As your Brigadier I wish to express my feelings as to your most gallant work on the 15th September 1916 in the operations at Ginchy. The advance from the Orchard in the face of machine-gun fire is equal to anything you have yet accomplished in this campaign, and once more the 1st Battalion Irish Guards has carried out a most magnificent advance and held ground gained in spite of the most severe losses. In this, your first campaign, you are upholding the highest standard of bravery and efficiency for your successors and more praise than that I cannot give you. You may be called upon in the very near future to carry out similar work and I know you will not fail.
(Sd.) C. E. Pereira,
Brigadier-General,
Commanding 1st Guards Brigade.
This meant that they would be moved again as soon as they could stand up, and would go into their next action with at least 50 per cent. new drafts and half their proper allowance of officers. Indeed, they were warned, next day, with the rest of their Division for further operations in the “immediate future,” and the work of re-making and re-equipping the Battalion from end to end, saved them from that ghastly state of body and soul which is known as “fighting Huns in your sleep.”
On the 19th, Major T. M. D. Bailie’s body was brought back from the front and buried in the cemetery in the centre of the camp at Carnoy, and on the same day Lord Cavan, commanding the Corps, rode over and spoke to the officers on horseback of the progress of the campaign, of what had so far been accomplished on the Somme, what was intended for the future, and specially, as bearing on their next battle, of what their artillery had in store for the enemy. It was a simple, unadorned speech, the substance of which he repeated to the N.C.O.’s, then wished the gentlemen of His Majesty’s Foot Guards all good fortune and rode away.
The Division had expected to be used again as soon as might be, but their recent losses were so heavy that every battalion in it was speculating beneath its breath how their new drafts would shape. It is one thing to take in men by fifties at a time and weld them slowly in The Salient to a common endurance; it is quite another to launch a battalion, more than half untried recruits, across the open against all that organized death can deliver. This was a time that again tested the Depot and Reserve Battalion whose never-ending work all fighting battalions take for granted, or mention only to blame. But Warley and Caterham had not failed them. Over three hundred recruits were sent up immediately after the 15th and 16th, and on the 20th September the re-made Battalion, less than six hundred strong, with ten officers, marched out of Citadel Camp to its detestable trenches on Ginchy Ridge. The two Coldstream Battalions of the 1st Brigade held the front line there; the 2nd Grenadiers in reserve, and the 1st Irish Guards in support.
The ground was not yet a sea of mud, but quite sufficiently tenacious. “The area allotted” was old trenches and newish shell-holes with water at the bottom, in “the small rectangular wood east of Trônes Wood.” They were employed for three or four days in cleaning up the litter of battle all about the slopes and piling it in dumps, while the enemy shelled them more or less regularly with large black 5.9 shells—a very fair test of the new drafts’ nerves. The stuff would drop unheralded through the then leafy woods, and explode at large among the shelters and slits that the men had made for themselves. They took the noise and the shaking with philosophy as their N.C.O.’s testified. (“There was some wondherin’ in the new drafts, but no budgin’, ye’ll understand.”)
Reading between lines one can see that the R.C. Priest, the Reverend Father F. M. Browne, was busy in those days on spiritual affairs, for he was hit in the face on the 23rd, “while visiting a neighbouring battery,” so that Mass on the 24th—the day before their second battle of the Somme—was celebrated by the Reverend Father Casey. They were shelled, too, that Sunday in the wood, a single unlucky shell killing two men and wounding thirteen. The last available officer from the base, Lieutenant A. H. Blom, had joined the night before; all drafts were in; the ground was assumed to be walkable (which was not the case), and about 9 P. M. of a pitch-black Sunday night the Battalion left the wood and reached its assembly-trench, an extraordinary bad and unprotected one, about midnight. They were promiscuously shelled in the darkness, and the trench, when found, was so narrow that they had to stand on the edge of it till the Battalion that they relieved—it did not keep them waiting long—got out. No. 1 Company (Captain L. R. Hargreaves), No. 2 Company (Captain the Hon. P. J. Ogilvy) were in the front line, the latter on the right, No. 3 Company (Lieutenant A. H. Blom), and No. 4 Company (Captain Rodakowski) about 150 yards behind with the Battalion Headquarters, in a diagonal communication-trench well bottomed with water. Second Lieutenant T. C. Gibson was wounded on the way up, and was replaced by 2nd Lieutenant T. F. MacMahon who had been left in Regimental Reserve.
The idea of the day’s work for the 25th was less ambitious than on the 15th, and the objectives were visible German trenches, not imaginary lines on uniformly indistinguishable landscapes. Here is the Brigade-Major’s memorandum for the 1st Brigade on the lie of the land, issued on the 22nd September: They were to attack and carry the village of Lesbœufs, up the Ginchy-Lesbœufs road, about fifteen hundred yards, on a front, again, of five hundred yards; the Irish Guards leading the attack throughout on the left of the 1st Brigade, and the 2nd Grenadiers on the right. It was in essence the clearing out of a badly shaken enemy line by the help of exceedingly heavy barrages.
1st Guards Brigade No. 262