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

by Rudyard Kipling

After Hooge

On the 1st June they moved out of that front altogether, to billets at the back of Wormhoudt fourteen miles away, and thence on the next day, June 2, to Bollezeele westward, while the enemy were making their successful attack on the Canadians at Hooge. (“Have ye noticed there is always trouble as soon as you come out of the line; or, maybe, being idle you pay the more attention to it. Annyway, the minute we was out of it, of course Jerry begins to play up and so Hooge happened, and that meant more fatigue for the Micks.”) Meantime, they were in “G.H.Q. Reserve” for a fortnight, busy on a rehearsal-line of English and German trenches which the R.E. had laid down for them to develop. Our G.H.Q. were thinking of the approaching campaign on the Somme. The enemy were intent on disarranging our plans just as our guns were moving southward. Hooge was their spoke in our wheel. It came not far short of success; for it pinned a quantity of shellable troops to weak ground, directly cost the lives of several thousands of them and added a fresh sore to the Salient’s many weaknesses in that it opened a fortnight’s fierce fighting, with consequent waste, as well as diversion, of supplies. While that battle, barren as the ground it won and lost, surged back and forth, the Battalion at Bollezeele gained a glory it really appreciated by beating the 3rd Grenadiers in the ring, six fights out of nine, at all weights. Specially they defeated Ian Hague (late heavy-weight champion of England) whom Corporal Smith of the Battalion settled “on points.” There would be time and, perhaps, warning to attend to Death when He called. Till then, young and active life was uppermost, and had to be catered for. Indeed, their brigadier remarked of the social side of that boxing entertainment that “it reminded him of Ascot.”

But at the back of everything, and pouring in hourly by official or unofficial word, was the news of the changing fortunes of Hooge. Would that postpone or advance the date of the “spring meeting,” not in the least like Ascot, that they had discussed so long? Whichever way war might go, the Guards would not be left idle.

On the evening of the 13th June the order came “telling us that we would move up next day to Hooge and take over a section of the line from a Canadian brigade.” They went off in motor lorries, and by the evening of the 15th the Battalion was once more in the packed Infantry Barracks of Ypres where the Canadian officers made Battalion Headquarters their guests till things could be sorted out. Our counter-attack of the 13th June had more or less come to rest, leaving the wrecked plinths of the houses of Hooge, and but very little more, in the enemy’s hands, and both sides were living on the last edge of their nerves. Proof of this came on the night of the 16th, when the Battalion in barracks was waiting its turn. An SOS. went up in the dark from somewhere north of the Menin road, that stony-hearted step-mother of calamity; some guns responded and, all in one instant, both sides’ artillery fell to it full-tongued, while “to make everything complete a gas-signal was given by one of our battalions. A terrific bombardment ensued. Later in the night, the performance was repeated, less the gas-alarm.”

The explanation was as simple as human nature. Both sides had taken bad knocks in the past fortnight. Both artilleries, largely increased, were standing by ready for trouble, and what else could one expect—save a detonation? But local rumour ran that the whole Gehenna had been started by one stray ration-party which, all communication-trenches being blown in, was toiling to the front line in the open and showed against the sky-line—quite enough, at that tension, to convince the enemy that it was the head of a fresh infantry attack. The rest came of itself: but the gas-alarm was the invention of the Devil himself. It upset the dignity of all the staffs concerned, for the Brigadier himself, the H.Q. Staff of the Coldstream as well as the C.O. and company officers of the 2nd Irish Guards who were visiting preparatory to taking over the sector, found themselves in one tiny room beneath a brick-kiln, all putting on their helmets at once, and, thereafter, all trying to explain their views of the crisis through them. Some have since compared that symposium to a mass-meeting of unemployed divers; others to a troupe of performing seals.

