Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated)

by Rudyard Kipling

  Besides the fighting forces, provision’ must be made for the graves of the merchant-seamen and discharged men whose deaths were due to enemy action, for Sisters and Nurses killed or died of wounds or disease, for Labour units of all races, and, indeed, for all who have served in any capacity in the war. The distinctive badges of these headstones are not yet all decided upon.

  Inscriptions, Registers, and Planning

  In addition to the name and rank upon the headstone, the Commission feel that relatives should, if they wish, add a short inscription of their own choice as an expression of personal feeling and affection. These inscriptions will be at the relatives’ expense, and, to avoid unduly crowding the stones with very small lettering, which, besides being difficult to read, does not weather well, it has been

  found necessary to restrict the length of the inscription to sixty-six letters.*

  Every cemetery will keep registers of the dead buried there, and in these registers it is hoped that it will be possible, with the assistance of his kin, to enter the age, parentage, and birthplace of each known man.

  The planning and planting of the cemeteries must depend largely on their site and the climate of the country, but it is proposed that, as a general rule, the cemeteries should have buildings designed for services, ceremonies, and shelter, I where the register of that cemetery will be kept under permanent safeguard. To recapitulate : —

  1. For each Cemetery its Cross of Sacrifice and Stone of Remembrance, the latter bearing the

  quotation (Ecclesiasticus 44, v. 14) “THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE”;

  2. For each grave its enduring headstone, Starved ‘with the symbol of the dead mans faith, his

  name and rank, his Regimental badge, and whatever text or inscription his relatives

  may add ;

  3. In the Cemetery building the register in which the man’s birthplace, age, and parentage can

  be recorded and referred to.

  * In counting the sixty-six letters, the space between any two words most be reckoned as one letter.

  Memorials to the Missing

  THIS matter is naturally of the deepest concern to the relatives of those whose bodies have never been recovered or identified, or whose graves, once made, have been destroyed by later battles. Their number is not small, and Sir Frederic Kenyon has suggested that the best way to record their memory would be to place a tablet on the walls or cloisters at the cemetery nearest to the spot where it is presumed they have lost their lives. In the case of officers and men in the Flying Corps, the place of whose death could not be known within many miles, the tablet might be placed in the cemetery nearest to the camp from which they had; started on their last flight. But in any case relatives may be| assured that! the dead; who have no known resting-place will be made equal with the others, and that each case will be dealt with upon full consideration of its’ merits as regards the site and the place of the memorial.

  Graves of Indian Troops

  THE symbols ofj their faith will also be carved on the headstones of the soldiers of the Indian Armies who fought beside their comrades from England and throughout the Empire in France and Belgium in 1914-16; and of the Indian Labour Corps who have since worked and taken the risks of life behind the lines. A committee of the Commission has decided upon the form that these symbols should take, and has further recommended that a Mohammedan mosque and Hindu temple should be erected in France for remembrance of the sacrifice made by Hindus and Mohammedans alike in the war. The designs for these buildings have been submitted for approval in India. In all such matters the treatment of the bodies of “these soldiers will be in strict conformity with the practice of their religions, and will be carried out under the supervision of native officers.

  Treatment of Isolated Graves

  AFTER so many years of fighting over densely populated and civilised countries like France and Belgium, it is inevitable that there must be single graves and groups in positions where, when the life of the land goes forward again, they cannot be reached or tended. Some lie in what were once town or village thoroughfares, and will be so again ; others by the side ot railway stations and goods yards, houses or factories, in arable or pasture fields, parks, gardens and the like. The objections to leaving these graves where they are need not be dwelt upon. No precautions save them from being encroached upon or obliterated in the course of time. There is, moreover, a strong sentiment among all ranks that such scattered graves look lonely, and the instinct of the Services demands that those who fell by the wayside should be gathered in to rest with the nearest main body of their companions. That is what the Commission, with all due care and reverence, proposes to do.

  Removal of Bodies

  In view of the enormous number (over half a million) of our dead in France alone, the removal of bodies to England would be impossible, even were there a general desire for it. But the overwhelming majority of relatives are content that their kin should lie — officers and men together — in the countries that they have redeemed. The Allied nations, too, have freely given their land to our dead for ever, and that offer has been accepted by the Governments. To allow exhumation and removal in the few cases where it has been suggested would, it seemed to the Commission, be undesirable, if only on the principle of equality, and, judging from what many gallant fighters have said and written before they in their turn fell, a violation, in all but a few special cases, of the desire of the dead themselves.

  Battle Memorials

  MEMORIALS to commemorate the parts borne :by particular jarmies, divisions, or regiments in campaigns and battles, such as, to name only a few, the Canadians at Ypres, the South Africans at Delville Wood, the Australians at Amiens, the British at the breaking of the Hindenburg line, will be advised upon by a fully representative military committee, and it is to be hoped that the best art of the Empire will give its services and advice in the designing of them.

