With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

The strict attention to duty which is enforced in the Guards is shown in the personal neatness of the men and the fine condition of their trenches. Be the conditions never so bad, and water never so scarce, a Guardsman in the field will always contrive to present a clean appearance. If his uniform is stained and patched, his puttees will be neatly tied and his boots, cumbrous though they are, will be scraped clean of mud. The army knows that a well-turned-out battalion, clean in appearance and punctilious about saluting, is a good fighting battalion. It has been the ambition of the Guards to set an example to the army in this respect.

The Guards trenches are famous all along our line. Deep, and well made, and clean, and as safe as they can be made, they are named after London streets familiar to the Guards on their “walkings out” on Sunday evenings—Piccadilly and Bond Street and Edgware Road and Praed Street. When the Guards are in their trenches they are kept scrupulously neat and tidy; the greatest attention is paid to hygiene, with the result that the plague of vermin and flies is probably less felt here than in any other part of the line.

There is a fine disdain for the shirker in the Guards. The Guards esteem it an honour to be able to fight with the Guards against the Germans, and therefore among the men there is nothing but contemptuous pity for the young fellow who prefers to loaf at home to earning the proud right to say in after years: “I was with the Guards in Flanders!” But for the Guards officer who should stay away from his battalion in the front line for any reason whatsoever, even to do useful duties in the rear, the officers have nothing but the most withering disdain.

It is no use arguing the question. It is no use pointing out to them that a man who is by temperament not a fighter can render better service to the country by serving on a Staff or doing other work behind the fighting-line. The only reply is that “they cannot imagine how the fellow can stay away from his battalion at a time like this.” You feel that they are often unjust in such wholesale condemnation, but you cannot help admiring the real Guards spirit which is reflected in this attitude of mind.

Their spirit is one of the most jealous exclusiveness. It is apparent in their mental attitude as well as in their dress. The Guards officers have succeeded in investing even their prosaic service khaki with one or two little touches that render their uniform quite distinct from that of officers of the line. In the first place, the different Guards regiments retain their distinctive button groupings in the service tunics of the officers, the buttons being arranged in ones for the Grenadier, in twos for the Coldstream, in threes for the Scots Guards, and in fours for the Irish Guards. It is etiquette that the buttons should be of dulled bronze, and as small and as unobtrusive as possible. No badges are worn on the collar, and the badge on the cap is silver and diminutive in size. Many Guards officers affect excessively baggy breeches, cut like full golfing-knickers, and worn with puttees. They are certainly distinctive, but they can hardly be said to be becoming, and are liable to get sodden and heavy from the wet in the trenches, I am told.

The Guards in the field judge life by two standards—the Guards’ standard and other men’s standard. There is nothing offensive to the rest of the army in their carefully studied exclusiveness. They are genuinely and generously appreciative of the undying gallantry displayed by line regiments. They show themselves friendly and companionable neighbours in the trenches, and stout and reliable comrades in action. But you will find that what they are seriously willing to concede to other regiments they will never allow to the Guards. They have no criticism to offer if a line battalion surrenders after a most gallant stand against overpowering odds, but if you probe their minds you will find that they would naturally expect a Guards battalion in similar circumstances to fight to the last man. And the remarkable thing is that, if you examine their records in this war, you will find that this is the standard the Guards have set and lived up to.

Indeed, the Guards’ spirit is not of this war. It is of another age. It is as old as chivalry itself. It was to the British Guards, if you remember, that the Frenchmen at Fontenoy said: “Messieurs les Anglais, tirez les premiers!” and as far as our Guards are concerned, a similar incident might occur in this war. You will never hear a Guardsman disparage the German as a fighter. He thinks the German is a bad sportsman, and, remembering Belgium and the Lusitania, he has a fierce joy in fighting him. But he knows he is a brave man, for our Guards, remember, saw the Prussian Guard advancing in parade order to their death at Ypres in the face of a perfect tornado of shot and shell.

“They were fine, big men all,” a Guards officer who witnessed that last desperate attempt to break our line said to me, “and they walked past the corpses of their dead comrades choking their line of advance, and straight into our machine-gun fire like brave men that were not afraid to die.”

It was the spirit of the Guards in Marlborough’s day that sent the Guardsman William Lettler across the river at Lille to cut the chains of the drawbridge. It was the same spirit that carried the Guards forward at Talavera with such impetuosity that a catastrophe was only narrowly averted, that at Waterloo welded them into a solid wall of steel. It was the Guards’ spirit that transformed the little Irishman, Michael O’Leary, into an epic hero; that inspired the Coldstreams at Ypres, the Scots Guards at Festubert, to fight to the last man.

This book is not a history, and I must leave the story of the Guards’ achievements in this war to an abler pen than mine. From the outset they have been in the very thick of the fighting. At Mons we find the famous Guards Brigade—2nd Grenadiers, 2nd and 3rd Coldstream and 1st Irish Guards—with the Second Division, and with the First Division the 1st Coldstream and the 2nd Scots Guards. With Sir Henry Rawlinson’s Seventh Division in Belgium—that splendidly gallant division of whose exploits in the early days of the war we heard so little—were the 1st Grenadiers and the 2nd Scots Guards. At Mons the Guards battalions played their part gallantly in beating back the desperate attempt of the Germans to overwhelm “French’s contemptible little army” with vastly superior numbers.