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Except for railway embankments and culverts, the country about was so flat that a bullet once started had no reason to stop. The men were billeted in solid-built Flemish houses with bullet-proof partitions, and therefore, unless noticeably shelled, were inclined to walk about in front of the houses in the daylight, till they were sternly set to work to clean their billets of months of accumulations of refuse and to bury neglected carcases. War and all connected with it was infinitely stale already, but houses and the ruins of them had not yet been wholly wiped out in that sector.

They were installed by the last day of the month with no greater inconvenience than drifts of stray bullets over the support trenches, and unsystematic shelling of Battalion Headquarters two or three hundred yards in the rear, and some desultory bombing in the complicated front line.

Early in the morning of the 1st February a post held by the Coldstream in a hollow near the embankment, just west of the Railway Triangle—a spot unholy beyond most, even in this sector—was bombed and rushed by the enemy through an old communication-trench. No. 4 Company Irish Guards was ordered to help the Coldstream’s attack. The men were led by Lieutenant Blacker-Douglass who had but rejoined on the 25th January. He was knocked over by a bomb within a few yards of the German barricade to the trench, picked himself up and went on, only to be shot through the head a moment later. Lieutenant Lee of the same Company was shot through the heart; the Company Commander, Captain Long-Innes, and 2nd Lieutenant Blom were wounded, and the command devolved on C.Q.M.S. Carton, who, in spite of a verbal order to retire “which he did not believe,” held on till the morning in the trench under such cover of shell-holes and hasty barricades as could be found or put up. The Germans were too well posted to be moved by bomb or rifle, so, when daylight showed the situation, our big guns were called upon to shell for ten minutes, with shrapnel, the hollow where they lay. The spectacle was sickening, but the results were satisfactory. Then a second attack of some fifty Coldstream and thirty Irish Guards of No. 1 Company under Lieutenants Graham and Innes went forward, hung for a moment on the fringe of their own shrapnel—for barrages were new things—and swept up the trench. It was here that Lance-Corporal O’Leary, Lieutenant Innes’s orderly, won his V.C. He rushed up along the railway embankment above the trenches, shot down 5 Germans behind their first barricade in the trench, then 3 more trying to work a machine-gun at the next barricade fifty yards farther along the trench, and took a couple of prisoners. Eye-witnesses report that he did his work quite leisurely and wandered out into the open, visible for any distance around, intent upon killing another German to whom he had taken a dislike. Meantime, Graham, badly wounded in the head, and Innes, together with some Coldstream, had worked their way into the post and found it deserted. Our guns and our attack had accounted for about 30 dead, but had left 32 wounded and unwounded prisoners, all of whom, with one exception, wept aloud. The hollow was full of mixed dead—Coldstream, Irish, and German.

The men who remained of No. 4 Company did not settle down to the work of consolidating their position till they had found Blacker-Douglass’s body. At least a couple of his company had been wounded in the first attack while trying to bring it away. Lee’s body was recovered not far off.

A quarter of an hour after the post had fallen, the Engineers were up with unlimited sand-bags and helped the men who worked as they ate among the piled horrors around them, while everything was made ready for the expected German counter-attack. It did not come. Not only had the post been abandoned, but also a couple of trenches running out of it to the southward. These were duly barricaded in case the enemy were minded to work back along them at dusk. But for the rest of the day they preferred to shell; killing 2 and wounding 5 men of the two companies which were relieved by a company of the 3rd Coldstream and one of the 3rd Grenadiers. Our men returned to billets “very tired and hungry, but very pleased with themselves.” That day’s work had cost us 2 officers and 8 men killed; 3 officers and 24 men wounded, and 2 men missing. In return, two machine-guns, 8 whole and 24 wounded prisoners had been taken, the post recovered and, perhaps, sixty yards of additional trench with it. Such was the price paid in those years for maintaining even a foothold against the massed pressure of the enemy. It is distinctly noted in the Diary that two complete machine-guns were added to the defence of the post after it had been recaptured. Machine-guns were then valuable articles of barter, for when the French who were their neighbours wished to borrow one such article “for moral and material support,” a Brigadier-General’s permission had to be obtained.

This experience had shown it was better for each battalion in the line to provide its own supports, and they reorganized on the 2nd February on this basis; the 2nd and 3rd Coldstream Guards taking over the left half of the line up to within fifty yards of the Keep, while for their right, to the main La Bassée road, the 2nd Grenadiers and the Irish Guards were responsible—each with two companies in the fire trench and two in support, and all on forty-eight hours’ relief.

The enemy continued to shell the captured position, killing 2 and wounding 9 men that day, but no counter-attack developed and a few days later it was decided to straighten out the front then held by the 4th (Guards) Brigade. The fighting on the 25th had left it running irregularly through the big brick-yard, before mentioned. Of the dozen or more solid stacks of brick, four or five connected by a parapet of loose bricks and known as the Keep, were in our hands. The other eight, irregularly spaced, made a most awkward wedge into our line. They were backed by a labyrinth of German trench-work, and, being shell-proof, supports could be massed behind them in perfect safety. The nearest were within bombing distance of the Keep, and, in those days, the Germans had more and better bombs than we. On every account, then, the wedge had to be cleared, the stacks and their connecting trenches overrun and the line advanced a hundred and fifty yards or so to get a better field of fire. As a preliminary, a small but necessary piece of German trench on the flanks of the Keep was captured by the Irish on the 5th February with a loss of but 2 killed and none wounded.

At 2 P. M. on the 6th of February the stacks were heavily bombarded for a quarter of an hour—a large allowance. Even “Mother,” a neighbouring 9.2, probably of naval extraction, took part in it, and some French artillery ringed the approaches on the German side with screens of black melenite fumes, while No. 2 Company from the front trenches swept the German parapet facing them with five minutes of that old “rapid fire” which the Germans in the Salient and elsewhere had so often mistaken for machine-gun work. Then two assaulting parties of thirty men each from Nos. 3 and 1 Companies, under 2nd Lieutenant T. Musgrave and J. Ralli, opened the attack on five of the eight stacks. The other three were fairly dealt with on the same lines by the 3rd Coldstream. As there was no wire left on the trench before our stacks, our party got there almost at once, but Musgrave, ahead of his men, was shot by a group of five Germans who showed fight behind a few fatal unbroken strands in the rear. They were all killed a moment later when the men came up. Then the supporting parties under Lieutenant Innes were slipped, together with the Engineers under Major Fowkes, R.E., and the combined attack swept on through the brick-stacks, in and out of the trenches and around and behind them, where the Germans were shot and bayoneted as found, till—fighting, digging, cursing and sand-bagging—our men had hacked their way some seventy yards beyond their objective and dug in under a shelf of raw ground about three feet high, probably the lip of an old clay-pit. Our guns had lifted and were choking off all attempts at possible counter-attacks, but the German supports seem to have evaporated in the direction of La Bassée. There was a ridge in front of the captured position whence a few bullets were still dropping, but the back of the defence had been broken and, as firing diminished, first one and then two out of every three men were set digging in and filling sand-bags. The fortunes of the little campaign had gone smoothly, and when it was necessary, in the rough and tumble of the trench-work, to bring up reinforcements or more shovels and ammunition for the digging-parties, the indefatigable and brotherly Herts Territorials were drawn upon. The Coldstream had carried their share of the front and lay in line on our left, and at dusk, while the Engineers were putting up more wire, under rifle-fire at 150 yards’ range, the position was secure.

