Officially, the formation of the 2nd Battalion of the Irish Guards dates from the 15th July 1915, when it was announced that His Majesty the King had been “graciously pleased to approve” of the formation of two additional Battalions of Foot Guards—the 4th Grenadier Guards, and the 2nd Battalion Irish Guards, which was to be made up out of the personnel of the 2nd (Reserve) Battalion. And, officially, on July 18 that formation took place. But those who knew the world in the old days, and specially the busy part of it that had Warley Barracks for its heart, know that the 2nd Battalion was born in spirit as in substance, long ere the authorities bade it to be. The needs of the war commanded it; the abundance of the reserves then justified it; and, though Warley Barracks had been condemned as unfit for use by the Honourable the East India Company a trifle of fifty odd years ago, this was not the hour to stand on ancient tradition. So the old, crazy barracks overflowed; the officers’ damp and sweating dog-kennels were double-crammed; and, by sheer good-will and stark discipline, the work went forward to the creation. Officers and men alike welcomed it, for it is less pleasing to be absorbed in drafts and driblets by an ever-hungry 1st Battalion in France, than to be set apart for the sacrifice as a veritable battalion on its own responsibility, with its own traditions (they sprang up immediately) and its own jealous esprit-de-corps. A man may join for the sake of “King and Country” but he goes over the top for the honour of his own platoon, company, and battalion; and, the heart of man being what it is, so soon as the 2nd Battalion opened its eyes, the first thing that it beheld was its 1st Battalion, as an elder brother to measure its stature against in all things. Yet, following the ancient mystery of all armies, there were not two battalions, but one regiment; officers and men interchangeable, and equally devoted to the battalion that they served for the time, though in their deeper minds, and sometimes confessing it, more devoutly attached to one or the other of the two.
By summer of ’15 the tide of special reserve officers was towards its flood, and the 2nd Battalion was largely filled by them. They hailed from every quarter of the Empire, and represented almost every profession and state of life in it, from the schoolboy of eighteen to the lawyer of forty odd. They had parted long ago with any delusion as to the war ending that year or the next. The information that came to them by word of mouth was not of the sort dispensed in the Press, and they knew, perhaps a little more than the public, how inadequate were our preparations. One and all they realised that humanly speaking, unless fortune favoured them with permanent disablement they were doomed men; since all who recovered from their wounds were returned to the war and sooner or later despatched. He was lucky in those days who survived whole for three months; and six without hurt was almost unheard of. So the atmosphere of their daily lives, underneath the routine and the carefully organised amusements that the world then offered to its victims, had an unreality, comparable in some degree, to the elaborately articulated conversation and serious argument over utterly trivial matters that springs up among officers in that last hour of waiting under the thunder of the preliminary bombardment before the word is given that hoists all ranks slowly and methodically into a bone-naked landscape.
Lieut.-Colonel the Earl of Kerry, M.V.O., D.S.O., who commanded the reserve and whose influence over the men was unbounded, began the work of making the 2nd Battalion, and, later on, Major G. H. C. Madden was recalled from duty in France to be its senior major. Captain the Hon. T. E. Vesey was the first adjutant and, with a tight hand which was appreciated afterwards, showed all that young community how to take care of itself. It was a time for understanding much and overlooking little. “Or else,” as the sergeants explained, “ye’ll die before ye’ve killed a Jerry.”
On the 27th of July, Major and Brevet-Lieut.-Colonel the Hon. L. J. P. Butler took over command, and on August the 6th the Battalion with full transport, and packs, paraded as such for its first route-march, of sixteen miles in the flat country, filled with training troops, that lies round Warley. The weather was very hot, nor did that officer who had bethought him to fill his “full pack” with a full-blown air-cushion, take much reward of his ingenuity when his unlucky fraud betrayed him by bursting almost under the adjutant’s eye. Men said that that was their real introduction to the horrors of war.