  Suggestions from the Public

  BUT the work so far has only been blocked out, and there is room and welcome for suggestions of every kind from the public throughout the world, whose servants the Commission are. For example, it has been suggested that the entrance to individual cemeteries should carry a text or inscription, and it has been decided that monuments should be erected to the dead whose graves are unknown, of a special form which has yet to be settled. These are points, among others, upon which the Commission would be grateful for expressions of opinion.

  The Progress of the Work

  MEANTIME, the long and difficult business of identification and registration goes forward still on all fronts. The various architects to whose charge the cemeteries have been allotted are preparing their designs for the planting and the building required in France, and steps are being taken to prepare dignified and characteristic designs for our cemeteries in the East and elsewhere. All this can be effected in reasonable time ; but there is no possibility of expediting the delivery of the headstones. More than half a million of these will be required, and at present there is not labour enough in all the world to cut, carve and letter them. While they are being made the wooden crosses will stand, and, where necessary, will be renewed ; the registers will be filled and filed, and the cemeteries will be faithfully and reverently tended.

  London: Published by His Majesty’s Stationery Office.

  THE IRISH GUARDS IN THE GREAT WAR

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  MONS TO LA BASSÉE

  LA BASSÉE TO LAVENTIE

  THE SALIENT TO THE SOMME

  THE SOMME TO GOUZEAUCOURT

  ARRAS TO THE ARMISTICE

  LOOS AND THE FIRST AUTUMN

  SALIENT AND THE SOMME

  RANCOURT TO BOURLON WOOD

  ARRAS TO THE END

  APPENDIX A

  APPENDIX B

  APPENDIX C

  Introduction

  THESE volumes try to give soberly and with what truth is possible, the experiences of both battalions of the Irish Guards from 1914 t
o 1918. The point of view is the battalions’, and the facts mainly follow the Regimental Diaries, supplemented by the few private letters and documents which such a war made possible, and by some tales that have gathered round men and their actions.

  As evidence is released, historians may be able to reconstruct what happened in or behind the battle-line; what motives and necessities swayed the actors; and who stood up or failed under his burden. But a battalion’s field is bounded by its own vision. Even within these limits, there is large room for error. Witnesses to phases of fights die and are dispersed; the ground over which they fought is battered out of recognition in a few hours; survivors confuse dates, places, and personalities, and in the trenches, the monotony of the waiting days and the repetition-work of repairs breed mistakes and false judgments. Men grow doubtful or oversure, and, in all good faith, give directly opposed versions. The clear sight of a comrade so mangled that he seems to have been long dead is burnt in on one brain to the exclusion of all else that happened that day. The shock of an exploded dump, shaking down a firmament upon the landscape, dislocates memory throughout half a battalion; and so on in all matters, till the end of laborious enquiry is too often the opening of fresh confusion. When to this are added the personal prejudices and misunderstandings of men under heavy strain, carrying clouded memories of orders half given or half heard, amid scenes that pass like nightmares, the only wonder to the compiler of these records has been that any sure fact whatever should be retrieved out of the whirlpool of war.

  It seemed to him best, then, to abandon all idea of such broad and balanced narratives as will be put forward by experts, and to limit himself to matters which directly touched the men’s lives and fortunes. Nor has he been too careful to correct the inferences of the time by the knowledge of later events. From first to last, the Irish Guards, like the rest of our armies, knew little of what was going on round them. Probably they knew less at the close of the war than at the beginning when our forces were so small that each man felt himself somebody indeed, and so stood to be hunted through the heat from Mons to Meaux, turned again to suffer beneath the Soupir ridges, and endured the first hideous winter of the Salient where, wet, almost weaponless, but unbroken, he helped in the long miracle of holding the line.

  But the men of ‘14 and ‘15, and what meagre records of their day were safe to keep, have long been lost; while the crowded years between remove their battles across dead Belgian towns and villages as far from us as the fights in Homer.