Our casualties, thanks to the bombardment and the swiftness of the attack, were only 1 officer and 6 men killed and 25 wounded. Father Gwynne, the Chaplain, was severely wounded by a piece of shrapnel while watching the attack “from an observation-post,” which, as the Father understood it, meant as far forward as possible, in order that he might be ready to give comfort to the dying. The Coldstream gathered in twenty-eight prisoners, the Irish none, but among their spoils is entered “one Iron Cross” won rather picturesquely. At the opening of the rush the Germans made a close-range bombing-raid on one of the corners of the Keep and at last pitched a bomb on to the top of a sand-bag redoubt. This so annoyed one of our bomb-throwers, a giant of the name of Hennigan, of No. 1 Company, that he picked up a trench-mortar bomb (no trinket) which lay convenient, cut down the fuse for short range and threw it at a spot where he had caught a glimpse of a German officer. The bomb burst almost before it reached the ground, and must have made a direct hit; for nothing upon the officer was recognisable later save the Iron Cross, which in due time went to the Regimental Orderly Room. Hennigan was awarded the D.C.M.; for his bomb also blew in and blocked up the communication-trench through which the bombers came—a matter which he regarded as a side-issue compared to his “splendid bowlin’.”

The companies were relieved in the evening by a company of Grenadiers, and as they wandered back through the new-taken trenches in the winter dusk, lost their way among all manner of horrors. One officer wrote: “I fell over and became involved in a kind of wrestling-match with a shapeless Thing that turned out to be a dead man without a head ... and so back to Beuvry, very tired and sad for the death of Tommy” (Musgrave).

There were other casualties that moved laughter under the ribs of death. A man reported after the action that his teeth were “all broke on him.” His Company Officer naturally expressed sympathy but some surprise at not seeing a bullet-hole through both cheeks. “I took them out and put them in my pocket for the charge, Sorr, and they all broke on me,” was the reply. “Well, go to the doctor and see if he can get you a new set.” “I’ve been to him, Sorr, and it’s little sympathy I got. He just gave me a pill and chased me away, Sorr.”

A weird attempt was made at daybreak on the 7th February by a forlorn hope of some fifty Germans to charge the newly installed line at a point where the Coldstream and 2nd Grenadiers joined. They dashed out across the ground from behind a stack, the officer waving his sword, and were all killed or wounded on or close up to our wire. Men said there seemed no meaning or reason in the affair, unless it was a suicide-party of Germans who had run from the attack of the day before and had been ordered thus to die. One of their wounded lay out all day, and when the Irish were taking over the relief on the 8th some Germans shouted loudly from their trenches and one stood up and pointed to the wounded man. Said the Grenadiers who were being relieved: “Come and get him!” A couple of German stretcher-bearers came out and bore their comrade away, not thirty yards from our trench, while our men held their fire.

In the same relief it fell to the Irish to examine the body of a single German who had crept up and of a sudden peered into our front-line trench, where a Grenadier promptly shot him. He dropped on the edge of the parapet and lay “like a man praying.” Since he had no rifle, it was assumed he was a bomber; but after dark they found he was wholly unarmed. At almost the same hour of the previous night another German came to precisely the same end in the same posture on the right flank of the line. Whether these two were deserters or scouts who would pretend to be deserters, if captured, was never settled. The trenches were full of such mysteries. Strange trades, too, were driven there. A man, now gone to Valhalla, for he was utterly brave, did not approve of letting dead Germans lie unvisited before the lines. He would mark the body down in the course of his day’s work, thrust a stick in the parados to give him his direction, and at night, or preferably when the morning fog lay heavy on the landscape, would slip across to his quarry and return with his pockets filled with loot. Many officers had seen C——’s stick at the back of the trench. Some living may like to learn now why it was there.[6]

A draft of one hundred men, making good the week’s losses, came in on the 8th February under Captain G. E. Young, Lieutenants T. Allen and C. Pease, and 2nd Lieutenant V. W. D. Fox. Among them were many wounded who had returned. They fell to at once on the strengthening and cleaning up of the new line which lay less than a hundred yards from the enemy. It supported the French line where that joined on to ours, and the officers would visit together through a tunnel under the roadway. Of this forlorn part of the world there is a tale that stands best as it was written by one of the officers of the Battalion: “And while we were barricading with sand-bags where the old trench joined the road, a dead Coldstream lying against a tree watched us with dull unobservant eyes.... While we were trudging along the pavé, mortally weary (after relief), said the Sergeant to me: ‘Did you hear what happened last night? You saw that dead man by the tree, Sir? Well, the covering-party they lay all round him. One of them tapped him on the shoulder an’ asked him if he were asleep. And presently, the C.S.M. that came down with the relief, he whispered to the Corporal, “How many men have ye got out, Corporal?” “Five, Sir,” says the Corporal. “I can see six meself,” says the C.S.M. “Five belong to me,” says the Corporal. “Count ’em, lad,” says the C.S.M. “Five came out with me,” says the Corporal, “and the sixth, faith, ’tis cold he is with watching us every night this six weeks.”’”

For a while the days and nights were peaceful, as peace was counted round the brick-stacks. The unspeakably foul German trenches were supplemented with new ones, communication-trenches multiplied and marked with proper sign-boards, and such historic main-arteries as the “Old Kent Road” trench paved with bricks from the stacks. By night the front line sat and shivered round braziers in the freezing dark while bits of new-made trench fell around them, and listening-posts at the head of old saps and barricaded alleys reported imaginary night-attacks. When they worked on a captured trench they were like as not to find it bottomed, or worse still, revetted, with an enemy corpse, which the sliding mud would deliver hideously into the arms of the party. On such occasions the sensitive would be sick, while the more hardened warmed and ate their food unperturbed amid all the offal. But there were compensations.

