The German offensive on the Bluff and the necessary measures of retaliation did not concern the Battalion for the moment. After a few days’ aimless waiting they were sent, in bitter cold and snow, to rest-camp at Calais for a week. They were seven hours slipping and sliding along the snow-covered roads ere they could entrain at Bavichore Street, and untold hours detraining at the other end; all of which annoyed them more than any bombing, even though the C.O. himself complimented them on their march “under very trying circumstances.” The Irish, particularly in their own battalions, have not the relief of swearing as other races do. Their temperament runs to extravagant comparisons and appeals to the Saints, and ordinary foul language, even on night-reliefs in muddy trenches choked with loose wires and corpses, is checked by the priests. But, as one said: “What we felt on that cruel Calais road, skatin’ into each other, an’—an’ apologisin’, would have melted all the snows of Europe that winter.”
Bombing instruction and inter-platoon bombing matches on Calais beach kept them employed.
On March 3, during practice with live bombs, one exploded prematurely, as several others of that type had done in other battalions, and Major Lord Desmond FitzGerald was so severely wounded that he died within an hour at the Millicent Sutherland (No. 9. Red Cross) Hospital. Lieutenant T. E. G. Nugent was dangerously wounded at the same time through the liver, though he did not realise this at the time, and stayed coolly in charge of a party till help came. Lieutenant Hanbury, who was conducting the practice, was wounded in the hand and leg, and Father Lane-Fox lost an eye and some fingers.
Lord Desmond FitzGerald was buried in the public cemetery at Calais on the 5th. As he himself had expressly desired, there was no formal parade, but the whole Battalion, of which he was next for the command, lined the road to his grave. His passion and his loyalty had been given to the Battalion without thought of self, and among many sad things few are sadder than to see the record of his unceasing activities and care since he had been second in command cut across by the curt announcement of his death. It was a little thing that his name had been at the time submitted for a well-deserved D.S.O. In a hard-pressed body of men, death and sickness carry a special sting, because the victim knows—and in the very articles of death feels it—what confusion and extra work, rearrangement and adjustments of responsibilities his enforced defection must lay upon his comrades. The winter had brought a certain amount of sickness and minor accidents among the officers, small in themselves, but cumulatively a burden. Irreplaceable N.C.O.’s had gone, or were going, to take commissions in the Line; others of unproven capacities had to be fetched forward in their place. Warley, of course, was not anxious to send its best N.C.O.’s away from a depot choked with recruits. The detail of life was hard and cumbersome. It was a lengthy business even to draw a typewriting machine for use in the trenches. Companies two thirds full of fresh drafts had to be entrusted to officers who might or might not have the divine gift of leadership, and, when all was set, to-morrow’s chance-spun shell might break and bury the most carefully thought-out combinations. “Things change so quickly nowadays,” Desmond FitzGerald wrote not long before his death; “it is impossible to see ahead.” And Death took him on Calais beach in the full stride of his power.
He had quietly presented the Battalion the year before with service drums. “No mention need be made of who paid.” They were the only battalion of the Brigade which lacked them at that time, and they had been the only battalion to bring them out of the beginning of the war, when, during the retreat from Mons, “the artillery drove over the big drum at Landrecies.”
Temporary Captain A. F. L. Gordon followed Lieutenant Nugent as Adjutant, and the Rev. F. M. Browne from G.H.Q. replaced Father Lane-Fox. They moved into the Salient again on the 6th March, billeting at Wormhoudt, and were told several unpleasant things about the state of the line and the very limited amount of “retaliation” that they might expect from their own artillery.
The snow stopped all training except a little bombing. Opinion as to the value of bombs differed even in those early days, but they were the order of the day, and gave officers the chance to put in practice their pet theories of bowling. A commanding officer of great experience wrote, a year later, after the Battle of Arras, thanking Heaven that that affair had “led to the rediscovery of the rifle as a suitable weapon for infantry,” adding, “I swear a bomb is of all weapons the most futile in which to specialize.”
The French were as keen on the bomb as the rest of the world, and parties of officers visited our bombing competitions at Wormhoudt, where the Battalion lay till the 16th March, moving to billets (Brandhoek) near Vlamertinghe for St. Patrick’s Day and the sports sacred to the occasion. They were played into camp by a naval party to the tune of “A Life on the Ocean Wave,” not a little to their astonishment. A little later they were to be even more astonished.
Then the 1st Guards Brigade took over their sector of the Fourteenth Division’s new front from the Sixth Division and, as usual, complained that the trenches which ran from the east to the town were in bad condition. The Brigade Reserve camp near Vlamertinghe was not much better. It is significant that, at this date, a train, specially oiled and treated to run noiselessly through the night, used to take the reliefs up into Ypres—a journey that did not lack excitement.