They relieved the 1st Coldstream, very quietly, on the night of the 18th June in an all but obliterated section of what had been the Canadians’ second line and was now our first, running from the Culvert, on the Menin road, west of Hooge, through Zouave Wood, and into the north end of Sanctuary Wood. Four to eight hundred yards lay between them and the enemy, who were settling down in the old Canadian front line across the little swampy valley. The left of the Irish Guards’ sector was, even after the Coldstream had worked on it for three days, without dug-outs, and blown in in places, but it offered a little cover. Their right line, for nearly half a mile, was absolutely unrecognizable save in a few isolated spots. The shredded ground was full of buried iron and timber which made digging very difficult, and, in spite of a lot of cleaning up by their predecessors, dead Canadians lay in every corner. It ran through what had once been a wood, and was now a dreary collection of charred and splintered stakes, “to the tops of which, blown there by shells, hung tatters of khaki uniform and equipment.” There was no trace of any communication-trenches, so companies had to stay where they were as long as the light lasted. Battalion H.Q. lived in the brick-kiln aforementioned, just west of the Zillebeke road, and company commanders walked about in the dark from one inhabited stretch to the next, trusting in Providence. So, too, did the enemy, whom Captain Alexander found, to the number of six, ambling promiscuously in the direction of Ypres. They challenged, he fired, and they blundered off—probably a lost wiring-party. In truth, neither front line knew exactly where the other lay in that chaos; and, both being intent upon digging themselves in ere the guns should begin again, were glad enough to keep still. Our observation-parties watched the Germans as they crept over the ridge at dusk and dropped into the old Canadian line, where their policies could be guessed at from the nature of the noises they made at work; but no one worried them.

On the 20th June an unlucky shell pitched into No. 1 Company, killing three, wounding two, and shocking five men; otherwise there was quiet, and their brigadier came round the support-trenches that day and complimented all hands on their honesty as craftsmen. As he said, it would have been easy for them to have slacked off on their last night in a position to which they were not returning, whereas they had worked like beavers, and so the battalion which relieved them (the Royal Canadian Regiment resting at Steenvoorde since Hooge where it had lost three hundred men) found good cover and fair wire all along the sector. The Canadians were late, for their motor-buses went adrift somewhere down the road, and the Battalion only “just caught the last train” out of Ypres and reached camp near Vlamertinghe at dawn on the 21st June.

It had been a strange interlude of ash-pits and charnel-houses, sandwiched between open-air preparations, for that always postponed “spring meeting.” No troops are the better for lying out, unrelieved by active reprisals, among shrivelled dead; and even the men, who love not parades, were pleased at a few days of steady barrack-square drill, when a human being walks and comports himself as though he were a man, and not a worm in the mire or a slave bound to bitter burdens and obscene tasks. At Vlamertinghe they found, and were glad to see him, Captain FitzGerald, recovered after three weeks’ sickness in England, and joyfully back before his time; and Lieutenant R. McNeill, who had acted as Adjutant, returned to the command of No. 2 Company in the absence of Captain Bird, gone sick. They were busied at Battalion H.Q. with the preparation of another raid to be carried out on the night of the 2nd July “as part of the demonstration intended to occupy the attention of the Germans in this locality while more important events were happening elsewhere.” Lieutenant F. Pym, a bold, daring, and collected officer, was chosen to command the little action, and each company sent up eight volunteers and one sergeant, from whom thirty men and one sergeant were finally picked and set to rehearsing every detail.

On the 28th June they moved up to within four miles of the front and lay at Elverdinghe—two companies and Battalion H.Q. in the château itself, where they were singularly comfortable, and two in the canal bank, in brick and sand-bag dug-outs. It was true that all furniture and pictures had gone from the château with the window-glass, and that swallows nested in the cornices of the high, stale-smelling rooms, but the building itself, probably because some trees around blocked direct observation, was little changed, and still counted as one of the best places in the line for Brigade reserves. Their trenches, however, across the battered canal presented less charm. The front line was “dry on the whole,” but shallow; the support quite good, but the communication-trenches (it was the Battalion’s first experience of Skipton Road) were variously wet, blown in, swamped, or frankly flooded with three feet of water. Broken trenches mean broken companies and more work for company commanders, but some of the platoons had to be scattered about in “grouse butts” and little trenches of their own, a disposition which tempts men to lie snug, and not to hear orders at the first call.