They were inspected on the 10th August by Major-General Sir Francis Lloyd, commanding the London District who, after the usual compliments on their physique and steadiness, told them they were due for France in a few days. Lord Kitchener came down and addressed them on the 13th of the month, was photographed with a group of all the officers of the 2nd Battalion and Reserve Battalions, and expressed his belief that they would be a credit to the Guards Division then, as we know, being formed in France.
On the 16th they left Brentwood Station, that has seen so many thousands depart; and that evening were packed tightly at Southampton in the Anglo-Canadian and the Viper. Duly escorted by destroyers, for the seas were troubled by submarines, both ships tied up at Havre in stillness and strange “foreign” smells at midnight. The city and its outskirts for miles round had long since been turned wholly to the monotonous business of expediting troops and supplies; and the camps that ringed it spread and linked on almost daily. The French were used, now, to our armed Empire at large flooding their streets. Wonder and welcome had passed. No pretty maids met them with wine or garlands, and their route inland to their work was as worn and smooth as the traffic-burnished metals from Brentwood to the sea. But the country and its habits were new to all those new hands, trained in a strict school; and it filled them with joy to behold the casual manner in which a worn and dusty French sentry was relieved while they were marching to their first wonderful camp outside the city.
They entrained for Lumbres on the 18th August and were bidden, next day, to march to billets at Acquin, a little village on a hill-side a few miles from St. Omer, in a fold of the great Sussex-like downs. It is a place both steep and scattered, cramped and hot, and when the air-war was in full swing had its small share of bombs intended for Army Headquarters at St. Omer, and the adjacent aerodromes. The men were billeted in barns forty and fifty at a time which, specially for a new battalion, was rather unhandy, as offering many ups and downs and corners, which afford chances for delays and misunderstandings. But it was to be their first and only experience of comfort for any consecutive time, and of French life a little untouched by war. They most deeply enjoyed the simple kindliness of the village-folk, and the graceless comments of the little sharp-faced French children at the halting attempts of the Irish to talk French; the glimpses of intimate domestic days, when sons and brothers of their hosts, returned on a few days’ leave from far-away battlefields in the Argonne or beyond, were shown with pride to the visitors who were helping the villagers to cart their corn—“precisely as our own sons would have done.” They talked, too, with veterans of ’70 met in the fields and at the cafés, who told them in set and rounded phrases that war was serious. And the French men and women upon whom they were billeted liked them well and remembered them long. Said one, years after, with tears in the eyes: “Monsieur, if you drew a line in the air and asked those children not to cross it, it was as a wall to them. They played, monsieur, like infants, without any thought of harm or unkindness; and then they would all become men again, very serious—all those children of yours.”
So things were gracious and kindly about them in that little village where every one had suffered loss, and was making their resolute, curt, French best of it; and the 2nd Battalion settled down to an eleventh-hour course of instruction in everything that the war of that day might call for—except, it may be, how to avoid their own cavalry on the march.
The historic first meeting between the 1st and 2nd Battalions took place on the 30th August on a march out to St. Pierre, when the units of the different Guards Brigades were drawing in together for combined work preparatory to the Battle of Loos. The veterans of the 1st were personal in their remarks, deriding the bright cap-stars of the 2nd Battalion, and telling them that they would soon know better than to advertise their rank under fire. The 2nd Battalion Diary notes a point that the 1st, doubtless through delicacy, omits—that when the merry gathering under the trees in the field was at an end, after dinner, the 2nd Battalion fell in and marched off the ground “before the critical eyes of their older comrades, and the 1st followed.” No fault was found, but it was a breathless business, compared, by one who took part, to the performances of rival peacocks. (“There was not any one else, that we considered; but we knew that, if we put a foot wrong that parade in front of them we’d be in the road to hear tell of it the rest of our lives.”) And it was on this great day, too, that the Rev. Father Knapp joined as R.C. Chaplain to the Battalion, and thereafter proved himself as far forward on all fields as any of the rest of his brethren.