THE IRISHMEN OF THE FIGHTING TENTH AT MACEDONIA
Told by One of the Fighting Irishmen
This is a spirited story of how the heroic Tenth (Irish) Division saved the situation for the Allies in retreat from Macedonia to Salonica. It is told for the first time by the London Weekly Despatch.
I—TALES OF THE IRISHMEN AND THE BULGARS
On December 3, which was a Friday, the British outposts brought in six Bulgar deserters who had much of interest to tell. They said that the Bulgars not only had suffered very heavily in their engagements with the Serbians but were losing men rapidly owing to sickness and frostbite.
What is more to the point, they warned the officers that a big attack against our line was impending, that it had been arranged to take place that day but that the severe snowstorm had caused them to put it off to another day which would not be long delayed.
March, 1916.
These opportune tidings which as events proved were thoroughly reliable, were communicated to headquarters and the necessary precautions for battle taken. The outposts were drawn in and finishing touches given to the trenches.
The night before the great Bulgar attack began one of the battalions held a pow-wow in their dug-outs, which they had covered in with a big tarpaulin that hid the smoke of a matchwood fire, lit for cheerfulness as much as for warmth. There was little in their surroundings to make them happy, but their own lively spirits allowed them to triumph over their environment and the night passed pleasantly in song.
In that bleak corner of the Balkans thousands of miles from home Englishmen sang themselves happy with sentimental and topical ditties. If a program had been printed it would have run like this:
Song, "My Little Gray Home in the West."
Mouth organ solo, "Who Were You With Last Night?"
Song, "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling."
Whistling solo, "Stop Your Tickling, Jock."
Interval for refreshments (tea, bully beef and biscuit sandwiches, jam sandwiches, etc.)
Song, "Yiddle on Your Fiddle."
Mouth organ solo, "Tipperary."
Song, "Are We All Here?"
Note.—Smoking allowed in all parts of the house.
Though the West Kents thus amused themselves and put many a shy comrade who refused to sing "in the oven," there was a feeling that danger was near. Instinct proved unerring.
The Tenth Division stood to all night, so that if the enemy came in the morning they would not find their hosts unprepared. In the first trenches were the Connaughts, the Munsters, the Dublin Fusiliers, the Hampshires and the Inniskillings, the latter to a large extent Ulster men holding the extreme right wing.
Dawn had scarcely broken when the enemy made his expected attack. The conditions wholly favored him, for a fairly dense fog prevailed, and under its cover the Bulgars were able to get within 300 yards of parts of our line without being observed. The Inniskillings were the first to be attacked; about 5 A. M. their outposts were driven in and then a great mass of the enemy swooped down on the trenches, but were driven back by the fire of our Maxim guns and by the steady magazine fire that came from the trenches.
Scarcely had the attack on the extreme right of our line had time to develop when the main body of Bulgars were seen running down a defile leading to the center of our front. They were perceived as a long, interminable stretch of men—a mass of shadowy figures revealed half distinctly in the mist. As they reached the end of the defile they spread out as from a bottle neck, and with wild cheers flung themselves on our line. But before they had got so far our guns smashed and battered the thick procession of men leaping out of the narrow gorge. It was impossible to miss them. British artillery had never had such a target since the first battle of Ypres, when the guns literally mowed down the half-trained German troops who attacked on the Yser.
The slaughter of the guns was magnified by the slaughter of the rapid magazine fire at short range. Wave after wave of the enemy came on, each broken as it swept out of the defile, but the Bulgars were not to be denied. Though their comrades fell thick and fast they came on, and by sheer impetus of numbers reached our trenches, where awful work was wrought. It was hand to hand fighting then—terrible to witness, terrible to think of. The short bayonet of the Bulgar, however, was of little use in these trench combats, and man for man the British won, but the Bulgars had the numbers and temporarily the first line of the Twelfth Division was overborne. The British were driven out.
The British artillery had been doing splendid work, but by now the enemy artillery was in full blast, and they poured a devastating and withering hail of fire on our positions, which through faulty ranging put out of action more of the Bulgars than it did of us. The Munsters and the Connaughts and the Dublins quickly rallied, and with a wonderful bayonet charge drove the enemy out of their trenches again. The enemy, massed in close formation, swarmed in once more, but against the deadly fire poured into them they could make no headway for some time. The brave Irish regiments were pouring lead into them as fast as they could load their rifles. They poured into the oncoming masses as much as 175 rounds at pointblank range. This will give an idea of the slaughter that went on this December morning, as the dawn slowly beat the mists away.
II—CRIES OF HALF-MADDENED BULGARS
Mingling with the roar of the artillery and the clitter-clatter of the machine guns and the sharp snap of the rifles were the hoarse cries of the half maddened Bulgars, whose officers ever drove them on to the death that came quick and hot from the British trenches. Men of splendid physique they were that faced our hail of lead, cheering in a sort of wild euthanasia of battle, with bugles and trumpets blowing defiant challenge as in the knightly days of the tourney. They did not know, many of them, whether they were attacking French, British or Turk, but unquestioning, unthinking, they came on with a fearlessness of life deserving of a better cause, leaping into our trenches and falling back dead with a bullet in the throat or a bayonet wound in the breast or with head blown off by one of our shells.