On the 11th February, for example, it is noted that the men had baked meat and suet pudding “for the first time since the war began”; on the 13th not one man was even wounded through the whole day and night; while on the 15th more than half the Battalion had hot baths “for the first time since January.” The diaries record these facts as of equal importance with a small advance by the French on their right, who captured a trench but fell into a nest of angry machine-guns and had to retire. The Battalion’s share in the work was but to assist in keeping the enemy’s heads down; in return for which the Germans shelled them an hour, killing 1 and wounding 5. Our men persisted in under-cutting the sides of the trench to make dug-outs, in the belief that unsupported caves of earth were safe against high explosives. Timbers and framing, indeed material of any kind, were still scarce, and doors and boards from wrecked houses were used in erecting parapets. Sand-bags were made out of old petticoats and pyjamas, and the farmers’ fences supplied an indifferent sort of wire. Sand-bags, wires, and stakes did not arrive at the front in appreciable quantities till the spring of 1915, and telephones about the same date. There was no abundance of any of these things till late in 1915; for the country had not made any preparation for war till war began, and the price of this was the lives of men.

The simplicity of our battery-work is shown by the joyous statement that “we now have a Gunner officer to live with us in our headquarters in the trenches and a telephone to the battery so that fire can be brought to bear quickly on any part of our front as necessity arises.” At times there would be an error in the signals, whereby the Battalion coming up from billets to the trenches through the dark would be urged to make haste because their section was being attacked, and after a breathless arrival would find the artillery busied on some small affair away on a flank.

Characteristically enough, the Germans when bombarded, as they were with effect by the French, would retaliate by shelling our lines. The shells worried the Irish less than the fact that three of their officers—Major the Earl of Rosse, Lieutenant Rankin, and 2nd Lieutenant D. Parsons, who arrived at 2 A. M. with a draft from home, were found to be temporarily attached to the Scots Guards. At that time the Battalion was 25 officers and 900 men strong, and the wastage from snipers and shells, both in the trench and while relieving, was not more than six daily.

There were reports that the enemy was now mining under the brick-stacks, so a mining company was formed, and an officer experimented successfully in firing rifle-grenades point-blank from the rifle, instead of parabolically which allowed the enemy time to see them descending. This was for the benefit of a few persistent snipers seventy yards away who were effectively moved and their dug-out set ablaze by the new form of attack.

Towards the end of the month our men had finished their trench-cleanings and brickings-up, had buried all dead that could be got at, and word went round that, if the situation on the 25th February could be considered “healthy” the Prince of Wales would visit them. The Germans, perhaps on information received (for the back-areas were thronged with spies), chose that day to be very active with a small gun, and as a fresh trench linking up with the French on the La Bassée road had been made and was visible against some new-fallen snow, they shelled that too. For this reason the Prince was not taken quite up to the front line, at which “he was rather annoyed.” The precaution was reasonable enough. A few minutes after he had left a sector judged “comparatively safe” 2nd Lieutenant T. Allen was killed by a shell pitching on the parapet there. Three privates were also killed and 4 wounded by shell or bomb on that “healthy” day. The same gun which had been giving trouble during the Prince’s visit was thought to be located by flash somewhere on the north side of the La Bassée road and siege-howitzers kept it subdued till the evening of the 25th, when, with the usual German scrupulosity, it began to shell the main road, by which reliefs came, at ten-minute intervals for three hours, but with no casualties as far as the Irish were concerned. One shell, duly noted, arrived near Brigade Headquarters and a battery of ours was asked to abate the nuisance. It is curious that only a few hours later the Germans were shelling a French battery not far from Béthune with ten-inch stuff which, if expended on the main road, would have disorganised our reliefs very completely. This was on the eve of going into Corps Reserve at Béthune, where the Battalion took over the Collège de Jeunes Filles from the Worcesters, the best billets since the war began, but, alas! furnished “with a large square where drill can take place.”

The month’s losses had been 4 officers and 34 men killed, 5 officers and 85 men wounded, or 128 men in all.

At Béthune they enjoyed nine days’ rest, with “steady drill and route-marches,” concerts in the local theatre, inter-regimental boxing with the 2nd Grenadiers, and a Divisional football competition for a cup presented by the Bishop of Khartum. Here they defeated the 6th Field Ambulance and lost by two goals to nil to the Oxford and Bucks L.I. Major Trefusis, C.O., Captain Mylne and 2nd Lieutenant H. Marion-Crawford went home for a week’s leave—for that wonderful experience of “first leave” was now available—while Major the Earl of Rosse, who had been recovered from the Scots Guards, took over command.

Neuve Chapelle

By the 9th March every one had returned and with them a draft of a hundred men under Lieutenant C. Wynter, 2nd Lieutenant T. E. Nugent and 2nd Lieutenant Hon. W. S. P. Alexander, just in time to take their share in the operations before Neuve Chapelle.

This village, which lay four miles under the Aubers Ridge, at the entrance to the open country round Lille and Tourcoing, had been in German hands since Smith-Dorrien’s Corps were turned out of it on October 26th and 27th of the year before. Assuming that our troops could break through at that point, that no reinforcements could be brought up by the Germans over all their well-considered lines of communication, that the Aubers Ridge could be surrounded and held, that cavalry could follow up infantry armed with machine-guns across trenches and through country studded with fortified posts, it was considered, in some quarters, that an attack might be driven through even to Lille itself.

Our armies, penned for months in the trenches, had suffered heavy wastage, though they were being built up from behind with men, material and guns on a scale which, by all past standards, was enormous. The enemy, with infinitely larger resources, had meantime strengthened and restrengthened himself behind belt upon belt of barbed wire with uncounted machine-gun posts and an artillery of high explosives to which the world then held no equal. His hand was heavy, too, in offence, and the French armies to the eastward felt it as soon as the spring opened. To ease that pressure, to release our troops from the burden of mere wasteful waiting, and to break, as far as might be, the edge of the enemy at the outset of the ’15 campaign, were presumably objects of the battle only second to the somewhat ambitious project of entering Lille.

