Alexander was credited with a taste for strange and Muscovitish headgear, which he possibly gratified later as a general commanding weird armies in Poland during the spasms of reconstruction that followed the Armistice.

[2] In those peaceful days when the Division was “fattening” for the fight, Greer had kept a sympathetic eye on Sassoon, who had gone down very sick some time before Greer came to command the 2nd Battalion, and was convalescing in the Entrenching Battalion where his heart was not. Greer, who had a keen eye for good officers, said of him: “He writes me pitiful letters protesting that he is now completely fit, and asking that he should be allowed to come up to this Battalion.... He is a stout-hearted savage, and a life-sentence with the Entrenching Battalion would certainly be an awful prospect.” So Sassoon was rescued, and Greer’s faith in his “stout-hearted savage” abundantly justified.

[3] On this basis, as is noted in the history of the 1st Battalion, a Fourth Brigade of the Guards Division was created by the lopped off battalions: viz., the 4th Grenadiers, 3rd Coldstream, and 2nd Irish Guards, which as a brigade was attached to the thirty-first Division, Thirteenth Corps (Major-General Sir Charles Fergusson).