The Guards Division lay, as we know, between the First French Division on its left and our Thirty-eighth Division on its right; the line of the Ypres-Staden railway with its blockhouses marking the limit between the two British divisions. This was an awkward junction, which caused trouble later. Four objectives were laid down. The first was the nearest German system of trenches, which had lain under searching artillery-fire for some time, and would not be difficult; the second, six hundred yards farther on, ran parallel to the Pilckem road; the third an imaginary line a hundred yards beyond the well-known Iron Cross Kortikaar-Cabaret road, beyond Pilckem Ridge, and the last went up to the Steenbeek River. The total depth of the run was about two miles from the canal bank.
The 2nd (Ponsonby’s) and the 3rd (Seymour’s) Brigades were to take the first three objectives, after which the 1st (Jeffreys’s Brigade), following close behind, was to come through and take the fourth. The 2nd Brigade, which was on the right of the division, held the front from the Ypres-Staden railway-bridge over the canal to Boesinghe Bridge. The 3rd Brigade continued the line to the left for six hundred yards. The 1st Brigade, less the 1st Irish and the 3rd Coldstream, which were under the direct orders of General Feilding, G.O.C. Guards Division, was in reserve.
Our barrages, conceived on a most generous scale, were timed to creep at a hundred yards in four minutes. They were put down at 3.50 A. M., July 31, a dark, misty morning on the edge of rain, and the whole attack went forward with satisfying precision so far as the Guards Division was concerned. The various objectives were reached at the given times, and level with the French advance. By eleven o’clock the farthest was in our hands, and what difficulties there were arose from the division on the Guards’ right being held up among unreduced blockhouses enfilading them from the railway line.
Meantime, the 1st Battalion Irish Guards spent the day, after breakfast at a quarter-past five, in reserve round the little two-roomed, sand-bagged and concreted Chasseur farm, where there was an apple-tree with all its leaves on; under half an hour’s notice to move up if required. But no order came. They were shelled intermittently all day, with a few casualties, and Captain F. S. Law was slightly wounded. The evening, as pessimists prophesied, closed in heavy rain, and the ground began to go. They stayed where they were till the afternoon of the 1st August, when word came to take over the line held by the 3rd Grenadiers and the 1st Coldstream on the first, second, and third objectives.
They moved out in rain into the usual wilderness of shell-holes filling with water, but for the moment were not shelled. No. 4 Company went by daylight to its positions on the first objective—Cariboo Wood and some half-wiped-out German trench-systems in a partly destroyed wood. The other companies waited till dusk before distributing themselves on the Green line—the third objective—which was about a thousand yards this side the Steenbeek River. While the move was in progress, a brigade of the Thirty-eighth Division reported that they had been shelled out of their advanced positions on the river and were falling back, which, as far as could be seen, would leave the right flank of the Guards Division in the air. If this were so, and the dusk and the rain made it difficult to judge, it was imperative to put everything else aside and form a defensive flank along the railway line that separated the two divisions. The companies were diverted accordingly, hastily re-directed in the dark, and, when all was done, the brigade that had made the trouble went back to its original position on the further objective. There was small choice of sleeping-places that night. Such German blockhouses as came handiest were used for battalion and company headquarters while the companies lay out in the wet and talked about the prospect of hot meals. They were not very severely shelled, but when August 2 broke in heavy rain and the brigade on their right continued to send up SOS’s at intervals, thereby obliging them to maintain their flank on the railway line, they felt that “conditions were becoming exceedingly trying,” as the Diary says. Then came a relief, which was at least a change. The 1st Scots Guards relieved the two platoons of No. 4 Company back in Cariboo trenches, where the shelling was light; and later, as darkness fell, set the other companies free to go forward and relieve the 2nd Grenadiers at the front of things. The change-over took five hours, and in the middle of it the brigade on their right once more sent up SOS’s, which brought down a German barrage, and necessitated every one “standing to” for developments. It proved a false alarm, and “no action was taken by the enemy”—an omission which it is conceivable the Guards Division rather regretted. Beyond question that Brigade had been badly held up among the blockhouses, and had been savagely shelled in and out of shell-holes that bewilder troops; but—till their own trouble comes—no troops go out of their way to make excuses for a nightmare of SOS’s. (“There’s enough fatigues, ye’ll understand, when you’re out o’ the line. Extra fatigues in action, like defensive flanks, is outrageous.”)
They were shelled and rained upon throughout the whole of the night of the 2nd August, and on the evening of the 3rd, still in ceaseless rain, were relieved by the 1st Scots Guards and marched through mud, water and darkness, over broken ground “beyond description” to Elverdinghe Siding, where they were packed into trucks at five in the morning and taken to Poll Hill Camp near Bandaghem for training.
Their casualties, all things reckoned, had been very light. They had gone into action on the 31st July with 26 officers and 1002 other ranks and had lost only 2 officers and 125 other ranks from all causes.
The total casualties for the twelve battalions of the Guards Division in the action had been 59 officers and 1876 men in two days; and rain falling without a break for the next four days drowned out the sad fight. The enemy’s line had been pushed back from Bixschoote, through Frezenberg, Westhoek, Stirling Castle, and Shrewsbury Forest down to Hollebeke. At that stage our armies, as had happened so often on the Somme, were immobilised. The clay ground was cullendered and punched by the shells into chains of pools and ponds. All valleys and hollows turned into bogs where, if men wandered from the regular tracks across them, they drowned or were mired to death. If they stayed on the plankings the enemy’s guns swept them away. When all had been done that man could do, the first phase of the Third Battle of Ypres closed in a strengthened conviction that all the powers of evil were in strict alliance with Germany. Our armies held off seven counter-attacks along the line, settled themselves in it and then, perforce, waited for the weather to clear.
It rained on and off till the 15th August, and, as most of the corn in the fields round Poll Hill Camp had, owing to the wet, not been cut, training-ground was limited just at the very time when the new German system of holding a line with a chain of carefully camouflaged posts called for a change in attack methods. So the Battalion was practised in “surprise situations”—i.e. discovering invisible enemies with machine-guns in shell-holes that turned the advancing line into a ragged scattering “scrum.” Their dummy barrages were slowed, too, as the Diary says, “to enable the surprise situations to be dealt with and to give time for the line to re-form behind the barrage after having dealt with these situations.” This was a kind of work for which, like bombing, the Irish had considerable natural aptitudes. It was summed up, unofficially, thus: “In the ould days, a trench was a trench, ye’ll understand, an’ something to lay hould upon. Third Ypres was failin’ into nothin’ and then findin’ ’twas two pill-boxes an’ a fort on your flank.” Therefore, the specialists in the shape of the Lewis-gunner and the “mopper-up” who dealt with the débris of attacks were important persons and were instructed accordingly when the Battalion was not indented upon for working-parties on the gun-tracks and bridges round Boesinghe.