Neuve Chapelle proved in large what the men in the trenches had learned in little throughout the winter—that unless artillery utterly root out barbed-wire trenches, machine-gun posts, and fortified houses, no valour of attacking infantry can pierce a modern defensive line. More than three hundred guns—say 5 per cent. of the number that our armies had in the last years of the war—opened upon Neuve Chapelle and its defences at 7.30 on the morning of March 10 for half an hour “in a bombardment without parallel!” Where the fire fell it wiped out everything above the sodden, muddy ground, so utterly breaking the defence that for a while the attack of Rawlinson’s Fourth Army Corps went forward with hardly a check across shapeless overturned wreckage of men and things. Then, at one point after another, along the whole bare front, battalions found themselves hung up before, or trapped between, breadths of uncut wire that covered nests of machine-guns, and were withered up before any artillery could be warned to their help. This was the fate of the 6th Brigade, whose part in the work on that sector was to capture two lines of trenches in front of Givenchy. Three battalions of the 4th (Guards) Brigade—the 2nd Grenadiers, 1st Irish and 2nd Coldstream—were attached to it as Divisional Reserve, and the remaining two battalions of the brigade—the 3rd Coldstream Guards and the Herts Regiment under Colonel Matheson—as Corps Reserve.

The Battalion left billets near Béthune in the early dawn of the 10th March and moved to a wood just north of the Aire-La Bassée Canal, where it remained till midnight, when it went forward to take over some trenches held by the King’s Liverpool and South Staffords (6th Brigade) whose attack had failed. Our guns had only succeeded in blowing an inadequate hole or two in the enemy’s wire which at many places was reported as ten yards deep, and the assaulting battalions had, as usual, been halted there and cut down. The only consolation for the heavy losses in men and officers was the news that the attack farther north had gone well and that a thousand Germans had been captured.

A fresh attack was ordered on the morning of the 11th, but the bombardment was delayed by fog and did so little damage to the wire that by afternoon the idea was abandoned, and in the evening the 4th (Guards) Brigade took over the line that had been held by the 6th Brigade. They were filthy trenches; their parapets were not bullet-proof, and the houses behind them blown to pieces; Headquarters Mess lived in one cellar, the C.O. of the Battalion slept in another, and the communication-trenches were far too shallow. Part of our front had to be evacuated while our bombardment was going on as it was too close to the enemy for safe shelling. The failure of the 6th Brigade’s attack in this quarter reduced the next day’s operation to a holding affair of rifle and heavy-gun fire, delayed and hampered by the morning fog, and on the 13th March the Battalion went into billets at Le Préol. The battle round Neuve Chapelle itself, they were told, had yielded more prisoners; but heavy German reinforcements were being moved up.

Late that night a draft of eighty N.C.O.’s, and men arrived under Lieutenant J. S. N. FitzGerald, among them the first detachment of specially enlisted (late) R.I. Constabulary—large drilled men—who were to play so solid a part in the history and the glory of the Battalion. The strength of the Battalion at that moment was 1080 with some 26 officers—much greater than it had been at any time during the War. They were all turned into the endless work of cleaning out and draining foul trenches, and the dog’s life of holding them under regular and irregular bombardments.

It was safer to relieve by daylight rather than by night, as darkness brought bursts of sudden rifle and machine-gun fire, despatched at a venture from behind the five-deep line of German chevaux-de-frise not seventy yards away. Tempting openings, too, were left in the wire to invite attack, but the bait was not taken. Neuve Chapelle had been a failure except in so far as it had shown the enemy that winter had not dulled any of our arms, and it was recognized we must continue to sit still till men and material should accumulate behind us. The documents and diaries of those weeks admit this with the unshaken cheerfulness of the race. Yet, even so, the actual and potential strength of the enemy was not realised.

Very slowly, and always with the thought at the back of the mind that the deadlock might break at any moment, the Army set itself, battalion by battalion, to learn the war it was waging.

On the 15th of March 2nd Lieutenant H. Marion-Crawford was appointed Brigade Bombing Officer to the Guards Brigade with sixty men under him attached to the Irish Guards. The “jam-pot” grenade of 1914 was practically obsolete by now; the “stick” hand-grenade of the hair-brush type and the grenade fired from the rifle had succeeded it and were appearing on the front in appreciable quantities. The Mills bomb, which superseded all others both for hand and rifle, was not born till the autumn of 1915 and was not lavishly supplied till the opening of the next year.

On the 16th March, or five days after their share of the battle of Neuve Chapelle had ended, and they lay in the trenches, a moaning was heard in the darkness of No Man’s Land and a corporal sent out to report. He came back saying that he had got into a trench some thirty yards from the front line where he had seen a lighted candle and heard what he believed to be Germans talking. Another patrol was despatched and at last came back with a wounded man of the King’s Liverpools, who had been lying out since the 10th. He said he had been wounded in the assault, captured as he was trying to crawl back, stripped of boots, equipment and rations, but left with a blanket, and the enemy apparently visited him every night as they patrolled the trench. An attempt was made to capture that patrol, but in the darkness the trench was missed altogether.

The enemy celebrated the day before St. Patrick’s Day and the day itself, March 17, by several hours of brisk shelling of Givenchy, timed to catch the evening reliefs, but luckily without casualties. Queen Alexandra sent the Battalion their shamrock; telegrams wishing them good luck were duly received from Lord Kitchener, Colonel of the Battalion, Brigadier-General Nugent, and a letter from Sir Charles Monro commanding the First Army Corps. Father Gwynne held an open-air service in the early morning, and every man was given a hot bath at Béthune. More important still, every man who wanted it had free beer with his dinner, and in those days beer was beer indeed.

The end of the month was filled with constructive work and the linking up and strengthening of trenches, and the burial, where possible, of “the very old dead”—twenty-nine of them in one day—and always unrelaxing watch and ward against the enemy. At times he puzzled them, as when one evening he threw bombs just over his own parapet till it seemed that he must be busy blowing holes in his own deep wire. But it turned out at last to be some new pattern of bomb with which he was methodically experimenting. Later came a few aeroplanes, the first seen in some weeks. It may have been no more than a coincidence that the first planes came over on the day that the Prince of Wales was paying the Battalion another visit. But it was the continuous rifle-fire at night that accounted for most of the casualties in the trenches and during reliefs. Second Lieutenant T. Nugent was wounded in the back of the neck on the 24th by an unaimed bullet, and almost each day had its count of casualties.

The Battalion took life with philosophic calm. Food and rest are the paramount considerations of men in war. The former was certain and abundant; the latter scanty and broken. So the Commanding Officer made no comment when, one night going round the line, he found a man deeply asleep with his feet projecting into the fairway and, written on a paper on his chest, the legend:

A certain amount of change and interest was given by the appearance on the scene of the Post Office Territorials (8th City of London), commanded by Colonel J. Harvey, an ex-Irish Guardsman, and a platoon of that regiment was attached to the Battalion for instructional purposes. Later, three, and at last seven platoons, were placed at the disposal of the Irish Guards, whose C.O. “found them work to do.” They “made themselves quite useful” but “wanted more practice in digging”—an experience never begrudged them by the generous Irish.