But it was, "for all our grim resistance," a hopeless kind of struggle. Sooner or later that unceasing stream of men issuing out of the narrow defile must sweep us back. Always the enemy returned to the charge, undeterred by heavy losses, undismayed by our deadly gun and magazine fire. The line held, and to their cheers we answered with our own cheers, and to their cries we gave back answer with our own cries, and if sometimes the thin line faltered the shouts of officers and men, "Stick it, jolly boys! Give 'em hell, Connaughts!" brought new life and new strength.
In the end we gave the enemy his dearly bought line of trenches and slowly fell back to our second line of positions, where the remainder of the divison joined up and helped us to beat off the sustained attacks, which lacked naught in violence. All day the Bulgars alternately bombarded and charged us. There seemed to be thousands and thousands of them. They gave us no rest at night. Wherever we stood they rained an unceasing fusillade of shell upon us and followed each rafale up with a determined infantry attack.
Outnumbering the Tenth Division in the proportion of at least eight to one, they were obstinately bent on its destruction at whatever cost to themselves. Their artillery far exceeded ours in weight of metal, but in effectiveness there was no comparison. Almost all our shells told, while many of theirs did no more than splinter the rocks yards away. So Monday, December 6, was passed with the Tenth Division mightily pressed but still well able to hold its own. Tuesday the 7th was an exact replica of the previous day.
The Bulgars heavily bombarded our line; then sent forward strong storming parties before whom we recoiled a little, but no more. The division never lost its cohesion, and it gave ground only at the rate of two miles a day, which is a proof, if any were needed, of the splendid rearguard action that this much outnumbered force fought. Our artillery kept them in sufficient check to give us all the respite we needed, and the rifle fire of the different regiments bit gaping wounds in the enemy mass that helped to throw them into temporary confusion.
Teodorow, the Bulgarian General, is a great believer in the German method of attack. He reckons no loss in men is too great if the objective be gained. The objective in this case was the decimation of the Tenth Division, and under his orders the Bulgars charged and charged until the snowdrifts over which the battle was fought were black with the recumbent forms of his men.
III—"WE OUTLIVED THE HORRORS OF SULVA"
We fought as at Mons. The arrowhead of the division consisting of two or three regiments, the Dublins, the Munsters and the Connaughts, took the shock of the enemy attacks, while the sides made good their retirement, then the arrowhead rapidly fell back and joined us with the main body, while other regiments received the shock in turn.
In the two days we drew four miles nearer to the Greek frontier. If we could continue to maintain this deliberate rate of retirement with our formations still intact we could hope for salvation, for we knew that re-enforcements were due.
The night of the 7th the Bulgars made a final attempt to smash our resistance. They redoubled the force of their bombardment; they increased still more the momentum of their infantry attacks. They came very near to achieving their purpose, and there were hours when one would have asked prayers for the Tenth Division, but British bulldog courage and obstinacy withstood all the fury of the enemy's onset, and our mountain artillery always found an easy target. By the 8th the force of the Bulgar attacks had spent itself.... In the two days' battle the Tenth Division inflicted on the enemy at least four times their own number of casualties and, what is possibly of equal importance, they taught him the temper and morale of British infantry....
The Tenth Division outlived the horrors of Sulva; it outlived the days and nights of biting cold on the Serbian frontier ranges, and it finished the miracle, to quote the official phrase, by "sustaining violent attacks delivered by the enemy in overwhelming numbers." The slow, punishing, rearguard action it fought allowed the Allies to withdraw all their accumulated stores and munitions and to fall back without congestion into Greek territory again.
The Tenth Division saved the situation by a display of courage and dogged heroism that cannot be too highly praised. One of these days we shall be told what the general said to the thinned units when he met them again at Salonica....
You ask the most talkative of them to give you a picture of the oncoming Bulgar masses.
"A mad, swearing mob, they were," he says, "on us as thick as ants. I suppose they were swearing. Anyhow, we couldn't understand their lingo, and they didn't say much after we had let them have five rounds of rapid fire." You ask another what he said when the Bulgars stormed the trench. "Said?" is the reply, "said? I never said anything. I was too busy pumping hell into them to say anything. But my pal was shouting hard enough for me and him as well." Get men with that spirit and neither Bulgar nor German shall best them.
It is hard to explain how the Tenth Division, encompassed as it was, won through, and perhaps the most satisfactory thing to do is to fall back on the explanation of a Munster Fanger, whose only grumble is that he was kept twelve hours in those terrible forty-eight hours' fighting without food.
"They beat us with numbers. We couldn't hope to hold up against the crowd they sent against us, a daft, clumsy gang of men. We gave 'em hell, but their numbers beat us. But two days wasn't much of a time to give theirselves to make us see we were beaten, and so we got away with them still coming after us. You'd got to be there to see what happened." It sounds very much like an anti-climax, but it is really what happened. The Tenth Division escaped because it hadn't time to know that by all the rules it was beaten.