The fact that Austria was reported out of the war did not make the next day any less pleasant, even though it rained, and “all the windows in the Battalion Headquarters were broken by one shell.” Battalion Headquarters had come through worse than broken glass in its time, but was now beginning to grow fastidious.
On the afternoon of the 7th November the Battalion marched to Bavai over muddy roads in a drizzle. Even then, men have said, there was no general belief in the end of Armageddon. They looked for a lull, perhaps; very possibly some sort of conference and waste of time which would give the enemy breath for fresh enterprise. A few, however, insist that the careful destruction of the roads and railway-bridges and the indifference of the prisoners as they poured in warned them of the real state of affairs. (“It looked as if the Jerries had done all the harm they could think of, and were chucking it — like boys caught robbing an orchard. There wasn’t an atom of dignity or decency about any of ‘em. Just dirt and exhausted Jerrydom.”) What the Battalion felt most was having to make detours round broken bridges, and to dig ramps in mine-craters on the roads to get their Lewis-guns across. They jettisoned their secondline transport at a convenient château outside Bavai on this account; found that there were no arrangements for billeting in the town, so made their own, and, while Bavai was being shelled, got into houses and again were “very comfortable.” The 2nd Brigade were in the front line on the railway, and next day the 1st Brigade were to lead and capture Maubeuge, seven miles down a road which cut across the line of their earlier stages in the retreat from Mons, and three miles, as a shell ranges, from the village of Malplaquet.
They began their last day, half an hour after midnight, marching “as a battalion” out of Bavai with their Lewis-gun limbers. Twice they were slightly shelled; once at least they had to unpack and negotiate more mine-craters at cross-roads. It was a populous world through which they tramped, and all silently but tensely awake — a world made up of a straight, hard road humped above the level of the fields in places, rather like the Menin road when it was young, but with untouched tiled houses alongside. Here and there one heard the chatter of a machine-gun, as detached and irrelevant as the laugh of an idiot. It would cease, and a single fieldgun would open as on some private quarrel. Then silence, and a suspicion, born out of the darkness, that the road was mined. Next, orders to the companies to spread themselves in different directions in the dark, to line ditches and the like for fear of attack. Then an overtaking, at wrecked cross-roads, of some of the 2nd Brigade, who reported patrols of the 3rd Grenadiers had pushed on into Maubeuge without opposition, and that the rest of that battalion was gone on. Just before dawn, No. 4 Company of the Irish, marching on a road parallel to the highway, ran into a company of Germans retiring. The Diary says: “A short sharp fight ensued in which five of the enemy were wounded and twelve captured, the rest getting off in the dark.” But there is a legend (it may have grown with the years) that the two bodies found themselves suddenly almost side by side on converging tracks, and that the Irish, no word given, threw back to the instincts of Fontenoy — faced about, front-rank kneeling, rear-rank standing, and in this posture destroyed all that company. It was a thing that might well have come about darkling in a land scattered with odds and ends of drifting, crazed humanity. No. 2 Company solemnly reported the capture of two whole prisoners just after they had crossed the railway in the suburbs of Maubeuge, which they passed through on the morning of the 9th, and by noon were duly established and posted, company by company, well to the east of it. No. 2 Company lay in the village of Assevant, with pickets on the broken bridge over the river there, an observation-line by day and all proper supports; No. 4 Company in posts on the road and down to the river, and Nos. 1 and 3 in reserve; Yeomanry and Corps Cyclists out in front as though the war were eternal.
AFTER THE ARMISTICE
And, thus dispersed, after a little shelling of Assevant during the night, the Irish Guards received word that “an Armistice was declared at 11 A.M. this morning, November 11.”
