CHAPTER XII
THE BRIGADE'S POUNCE ON GUINCHY[ToC]
GALLANT BOY OFFICERS OF THE DUBLIN FUSILIERS
Guinchy fell within the same week as Guillamont. It was stormed on the following Saturday, September 9. The village had been taken two or three times previously—some accounts say four—by the British and recaptured each time by the Germans. But the grip of the Irish Brigade could not be relaxed. Standing on a hill 500 feet high, Guinchy was one of the most important enemy strongholds on the Somme, particularly for artillery. It had been fortified with the accumulated skill of eighteen months' labour by the German engineers. It was well protected by guns. Picked troops—the Bavarians—defended it. The Germans, according to a captured officer, believed that Guinchy could not be taken. "But," he added, "you attacked us with devils, not men. No one could withstand them." The capture of the place was therefore a good day's work. It stands solely to the credit of the Irish Brigade. They did it all by themselves.
The attack was mainly delivered from the direction of Guillamont. All through the week, for five days and nights, most of the Irish battalions had lain in the trenches—connected shell craters for the most part—under heavy artillery fire. In these circumstances they could get nothing hot to eat. They subsisted mainly on the iron rations of bully beef and biscuit, which formed part of each man's fighting equipment, and a little water. As for sleep, they were unable to get more than disturbed and unrefreshing snatches. Yet they were as full of spirit and had nerves as unshaken as if they had come fresh from billets, and they were as eager for a fight as ever.
In preparation for the advance, a thunderstorm of British fire and steel broke over the German trenches. The splitting, tearing crashes of the mighty "heavies" lying miles back; their firing accuracy, the penetrating power of their shells, had a heartening influence on the men. "Ah, those guns," said an officer of the Royal Irish Regiment—"their effect, spiritual and temporal, is wonderful. Your own makes you defiant of the very devil; the enemy's put the fear of God into you." The German lines were blotted out by smoke and flying soil. The ground rocked and swayed. It was like a heavy sea, only the waves were of earth.
The whistle sounded at four o'clock, and up and over went the men in a mass. Like the country before Guillamont, the country before Guinchy was slashed and gouged and seared, and the air had the sickening taste of gunpowder, poison gas and the corruption of the body. The men walked or ran, in broken array, in and out of the shell holes or over the narrow ledges that separated them. Soon the enemy got the range. Severed limbs, heads, arms and legs, and often the whole body, were flung high into the air. It was a dreadful scene. The noise, too, was appalling, what with the roaring of the guns, the bursting of the shells, and, not less, the frenzied yells of the charging masses. There is no shout in the mêlée of battle so fierce as the Irish shout. Every man is like "Stentor of the brazen voice," whose shout, as Homer says in the Iliad, "was as the shout of fifty men." So the Irish shouted as they dashed forward, partly in relief of their feelings, and partly in the hope of confusing and dismaying their adversaries. It was an amazing martial feat, that charge of the Irish Brigade at Guinchy. Within just eight minutes they had overrun the intervening ground and captured the village. Nothing stopped nor stayed them. They did not pause to lie down for a while and let the bullets and shrapnel fly over them. Many were seen, as the advance proceeded, lying huddled on the ground as if taking shelter. They had taken shelter, indeed, but it was behind a stronger thing than a mound of earth—and that is death.