Trench-work after Neuve Chapelle

Thanks to Neuve Chapelle, a breathing-space had been won during which Territorial troops were taking their place in the front line and such supplies as times afforded were coming up. The Diary records many visits of Colonels, Brigadiers, and Inspectors of the Territorial Forces to this section, which, when it had been brought up to the Guards’ standard, was considered a model for instruction. The month closed with bright moonlight and the mounting of two motor machine-guns, one south of Duck’s Bill and the other in Oxford Street, for protection against aeroplanes.

April opened with the death of 2nd Lieutenant J. M. Stewart, killed before dawn while looking over the parapet of the trench at Duck’s Bill, and buried at noon in the cemetery near “Windy Corner.” He was one of the best of the younger officers of these days and had proved himself on many occasions. The lull after Neuve Chapelle continued, the Battalion relieving the Grenadiers every other day at 6 P. M. with almost the regularity of a civilian department. When it was fine, aeroplanes, taking no notice of the anti-aircraft artillery, ranged over them in search of certain heavy naval guns that had been reaching into enemy back-areas.

There was very little bomb-dropping on infantry, and the monotony of rifle-fire and occasional hand-bombing was only broken when our artillery, with a few shells to spare, fired into the enemy’s second line near Couteleux, where the Germans, behind heavy wire, were singing and “making much noise.” The effort drew a return fire of high explosives and a shell wounded 8 and killed 1 man of No. 3 Company. Our gunners said that they had killed many more than nine Germans, but sporadic outbursts of this kind were not well seen in the front line, which has to abide the result. As one officer wrote: “I am all for determined bombardment but do not appreciate minor ones, though I quite see it makes the enemy use his ammunition.” The 2nd London Territorial Artillery registered their guns also, for the first time, on April 12, and a platoon of the 15th County of London with its machine-gun was attached to the Battalion for instruction.

It is no sort of discredit to the Territorials that at first they did not know what to expect in this war, and reading between the lines one sees how thoroughly and patiently the Regulars performed their extra duties of schoolmasters, guides, philosophers, and friends to battalions whose most extended training had never dreamed of an ordered existence, half underground, where all things but death were invisible, and even the transport and tendance of the wounded was a mystery of pain and confusion worked out among labyrinths of open drains.

Among the distinguished visitors to be shown the trenches was Lieut.-Colonel R. S. de Haviland of the Eton O.T.C.—a man of many friends in that company. The come-and-go of visitors cheered and interested the men in the front trenches, since their presence even for a little proved that, somewhere in the world, life continued on not inconceivable lines. They jested naturally enough at those who looked on for a day or two at their hardships and went away, but the hardships were lightened a little by the very jest. Even while the Commandant of the Eton O.T.C. was with them the Battalion was energetically devising means to drain out an unspeakable accumulation of stagnant water down hill from a mine near the Shrine under the White House barricade (the White House was scarcely more than a name even then) into some German trenches at the foot of the slope. This work necessitated clearing a ditch by the roadside in which were found four German corpses, “besides pieces of other human beings,” which were buried, and in due course the whole flood of abomination was decanted on the enemy. “As it was very horrible, I don’t suppose they will like it,” writes one of the officers chiefly concerned.

On the same day, April 16, while 2nd Lieutenant H. Marion-Crawford, who it will be remembered was Brigade Bombing Instructor, was schooling some men of the 3rd Coldstream with live grenades one exploded and killed him instantaneously. He had shown the greatest ability in organizing the bombing work and his loss at that time, where bombers were being more and more leaned upon, was very seriously felt. He was buried four hours after his death in the cemetery near Givenchy.

On the 17th the Battalion went back to the Collège des Jeunes Filles at Béthune for a four days’ rest while its place in the trenches was taken by a couple of Territorial Battalions—the Post Office Rifles and the 15th County of London. While it was route-marched, and instructed, and washed and steadily drilled, the battle for Hill 60 was being fought with mines and hand-grenades, hand-mortars, and the first gas-shells, a score of miles to the north, where it was made known to the Germans how, man for man, their fresh and fully-trained troops could not overcome ours. The demonstration cost some three thousand casualties on our side, and, it may be presumed, strengthened the enemy’s intention to use gas on a larger scale in the future. But no echo of the little affair interfered with the work at Givenchy. The question was how the new Territorial battalions would hold their trenches, and one sees in all the documents a justified pride in their teachings when the Battalion went up to the front again on the 22nd and found the Territorials were keen and had kept their trenches clean. For the Guards teach, not unsuccessfully, that unless a man is clean he cannot be the best sort of soldier.

On the night of the 22nd April the sector was held by the 15th County of London, the Irish Guards and the Post Office Rifles, the remainder of the Guards Brigade being in rest. To the normal strain of a watching front line in foul weather was added a fresh burden. A few days before, the enemy had blown a mine in an orchard about fifty yards short of our trenches. It did no damage at the time, but the R.E. Mining Officer, Lieutenant Barclay, in counter-mining towards the crater it had made, saw, through the wall of his mine, Germans engaged in turning the crater into an advanced-post. Trench-mortars were fired at once to discourage them. Then came reports of underground workings heard in other directions and, notably, close to the parapet of a trench near the White House. This was on the evening of the 24th. Hardly had orders been given to clear the White House trench, when the ground at the junction of Lieutenant Barclay’s countermine and the German crater went up and the Lieutenant was killed. At the same time an explosion occurred near the White House. Two privates of the Irish Guards (2845 J. Mansfield and 3975 M. Brine) volunteered to enter our mine and see what had happened. They recovered Lieutenant Barclay’s body at great risk from the asphyxiating gases, and both men were recommended for the D.C.M. The explosion near the White House was, after inspection, put down as the work of a heavy shell, not a mine; but listening parties reported more underground noises and another section of trench was evacuated accordingly. To prevent the Germans consolidating themselves further in the crater which connected with Lieutenant Barclay’s mine, our 4.5 howitzers bombarded it on the 25th, and it was decided to blow our end of the mine as soon as possible to prevent the enemy working up it. This was difficult, for the galleries were full of foul gas—whether leaking from some adjacent coal-pit or laid on by the enemy was uncertain. The R.E. officer who went down to lay the charges was asphyxiated and several of his men were injured.

