The next serious fighting in which the Guards were involved was to the south, in the wet and dreary black country opposite La Bassée. In December the First Division was ordered up to Givenchy to relieve the Indian Corps, which had been having a very bad time, and on December 21 the First Brigade found itself holding the trenches from Givenchy down to the La Bassée Canal. The prompt intervention of this fine division enabled our line, from which the Indians had been partially forced back, to be re-established.
This ugly and sinister region from Givenchy to Cuinchy, situated on the other side of the La Bassée Canal, was destined to be the home of the Guards for many months, and the scene of some of their most heroic exploits in this war. On January 24 the First Brigade, under Brigadier-General Cecil Lowther, found itself holding the line in the Cuinchy brick-fields opposite the famous La Bassée Railway triangle formed by the Béthune-La Bassée line and the Lens-La Bassée line, which joins the first in two branches. The 1st Scots Guards and the 1st Coldstreams were in the trenches. On the 25th the Germans opened a heavy bombardment of the Guards’ trenches, which were practically destroyed. The line was broken, and the Germans managed to secure a footing in the brick-fields. A counter-attack, delivered with great gallantry by the Black Watch, the Cameron Highlanders, and the King’s Royal Rifles, succeeded in partially clearing our second line. The First Brigade lost heavily, and was relieved during the night.
On February 1 Cavan’s Guards Brigade was holding the line through the Cuinchy brick-fields. At half-past two in the morning the 2nd Coldstreams were driven out of their trenches, but managed to hold out till daylight in a position close to their old trench. A counter-attack launched in the small hours by some of the Irish Guards and Coldstreams was checked by the enemy’s rifle-fire.
Another counter-attack was arranged for 10.15 a.m. It was preceded by a splendid artillery preparation—the kind of ruthless and accurate rain of high-explosive projectiles that puts a fine heart into men waiting to attack. Then the storming-party went forward, a grand array of big, stalwart men in whose great hands their rifles with bayonets fixed seemed as light and as inconsiderable as toothpicks. Captain A. Leigh Bennett led the way at the head of fifty of the 2nd Coldstreams, bent on “getting their own back”; following came Second-Lieutenant F. F. Graham with thirty Irish Guards, with whom went one Michael O’Leary in the front line, and a party of Royal Engineers with barbed wire in rolls, and sandbags, to “organize” the trenches that might fall into our hands.
It was a magnificent piece of work. The Guards were irresistible. They swept like an avalanche over the lost trench, bayoneting their way. All the ground lost was retaken, and another trench besides, while two machine-guns and thirty-two prisoners fell into our hands. It was here that Michael O’Leary performed his prodigious exploit.
But the achievements of the Guards were not confined to brilliance in the open with the bayonet. They proved themselves well-disciplined, uncomplaining, resourceful, and patient through the long winter months in the trenches in this sordid region, which vies with the Ypres salient as being the ugliest, wettest, and most depressing portion of our whole line.
Neuve Chapelle saw the 1st Grenadiers and 2nd Scots Guards in line with the Seventh Division. The latter stages of that historic fight made great demands on the courage and tenacity of the troops engaged, and these two famous battalions maintained their high reputation for both. The Guards were not engaged in the second battle of Ypres. Their services were required farther south, where the attack on the Fromelles ridge, to support the French “push” in the Artois, was preparing. In the operations which began on May 9, and, continuing with intervals until the middle of June, resulted in the gain of a mile or two of front and the capture of several hundred prisoners, all the brigades in which the Guards are serving were concerned.
After the attack by the Seventh Division on May 15 on the German trenches south of Richebourg l’Avoué, the greater part of a company of the 2nd Scots Guards, including Captain Sir Frederick Fitzwygram, was found to be missing. Presently word came down to the brigade—I think from the Canadians, who had taken over the line here—that some Scots Guards’ graves had been located. Would the brigade send up an officer to investigate?
An officer was despatched. He was destined to elucidate the mystery of the missing company. He did not find Fitzwygram, who had been wounded and captured. But he found the dead bodies of sixty Scots Guards lying huddled together in the open, the centre of a grim circle of some 200 German corpses, and close by two rough white crosses marking the spot where the Canadians had laid two Scots Guards officers to rest.
The Scots Guards, who had advanced side by side with the Border Regiment, had outdistanced their fellows. They were found dead, amid heaps of empty cartridge cases, with their rifles still grasped in their stiffened fingers, in the place where they had last been seen through a drifting haze of high-explosive vapours, standing shoulder to shoulder together under a murderous fire poured in on them from three sides. Soaked by the rain and blackened by the sun, their bodies were not beautiful to look upon, but monarch never had nobler lying-in-state than those sixty Guardsmen dead on the coarse grass of the dreary Flanders plain.