Men took the news according to their natures. Indurated pessimists, after proving that it was a lie, said it would be but an interlude. Others retired into themselves as though they had been shot, or went stiffly off about the meticulous execution of some trumpery detail of kit-cleaning. Some turned round and fell asleep then and there; and a few lost all holds for a while. It was the appalling new silence of things that soothed and unsettled them in turn. They did not realize till all sounds of their trade ceased, and the stillness stung in their ears as soda-water stings on the palate, how entirely these had been part of their strained bodies and souls. (“It felt like falling through into nothing, ye’ll understand. Listening for what wasn’t there, and tryin’ not to shout when you remembered for why.”) Men coming up from Details Camp, across old “unwholesome” areas, heard nothing but the roar of the lorries on which they had stolen their lift, and rejoiced with a childish mixture of fear as they topped every unscreened rise that was now mere scenery such as tourists would use later. To raise the head, without thought of precaution against what might be in front or on either flank, into free, still air was the first pleasure of that great release. To lie down that night in a big barn beside unscreened braziers, with one’s smiling companions who talked till sleep overtook them, and, when the last happy babbler had dropped off, to hear the long-forgotten sound of a horse’s feet trotting evenly on a hard road under a full moon, crowned all that had gone before. Each man had but one thought in those miraculous first hours: “I — even I myself, here — have come through the War!” To scorn the shelter of sunken roads, hedges, walls or lines of trees, and to extend in unmartial crowds across the whole width of a pave, were exercises in freedom that he arrived at later. “We cannot realize it at all.” . . . “So mad with joy we don’t feel yet what it all means.” The home letters were all in this strain.
The Battalion was relieved on the 12th November by the 2nd Grenadiers and billeted in the Faubourg de Mons. All Maubeuge was hysterical with its emotions of release, and well provided with wines which, here as elsewhere, had somehow missed the German nose. The city lived in her streets, and kissed everybody in khaki, that none should complain. But the Battalion was not in walking-out order, and so had to be inspected rigorously. Morning-drill outside billets next day was in the nature of a public demonstration — to the scandal of the grave sergeants!
On the 14th a great thanksgiving-service was held in the Cathedral for all the world, the Battalion providing the Guard of Honour at the Altar, and lining the Place d’Armes at the presentation of a flag by the Mayor of Maubeuge to the Major-General. The massed drums of the Division played in the square in the afternoon, an event to be remembered as long as the Battalion dinner of the evening. They were all route-marched next morning for an hour and a half to steady them, and on the 16th, after dinner, set off in freezing weather for the first stage of their journey to Cologne. It ran via Bettignies and then to Villers-Sire-Nicole, a matter of five and a half miles.
On the 17th they crossed the Belgian frontier at Givet and reached Binche through a countryside already crowded with returning English, French, Italian, and Belgian prisoners. One Diary notes them like migrating birds, “all hopping along the road, going due west.” Binche mobbed the drums as one man and woman when they played in the town at Retreat, but it was worse at Charleroi on the 19th, where they could hardly force their way through the welcoming crowds. The place was lit from end to end, and the whole populace shouted for joy at deliverance.
Now that they had returned as a body to civilization, it was needful they should be dressed, and they were paraded for an important inspection of great-coats, and, above all, gloves. That last, and the fact that belts, when walking out, were worn over the great-coats were sure signs that war was done, and His Majesty’s Foot Guards had come into their own. But they found time at Charleroi, among more pleasant duties, to arrest three German soldiers disguised as civilians.
On the 23rd they left , fo
r Sart-St.-Laurent, whose Mayor, beneath a vast Belgian flag, met and escorted them into the town. The country changed as they moved on from flat coal-districts to untouched hills and woods. On the 24th they picked up a dump of eighty-four guns of all calibres, handed over according to the terms of the Armistice; passed through a tract of heavily wired country, which was “evidently intended for the Meuse Line that the Germans were to have fallen back on”; and a little later crossed (being the first of the Division to do so) the steeply banked, swiftly running Meuse by a pontoon bridge. Next their road climbed into Nanine, one of the loveliest villages, they thought, they had ever seen. But their hearts were soft in those days, and all that world of peace seemed good. They dared not halt at Sorinne-la-Longue the next day, as the place was infected with influenza (“Spanish fever”), so pushed on to Lesves, and on the 26th November to Sorée, where was another wayside dump of thirty or forty Hun guns. It is noteworthy that the discarded tools of their trade frankly bored them. Where a Hun, under like circumstances, would have re-triumphed and called on his servile Gods, these islanders (of whom almost a half were now English) were afflicted with a curious restlessness and strong desire to get done with the work in hand. All their world was under the same reaction. They had to wait at Sorée for three days, as supplies were coming up badly. Indeed, on the 28th November, the Diary notes bitterly that “for the first time in the war the supplies failed to arrive. The Quartermaster managed to improvise breakfasts for the Battalion.” It was not all the fault of bad roads or the dispersion of the troops. The instant the strain was taken off, there was a perceptible slackening everywhere, most marked in the back-areas, on the clerical and forwarding sides. Every one wanted to get home at once, and worked with but half a mind; which, also, is human nature.