Not till the 29th of April were the difficulties overcome; by which time the enemy had driven a fresh shaft into it. After the explosion, a field-battery (17th R.F.A.) and the 47th Howitzer Battery fired a salvo at the German trenches. “There was a little rifle-fire, but soon all was quiet.” Mining, like aerial and bombing work, was still in its infancy, and the information supplied by the Intelligence was said to be belated and inadequate.

An interesting point is the unshaken serenity with which the men took the new developments. They were far too annoyed at being shifted about and losing their rest to consider too curiously the underlying causes of evil. They left the 3rd Coldstream to deal with the situation and went into billets in Le Préol, and the next day (April 26) into Béthune for their hot baths. A draft of 3 officers (Captain T. M. D. Bailie and 2nd Lieutenants A. W. L. Paget and R. S. G. Paget) with 136 N.C.O.’s and men reached them on the 27th, when there was just time to give them a hot meal and send them at once to the trenches in the bright moonlight under “a certain amount of rifle-fire and intermittent shelling from small guns which did not do much damage.” An enemy field-gun, long known as an unlocated pest, spent the morning busily enfilading the trenches, in spite of the assurances of our artillery that they had found and knocked it out several times. Appeal was made to an R.A. Brigadier who, after examining the ground, left the Battalion under the impression that “it was likely a gun would be brought up early to-morrow.” Nothing more is heard of the hope: but guns were scarce at that time.

There were other preoccupations for those in command. The second battle of Ypres, that month’s miracle of naked endurance against the long-planned and coldly thought-out horror of gas, had begun near Langemarck with the choking-out of the French and Canadian troops, and had continued day after day with the sacrifice of battalions and brigades, Regulars and Territorials swallowed up in the low grey-yellow gas banks that threatened Ypres from Langemarck to Hill 60, or beaten to pulp by heavy explosives and the remnant riddled anew by machine-guns. Once again England was making good with her best flesh and blood for the material and the training she had deliberately refused to provide while yet peace held. The men who came out of that furnace alive say that no after experience of all the War approached it for sheer concentrated, as well as prolonged, terror, confusion, and a growing sense of hopelessness among growing agonies. If a world, at that time unbroken to German methods, stood aghast at the limited revelations allowed by the press censorship reports, those who had seen a man, or worse, a child, dying from gas may conceive with what emotions men exposed to the new torment regarded it, what kind of reports leaked out from clearing-stations and hospitals, and what work therefore was laid upon officers to maintain an even and unaffected temper in the battalions in waiting. The records, of course, do not mention these details, nor, indeed, do they record when gas-protectors (for masks, helmets, and boxes were not evolved till much later) were first issued to the troops on the Givenchy sector. But private letters of the 25th April, at the time the German mine in the orchard occupied their attention, remark, “we have all been issued out with an antidote to the latest German villainy ... i.e. of asphyxiating gases.... What they will end by doing one can hardly imagine. The only thing is to be prepared for anything.”

The first “masks” were little more than mufflers or strips of cloth dipped in lime water. A weather-cock was rigged up near Headquarters dug-outs, and when the wind blew from the Germans these were got ready. False alarms of gas, due to strange stenches given off by various explosives, or the appearance of a mist over the German line, were not uncommon, and on each occasion, it appeared that the C.O. had to turn out, sniff, and personally pass judgment on the case. The men had their instructions what to do in case of emergency, concluding with the simple order, perhaps the result of experience at Ypres, “in event of the first line being overcome, the second immediately charge through the gas and occupy the front-line trenches.”

But to return to the routine:

The casualties for the month of April were 2 officers and 8 men killed and 1 officer and 42 men wounded. The strength of the Battalion stood at 28 officers and 1133 men, higher than it had ever been before.

The following is the distribution of officers and N.C.O.’s at that time, a little less than three weeks before the battle of Festubert.

The first ten days of May passed quietly. Mines, for the moment, gave no further anxiety, bombing and bombardments were light, reliefs were happily effected, and but 1 man was killed and 1 wounded. Two officers, Lieutenant H. A. Boyse and 2nd Lieutenant R. H. W. Heard, joined on the 2nd.

The Battle of Festubert

It was judged expedient while the second battle of Ypres was in full heat that the Germans should, if possible, be kept from sending any help to their front near Arras, in Artois, which at the time was under strong pressure from the French thrusting towards Lens. To this end, our First Army was ordered to attack the German Seventh Corps over the flat ground between Laventie and Richebourg on a front of some ten miles. The affair opened very early on the morning of the 9th May with a bombardment, imposing in itself by the standards of the day, but, as before, insufficient to break the wire or crush enough of the machine-gun nests. The Germans seem to have had full information of its coming, and dealt with it severely. The whole attack from north to south—Indian, Scottish, Territorials, and the rest—was caught and broken as it rolled against the well-wired German trenches.

The Battalion, whose part, then, was to maintain the right of our Army where it joined the French, heard the French guns open on the night of the 8th May, and by dawn the English gun-fire was in full swing to the north—one continuous roar broken by the deep grunt of our howitzer-shells bursting; for these were so few that we could pick them up by ear. The Guards had no concern with these matters till the trouble should thicken. Their business was to stand ready for any counter-attack and keep up bursts of rapid fire at intervals while they waited for what little news came to hand. It was uniformly bad, except that the French in the south seemed to be making some headway, and so far as aeroplanes and artillery observers could make out, there was no concentration of troops immediately in front of them. The Germans were too busy with the immediate English front to extend their commitments to the southward, and the next two days were, for the Battalion in their trenches, the quietest that they had known for some time. Then came orders to hand over to the 1st Scots Guards and rejoin the Second Division near Le Touret in readiness to carry on the attack which had broken down on the 9th. They bivouacked in the open, and the weather turned cold and wet, but the men, relieved from the trenches and assured of a change of work, sat it out “singing songs and playing games in the wet!” They had been forbidden to light fires, lest they should accidentally use the local farmers’ tobacco-drying poles or hedge-stuff. And while they waited under their mackintosh sheets the armies waited on the weather. A fresh attack was to be launched from Richebourg by the Rue du Bois, and southward as far as Festubert, but, this time, by night not by day, and after longer artillery preparation. The 5th and 6th Brigades were to open it, with the 4th (Guards) Brigade in support. It began at 11.30 on the 15th, when, at huge cost, something like half a mile in breadth and a quarter of a mile in depth of trenches was screwed out of the Germans by the morning of Sunday the 16th. The Battalion was moved from bivouac in the dawn of that day to support the 5th Brigade which had not gone so far forward as the 6th, and spent the day in trenches at Rue du Bois under incessant mixed artillery fire, which killed 1 man and wounded an officer and 28 men—the whole without being able to inflict any damage on the enemy. Indeed, the survivors of the battle here agreed that they saw no German dead other than some corpses left over from previous attacks. They returned to bivouac in wet and mist, and on the afternoon of the 17th were, with the 2nd Grenadiers, ordered to occupy the line then held by the 21st Brigade, and to push forward and dig in near a farm (Cour l’Avoine) bristling with machine-guns across a stretch of dead flat, muddy ground, pitted with water-logged shell-holes. The left was to keep touch with the 6th Brigade and the right with the Grenadiers, the whole line facing north-east from Quinque Rue.