  Doubtless, all will be reconstructed to the satisfaction of future years when, if there be memory beyond the grave, the ghosts may laugh at the neatly groomed histories. Meantime, we can take it for granted that the old Regular Army of England passed away in the mud of Flanders in less than a year. In training, morale, endurance, courage, and devotion the earth did not hold its like, but it possessed neither the numbers, guns, nor equipment necessary for the type of war that overtook it. The fact of its unpreparedness has been extolled as proof of the purity of its country’s ideals, which must be great consolation to all concerned. But, how slowly that equipment was furnished, how inadequate were our first attempts at bombs, trench-mortars, duck-boards, wiring, and the rest, may be divined through the loyal and guarded allusions in the Diaries. Nor do private communications give much hint of it, for one of the marvels of that marvellous time was the silence of those concerned on everything that might too much distress their friends at home. The censorship had imposed this as a matter of precaution, but only the spirit of the officers could have backed the law so completely; and, as better days came, their early makeshifts and contrivances passed out of remembrance with their early dead. But the sufferings of our Armies were constant. They included wet and cold in due season, dirt always, occasional vermin, exposure, extreme fatigue, and the hourly incidence of death in every shape along the front line and, later in the furthest back-areas where the enemy aeroplanes harried their camps. And when our Regular troops had been expended, these experiences were imposed upon officers and men compelled to cover, within a few months, the long years of training that should go to the making of a soldier — men unbroken even to the disturbing impact of crowds and like experiences, which the conscript accepts from his youth. Their short home-leaves gave them sudden changes to the tense home atmosphere where, under cover of a whirl of “entertainment” they and their kin wearied themselves to forget and escape a little from that life, on the brink of the next world, whose guns they could hear summoning in the silences between their talk. Yet, some were glad to return — else why should youngsters of three years’ experience have found themselves upon a frosty night, on an ironbound French road, shouting aloud for joy as they heard the stammer of a machine-gun over the rise, and turned up the well-known trench that led to their own dug-out and their brethren from whom they had been separated by the vast interval of ninety-six hours? Many have confessed to the same delight in their work, as there were others to whom almost every hour was frankly detestable except for the companionship that revealed them one to another till the chances of war separated the companions. And there were, too, many, almost children, of whom no record remains. They came out from Warley with the constantly renewed drafts, lived the span of a Second Lieutenant’s life and were spent. Their intimates might preserve, perhaps, memories of a promise cut short, recollections of a phrase that stuck, a chance-seen act of bravery or of kindness. The Diaries give their names and fates with the conventional expressions of regret. In most instances, the compiler has let the mere fact suffice; since, to his mind, it did not seem fit to heap words on the doom.

  For the same reason, he has not dealt with each instance of valour, leaving it to stand in the official language in which it was acknowledged. The rewards represent but a very small proportion of the skill, daring, and heroism actually noted; for no volume could hold the full tale of all that was done, either in the way of duty, under constraint of necessity and desire to keep alive, or through joy and pleasure in achieving great deeds.

  Here the Irish rank and file by temperament excelled. They had all their race’s delight in the drama of things; and, whatever the pinch-whether ambushed warfare or hand-to-hand shock, or an insolently perfect parade after long divorce from the decencies — could be depended upon to advance the regimental honour. Their discipline, of course, was that of the Guards, which, based upon tradition, proven experience, and knowledge of the human heart, adjusts itself to the spirit of each of its battalions. Though the material of that body might be expended twice in a twelvemonth, the leaven that remained worked on the new supplies at once and from the first. In the dingy out-of-date barracks at Warley the Regimental Reserves gathered and grew into a full-fledged Second Battalion with reserves of its own, and to these the wounded officers and men sent home to be repatched, explained the arts and needs of a war which, apparently always at a stand, changed character every month. After the utter inadequacy of its opening there was a period of handmade bombs and of loaded sticks for close work; of nippers for the abundant wire left uncut by our few guns; of remedies for trench-feet; or medicaments against lockjaw from the grossly manured Belgian dirt, and of fancy timberings to hold up sliding trenches. In due course, when a few set battles, which sometimes gained several hundred yards, had wasted their many thousand lives, infallible forms of attack and defence developed themselves, were tried and generally found wanting, while scientific raids, the evolution of specialists, and the mass of regulated detail that more and more surrounded the life of the trenches, occupied their leisure between actions. Our battalions played themselves into the game at the awful price that must be paid for improvisation, however cheery; enduring with a philosophy that may have saved the war, the deviations and delays made necessary by the demands of the various political and other organisations at home.

  In the same spirit they accepted the inevitable breakdowns in the business of war-by-experiment; for it is safe to say that there was hardly an operation in which platoons, companies, regiments
, brigades, or divisions were not left with one or both flanks in the air. Among themselves, officers and men discussing such matters make it quite clear how and why such and such units broke, were misled, or delayed on their way into the line. But when a civilian presumes to assist, all ranks unite against his uninformed criticisms. He is warned that, once over the top, no plans hold, for the machine-gun and the lie of the ground dictate the situation to the platoon-commander on whom all things depend and who sees, perhaps, fifty yards about him. There are limits, too, of shock and exhaustion beyond which humanity cannot be pressed without paying toll later. For which cause it may happen that a Division that has borne long agony unflinching, and sincerely believes itself capable of yet more, will, for no reason then apparent (at almost the mere rumour of noises in the night) collapse ignominiously on the same ground where, a month later, with two thirds of its strength casualties, it cuts coolly and cleanly to its goal. And its fellows, who have borne the same yoke, allow for this.