They were on the road again by December 5 with the rest of their brigade, and reached Méan in the afternoon over muddy roads. lay the 6th they were at Villers-St.-Gertrude hill-marching through beautiful scenery, which did not amuse them, because, owing to the state of communications, supplies were delayed again. So, on the 8th December at Lierneux, fifteen miles from Villers-St.-Gertrude, another halt was called for another three days, while company officers, homesick as their men, drilled them in the winter dirt. On the 11th they crossed the German frontier line at Recht, and the drums played the Battalion over to the “Regimental March.” (“But, ye’ll understand, we was all wet the most of that time and fighting with the mud an’ our boots. ‘Twas Jerry’s own weather the minute we set foot in his country, and we none of us felt like conquerors. We was just dhrippin’ Micks.”) At Vielsalm, almost the last village outside Germany, they picked up a draft of sixty men to share with them the horrors of peace ahead, and a supply-system gone to bits behind them.
Their road wound through small and inconspicuous hamlets among wooded hills, by stretches of six or seven hours’ marching a day. The people they had to deal with seemed meek and visibly oppressed with the fear of rough treatment. That removed from their minds, they stepped aside and looked wonderingly at the incomprehensible enemy that tramped through their streets, leaving neither ruin nor rape behind. By the 18th December the advance had reached Lovenich, and, after two days’ rest there, they entered Cologne on the 23rd December with an absence of display that might or might not have been understood by the natives. They had covered more than two hundred miles over bad roads in bad boots that could not be repaired nor thrown away, and but one man had fallen out. The drums played “Brian Boru” when they entered the Hohenzollern Ring; their Major-General beheld that last march, and they were duly photographed in the wet; while the world that saw such photographs in the weekly illustrated papers was honestly convinced that the Great War and all war was at an end for evermore.
Then really serious trouble overtook them, which was, in some sort, a forecast of the days to come. Their billets at Nippes, in the suburbs of Cologne, were excellent and clean, though, of course, in need of the usual “improvements” which every battalion of the Brigade is bound to make; but on Christmas Day, owing to transport difficulties, the men’s Christmas dinner did not arrive! This thing had never happened in the whole history of the war! Pressure of work in the front line had delayed that dinner, as on the Somme; enemy attentions had caused it to be eaten in haste, a sort of Passover, as in the dread Salient, but complete breakdown was unheard of. The Battalion, rightly, held it mortal sin, and spoke their minds about the transport which was fighting mud and distance across the hills as loyally as ever. It was the back-areas that had been caught unprepared by the peace. But, on Christmas night (superb and unscrupulous staff-work went to secure it), a faithful lorry ploughed in from Paris with what was wanted, and on Boxing Day the full and complete Christmas dinner was served, and for the fifth and last time their Commanding Officer performed the sacred ritual of “going round the dinners.”
They sat them down, twenty-two officers and six hundred and twenty-eight other ranks, and none will know till Judgment Day how many ghosts were also present. For the first time since August, ‘14, the monthly returns showed no officer or man killed, wounded, or missing. The two battalions had lost in all two thousand three hundred and forty-nine dead, including one hundred and fifteen officers. Their total of wounded was five thousand seven hundred and thirty-nine. Of both these the 1st Battalion, by virtue of thirteen months longer in the field, could reckon more than a generous half.