They extended in the dusk. The left flanking company, No. 4, found no sign of the 6th Brigade, but received a message from the 5th King’s Battalion that their brigade orders were that the right of that battalion should get into touch with the Irish but would not be up till late; so one machine-gun was sent to strengthen that company’s flank. No. 2 Company, on the right flank, had reached its objective and dug itself in under bursts of raking machine-gun and rifle-fire directed against the dykes and bridges, which unfortunately wounded both Captain Mylne and Lieutenant Kemp, and the company command devolved on 2nd Lieutenant S. G. Tallents. The left flank, meantime, was in the air without tools or sandbags, but luckily the night was wet and it was allowed to dig itself in unmolested. The casualties for the day were only 2 officers wounded, 3 men killed, and 5 wounded.

The 18th dawned in wreaths of driving rain and mist that wrapped the flats. The preliminary bombardment of farm Cour l’Avoine was postponed for lack of good light, and in that lull a Brigadier whose men had already attacked the farm unsuccessfully came across the trenches to the Battalion and gave his experiences and recommendations. The weather made one low cluster of devastated buildings seen across the levels look remarkably like any other; and it seems pure luck that the attack, as originally intended, was not launched against the wrong objective. From noon on, the enemy began to shell the Battalion severely in its shallow trenches, and there were forty casualties while they lay awaiting orders. The attack began at 4.30 P. M. Cour l’Avoine was then so bombarded by heavy shell-fire that, as usual, it seemed that nothing in or around it could live. But as soon as the attacking companies rose and showed over the ground-line, the hail of machine-gun fire re-opened, and for the next three hours, the Irish suffered in the open and among the shell-holes, beaten down, as the other battalions had been before them, round the piled wreckage of Cour l’Avoine farm. In one trench, abandoned by the enemy, they fell into a neat German trap. Its parapet facing towards the British was bullet-proof enough, but the parados, though proof against the casual splinters of our shrapnel, which had no back-blast, had been pared thin enough to pass all bullets. Consequently, when the trench was occupied, accurately ranged machine-guns opened on the parados, and riddled the men to such an extent that one company had to get out and take refuge behind what had been the parapet. The greatest distance gained in all was about three hundred yards, and this with their left flank still in the air and protected by the one machine-gun which Lieutenant Straker, the unflinching enthusiast of the weapon, had brought into a communication-trench. At last they dug in where they were; the next brigade on the left linked up to the one machine-gun communication-trench, and with their old friends the Herts Battalion and the East Anglian Field Company, with whom they had tested mines together, they began to consolidate. The C.O. writes: “I tried to find out what officers I had left. Out of twenty-eight there were twelve, but four of these had been left behind with the transport a day or two before.” Of the eight who had come through the affair on their feet, only two were absolutely untouched. Here is the list: Captain J. N. Guthrie and 2nd Lieutenant V. W. D. Fox, killed by shell-fire, while leading their company—No. 1—to reinforce the line; 11 officers were wounded, Major the Earl of Rosse very severely in the head by a piece of shell; Major Reid, concussion from the explosion of a shell; Captain G. E. S. Young, hand; Lieutenant H. T. A. H. Boyse, head; 2nd Lieutenant S. G. Tallents, thigh; 2nd Lieutenant J. R. Ralli, stomach; 2nd Lieutenant E. W. Campbell, head; 2nd Lieutenant Hon. W. S. P. Alexander, neck; 2nd Lieutenant R. S. G. Paget, arm; 2nd Lieutenant J. K. Greer, leg and hand; 2nd Lieutenant C. de Persse, head. Twenty-two men were killed, 284 wounded, and 86 missing. The Battalion came through it all, defeated, held down at long range, but equable in temper and morale.

Small wonder that in the cheerless dawn of the 19th their Brigadier came and “made some complimentary remarks to the men who were standing about.”

The four officers who had been left behind were then ordered up to fill the gaps, and in that dawn the company commands stood: No. 1, Lieut. R. G. C. Yerburgh; 2nd Lieut. R. H. W. Heard. No. 2, Lieut. Sir Gerald Burke; 2nd Lieut. A. W. L. Paget. No. 3, Capt. T. M. D. Bailie. No. 4, Lieut. J. S. N. FitzGerald; Lieut. C. D. Wynter.

Almost at once shelling opened again, and Lieutenants Burke and Paget were wounded and 10 men killed or wounded by three high explosives bursting right over the line. It was sheer luck that, though shelled at intervals for the rest of the day, there were very few further casualties, and the Battalion returned “in small parties” to their bivouacs near Le Touret, where a hot meal, great-coats and a rum-ration awaited them. They were wet, tired, chilled, and caked with dirt, and cheerful; but next day, when they paraded before going into rest while they waited for reinforcements, there was hardly a speck of mud to be seen on them. Rest-billets at Lapugnoy, some seven or eight miles back, were out of range but not out of hearing of the guns, in a valley between delightful beech-woods carpeted with blue-bells. Here they lay off and rejoiced in the novel sight of unscathed trees and actual hills.

From Festubert to Loos

On the 24th May General Horne came to inspect and complimented them. His compliments are nowhere recorded, but it was remarked with satisfaction at his parade that the men “stood very steady and moved their arms well considering that they have not had much practice in steady drill lately.” They had merely practised unbroken discipline among the dead and the dying in a hopeless fight.

A draft of 126 men, under Lieutenant A. F. Gordon, arrived, and Lieutenant R. Rankin, who had been attached to the 1st Scots Guards since February, joined them at Lapugnoy, and the Rev. S. Knapp, R.C. Chaplain from the 25th Brigade, took temporary charge of spiritual affairs while their own Father Gwynne, who never spared himself, was trying electric treatment in Paris for lumbago, induced, as every one knew, by unsparing exposure.

