Time after time they have been seen assembling by our flying men and observers, and time after time their ranks have been shattered by our guns. To the north of Lens there is a chalk quarry, which was not gained by the Canadians in their first attack, so that they established their line on the west side of it, and it was against this line that repeated efforts were made. Each attempt was smashed up, and then the Canadians advanced into the quarry and captured ninety men of many units and twenty machine-guns. The prisoners complain that their officers had lost their heads, and had been utterly demoralized. After violent attacks on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, the enemy made a great effort with every weapon of frightfulness on Friday evening, using poison-gas and flame-jets and a hurricane of high explosives in order to drive the Canadians off Hill 70. It failed with great losses to themselves when the German infantry attacked, and the attacks yesterday have had no greater success. The Canadians claim that the enemy's losses must be at least three times as great as their own. There were moments when the Canadians were hard pressed, and one of them was when a battalion commander was warned that the Germans were behind him. "I'm all right," he said cheerily, and then suddenly he said, "Good Lord, so they are." He was not heard from again for two hours and a half, and in that time he had organized his clerks and batmen and signallers and driven out a party of Germans who had worked out round No Man's Land and thrust a wedge behind him. The fighting has been savage and fierce, and the Canadians have used the bayonet at close quarters and fought hand to hand in the dark cellars of the mining cités. This phase of the war is as bloody as anything that has been done in the history of human strife.
XI
THE IRISH IN THE SWAMPS
August 21
It is of the Irish now that I will write, though their story is four days old and not a tale of great victory. It is easier to write of success than of failure, and of great advances than of grim rear-guard actions fought by men desperately tried but still heroic. But I want to tell the story of the Irish who went forward over bad ground on the morning of August 16, that morning when there was great success at Langemarck on the left, and something less than success on the right.
These Irishmen had no luck at all. They gained ground but lost it again. It is up to the Irish to tell this tale, for they were grand men and they fought and fell with simple valour. They were the Southern Irish and the men of Ulster side by side again, as they were at Wytschaete, where I met them on the morning of the battle and afterwards, glad because they had taken a great share in one of the finest victories of the war. Their laughter rang out then as they told me their adventures, all their young officers keen to say how splendid their men had been, and the men themselves drawing cheerful comparisons between this day's luck and that other day at Ginchy, on the Somme, when they gained another victory, but with thinned ranks, so that when I met them marching out they had but the remnants of battalions, and their general called out words of good cheer to them with a break in his voice. After Wytschaete they were in high spirits. Quick in attack, full of the old Irish dash, they were the men for a sudden assault, needing an impetuous advance, while they were fresh and unspoilt. But they had no luck this time.
Let me tell first the happenings of the Irish troops on the right, the Catholic Irish, whose own right was on the Roulers railway, going up to the Potsdam Redoubt. An hour or so before the attack the enemy, as though knowing what was about to come, flung down a tremendous and destructive barrage, answered by our own drum-fire, which gave the signal for the Irish to advance. The Dublin Fusiliers and the Royal Irish Rifles went forward on the right and the Inniskillings on the left. In front of them were numbers of German strong points, the now famous pill-boxes, or concrete blockhouses, which the enemy has built as his new means of defence to take the place of trench systems. They were Beck House, Borry Farm, and the Bremen Redoubt—sinister names which will never be forgotten in Irish history. There were also odd bits of trench here and there for the use of snipers and small advanced posts. As the first wave of the Irish assaulting troops advanced Germans rose from those ditches and ran back to the shelter of the concrete works, and immediately from those emplacements and from other machine-gun positions echeloned in depth behind them swept a fierce enfilade fire of machine-gun bullets, even through the barrage of our shell-fire, which went ahead of the Irish line. Many men in the first wave dropped, but the others kept going, and reached almost as far as they had been asked to go. The Royal Irish Rifles worked up the Roulers railway to the level crossing, and captured two German officers and thirty prisoners. The Dublin Fusiliers, on their left, were held up by machine-guns from the Bremen Redoubt, and later a message came down from that small party. It was from a young Irish subaltern. "I am lying out here in a shell-hole. All officers and men killed or wounded." Other men joined him, but were cut off and taken prisoners. On the left the Inniskillings, who had crossed over the Zonnebeke river, made good and rapid progress, capturing two strong redoubts and seizing an important little hill—Hill 37—which was one of the keys of the position. The success of the day would have been gained if the centre had been carried, and if the supporting troops could have come up. But neither of these things happened. The supporting waves were caught by the cross-fire of machine-guns, and they could make hardly any headway. The Borry Farm Redoubt gave most trouble. It contained five machine-guns and a garrison of sixty expert and determined gunners, and never fell all day. It broke the centre of the Irish attack, and was the cause of heroic but deadly efforts by the Irish Rifles, followed by Inniskillings. The Royal Irish Fusiliers attacked it by direct assault, knowing that everything was staked on their success. They went for it like tigers, but without avail. One of the battalion officers, seeing this failure, but knowing how all depended upon the capture of that fort, thereupon led another attack by a company of the Royal Irish Rifles. This met the same fate.
Meanwhile the men of the Ulster Division were fighting just as desperately. They had ahead of them several of the concrete forts, one of which, near Pond Farm, was a strong defensive system with deep dug-outs and overhead cover proof against shell-fire. This and other strong points had wooden platforms above the concrete walls, on which the gunners could mount their machines very quickly, firing them behind two yards thickness of concrete.
Opposite the Pommern Redoubt stands a small hill which the enemy has used for a long time as one of his chief observation-posts, as it gives a complete view of our ground. Beyond that the country rises to a saddle-back ridge, with double spurs guarded on the lower slope by a small fort called Gallipoli, and from these spurs he could fling a machine-gun barrage across the low ground. An ugly position to attack. It was worse for the Ulster men because of the state of the ground, which was a thin crust over a bog of mud. On the left some of the Inniskillings and Irish Rifles rushed forward as far as a network of trenches and wired defences, which they took in a fierce assault against a Bavarian garrison, who fought to a finish. Here they recaptured one of our Lewis guns lost in the fighting on July 31. On the right the Irish Rifles and the Fusiliers, walking through the fire of many machine-guns, made a straight attack upon Hill 35, which dominated the centre of the Ulster attack. Before it were some gun-pits, and the Ulster men, by most desperate efforts, took and crossed these pits and fought up the slopes of the hill beyond. But they could not keep the hill nor the pits. So after many hours of frightful fighting the situation was that some scattered groups of Dublins and Royal Irish held out on a far goal with exposed flanks, with some Inniskillings clinging to the slopes of Hill 37, while on the other side of the Zonnebeke river the Ulster men had been forced off their little hill, and had been unable to get beyond the German chain of concrete houses.