They were too near and too deeply steeped in the war that year’s end to realize their losses. Their early dead, as men talked over the past in Cologne, seemed to belong to immensely remote ages. Even those of that very spring, of whom friends could still say, “If So-and-so had only lived to see this!” stood as far removed as the shadowy great ones of the pre-bomb, pre-duckboard twilight; and, in some inexpressible fashion, they themselves appeared to themselves the only living people in an uncaring world. Yet Cologne was alive with soldiery; roads were roaring full, as communications were restored; men stood guard over visible gun- and ammunition-dumps; the Battalion joined in marches to the bridge-heads, attended football matches, saw hosts of new faces belonging to new troops of all breeds; and watched about them, in the wet, grey weather, the muddy-faced Hun-folk, methodically as usual, trying to find out just how far it was expedient to go with the heralds of the alleged new order.
“But ye’ll understand, when everything was said and done, there was nothing real to it at all, except when we got to talking and passing round the names of them we wished was with us. We was lonely in those days. The half of us was Church of England by then, too. But we were lonely, ye’ll understand, as units. And our billets, mind ye, ma-agnificent, with walls and lockers and doors and all. The same for the officers! And there was Mr. — — that I’d known well any time these last two winters, freezing and swearing alongside of me in any shell-hole we could find, and glad to be out of the wind — and now, him cursin’ in his quarters because he had not the Jerry-talk for the German for: “Turn off that dam’ steam-heat!” And that’s war also.
“But ye might tell that we was lonely, most of all. Before God, we Micks was lonely!”
COMMANDING OFFICERS
1st BATTALION
FROM AUGUST 12, 1914
Rank
Name
From B.E.F.
To
Lt.-Col.
Hon. G. H. Morris
12.8.1.4
1.9.14
Major
H. H. Stepney
2.9.14
17.9.14
Lt.-Col.
Lord Ardee, C.B.E.
18.9.14
3.11.14
“ ” (temp.)
Hon. J. F. Trefusis, D.S.O.
4.11.14
15.8.15
“ ”
G. H. C. Madden
16.8.15
1.11.15
“ ”
R. C. A. McCalmont, D.S.O.
2.11.15
2.3.17
“ ” (actg.)
H. R. Al
exander, D.S.O., M.C.
3.3.17
23.5.17
“ ”
C. E. Rocke, D.S.O.
24.5.17
11.7.17
“ ”
R. V. Pollok, C.B.E., D.S.O.
12.7.17
19.6.18
“ ”
R. R. C. Baggally, D.S.O., M.C.
20.6.18
To return to England.
Loos and the First Autumn
OFFICIALLY, the formation of the 2nd Battalion of the Irish Guards dates from the 15th July 1915, when it was announced that His Majesty the King had been “graciously pleased to approve” of the formation of two additional Battalions of Foot Guards — the 4th Grenadier Guards, and the 2nd Battalion Irish Guards, which was to be made up out of the personnel of the 2nd (Reserve) Battalion. And, officially, on July 18 that formation took place. But those who knew the world in the old days, and specially the busy part of it that had Warley Barracks for its heart, know that the 2nd Battalion was born in spirit as in substance, long ere the authorities bade it to be. The needs of the war commanded it; the abundance of the reserves then justified it; and, though Warley Barracks had been condemned as unfit for use by the Honourable the East India Company a trifle of fifty odd years ago, this was not the hour to stand on ancient tradition. So the old, crazy barracks overflowed; the officers’ damp and sweating dog-kennels were double-crammed; and, by sheer goodwill and stark discipline, the work went forward to the creation. Officers and men alike welcomed it, for it is less pleasing to be absorbed in drafts and driblets by an ever-hungry 1st Battalion in France, than to be set apart for the sacrifice as a veritable battalion on its own responsibility, with its own traditions (they sprang up immediately) and its own jealous esprit-de-corps. A man may join for the sake of “King and Country” but he goes over the top for the honour of his own platoon, company, and battalion; and, the heart of man being what it is, so soon as the 2nd Battalion opened its eyes, the first thing that it beheld was its 1st Battalion, as an elder brother to measure its stature against in all things. Yet, following the ancient mystery of all armies, there were not two battalions, but one regiment; officers and men interchangeable, and equally devoted to the battalion that they served for the time, though in their deeper minds, and sometimes confessing it, more devoutly attached to one or the other of the two.
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 908