On the 25th May they moved from Lapugnoy via Chocques to Oblinghem, some five miles to the north-east, a village of many and varied smells, close to an aerodrome where they lay at a moment’s notice, which meant that no one could take off his boots. A new type of gas-mask was issued here, and the men drilled in the use of it. Captain A. H. L. McCarthy, the medical officer who had been with them since October 25, accidentally broke his arm, and his duties were taken over by Lieutenant L. W. Bain, R.A.M.C.

On the 28th May a draft of 214 N.C.O.’s, and men under Lieutenant L. R. Hargreaves, 2nd Lieutenants N. F. Durant and L. C. Whitefoord, arrived, and the next day (29th) twelve more officers came in from England: Major G. H. C. Madden; Captain V. C. J. Blake; Captain M. V. Gore-Langton; 2nd Lieutenant J. T. Robyns; 2nd Lieutenant K. E. Dormer; 2nd Lieutenant Hon. H. B. O’Brien; 2nd Lieutenant R. J. P. Rodakowski; 2nd Lieutenant K. W. Hogg; 2nd Lieutenant J. Grayling-Major; 2nd Lieutenant F. H. Witts; 2nd Lieutenant W. B. Stevens; 2nd Lieutenant P. H. J. Close; bringing the Battalion up to 28 officers and 958 other ranks.

Headquarters and Companies then stood as follows:

There is no hint of the desperate hard work of the 2nd, reserve, Battalion at Warley, which made possible the supply at such short notice of so many officers of such quality. These inner workings of a regiment are known only to those who have borne the burden.

On the 31st May the 4th (Guards) Brigade was shifted from Oblinghem to billets near the most unpleasing village of Nœux-les-Mines, farther south than they had ever been before, as Divisional Reserve to a couple of brigades of the 2nd Division in trenches recently taken over from the French. The Brigade moved off in two columns, through Béthune down the main road to Arras, where they were seen by the Germans and shelled both en route and as they were billeting, but, as chance chose, without accident. The billets were good, though, like most in the early days, they needed cleansing, and a rumour went about that the trenches to which the Battalion was assigned were peculiarly foul, in very bad shape and would probably need re-making throughout.

Bombing classes with a new and an “absolutely safe” bomb (Mills), the routine of company drills and exercise, sports and an Eton dinner on the 4th June, filled the warm, peaceful days till it left Nœux-les-Mines for Sailly-Labourse. This was not the sector they had expected, but one farther to the north and nearer Cuinchy. Their trenches were an unsatisfactory line with insufficient traverses, not too many dug-outs, and inadequate parapets facing fields of fast-growing corn, which marked the German front two hundred yards away. They were reached from Cambrin through a mile and a half of communication-trenches, up which every drop of water had to be carried in tins. A recent draft of fifty had increased the Battalion to over a thousand men, and, apparently by way of breaking in the new hands, it was suggested that the Battalion should dig a complete new line of trenches. They compromised, however, by improving the existing one, which they shared with the 2nd Grenadiers, changing over on the 12th June to a stretch of fifteen hundred yards, held by the 2nd Coldstream. This necessitated three companies instead of two in the front line and the fourth in support.

The enemy here confined themselves to shelling timed to catch reliefs, but rarely heavy enough to interfere with working-parties digging or wiring in the tough chalk. On one occasion a selection of coloured lights, red, green, and white, had been sent up for the battalions to test. They chose a night when the enemy was experimenting on a collection of lights of his own, but soon discovered that rocket-lights were inadvisable, as their fiery tails gave away positions and drew fire. This disadvantage might have been found out in England by the makers instead of at 1 A. M. by a wearied Commanding Officer, whose duty was to link up and strengthen his trenches, keep an eye on the baffling breadths of corn in front of him, send reconnoitring parties out on all possible occasions, procure wire and Engineers to set it up, and at the same time keep all men and material in readiness for any possible attack that might develop on the heels of the bombardments that came and went like the summer thunder-storms along the tense line.

Sometimes they watched our own shells bursting in the German trenches opposite Givenchy, where the Battalion had stayed so long; sometimes they heard unexplained French fire to the southward. Next day would bring its rumours of gains won and lost, or warnings to stand-to for expected counter-attacks that turned out to be no more than the rumble of German transport, heard at night, moving no one knew whither. When our stinted artillery felt along the enemy’s trenches in front of them—for the high corn made No Man’s Land blind and patrol-work difficult—the German replies were generally liberal and not long delayed.

On the 17th June one such outburst of ours loosed an hour’s heavy shelling, during which Staff-Captain the Hon. E. W. Brabazon (Coldstream), on his rounds to look at a machine-gun position under the Battalion Machine-gun Officer, Lieutenant Straker, was killed by a shell that fell on the top of the dug-out. Lieutenant Straker, who was sitting in the doorway, had his foot so pinned in the fallen timber that it took an hour to extricate him. Captain Brabazon, in the dug-out itself, was crushed by a beam. He was buried at Cambrin next morning at nine o’clock, while the Battalion was repairing the damage done to the blown-in trenches and the French were fighting again in the south.

The brotherly Herts Battalion had been doing all the work of digging in their rear for some time past, and on the 20th the Battalion took over their fatigue-work and their billets at Annequin and Cambrin, while the Herts went to the front line. It was hot work in that weather to extend and deepen unending communication-trenches that cut off all the air. The Prince of Wales looked in on them at Annequin and watched the German guns searching for a heavy battery which had gone elsewhere. The movements of the Heir to the Crown, even as guardedly recorded in this Diary, not to mention others, and the unofficial stories of his appearance, alone, on a bicycle or afoot in places of the most “unhealthy” character, must have been a cause of considerable anxiety to those in charge of him. He spent his birthday (June 23) visiting along the line, which happened to be quiet after a bombardment of Annequin the day before. The place drew much fire at that time, as one of our batteries lay in front of it, and a high coal dump, used as an observation-post, just behind it. The Battalion was still on fatigues, and, in spite of many rumours and alerts, had suffered very little. Indeed, the total casualties of June were but 2 men killed and an officer and 22 men wounded. Meantime, the new drafts were learning their work.

The really serious blow they took was the departure at the month’s end of Lord Cavan, their Brigadier, to command the Fiftieth Division. They had known and loved him as a man who understood their difficulties, who bore his share, and more, of their hardships, and whose sympathy, unsparing devotion and, above all, abounding cheery common-sense, had carried them at every turn so far through the campaign.

He bid them farewell at Béthune on the 28th, where they were in rest-billets, in these words: