The Irish Guards in the Great War, Volume 1 (of 2) : $b The First BattalionKipling, Rudyard
History
The Irish Guards in the Great War, Volume 1 (of 2) : $b The First Battalion
Kipling, Rudyard
Great Britain. Army. Irish Guards -- History; World War, 1914-1918 -- Regimental histories -- Great Britain
Colonel Madden was succeeded by Captain Lord Desmond FitzGerald as
commanding officer, and the rest of the day was spent in suffering
a bombardment of aerial torpedoes, very difficult to locate and not
put down by our heavy guns till after dark. Besides the 3 wounded
officers that day 3 men were wounded and, 3 killed.
On the morning of the 13th, after heavy shelling, a bomb attack on
the 2nd Grenadiers developed in the trenches to the right, when the
Battalion brought up and detonated several boxes for their comrades.
Their work further included putting up 120 scaling-ladders for an
attack by the 35th Brigade.
Next day they were relieved by the 7th Norfolks, 35th Brigade of the
North Midland Division of Territorials, and went to rest at Verquin,
five or six miles behind the line. It took them nearly seven hours
to clear the trenches; Colonel Madden, on account of his wounds,
being carried out on a sitting litter; Lord Desmond FitzGerald, who,
as Adjutant, had been wounded when Father Gwynne had been killed,
overdue for hospital with a piece of shrapnel in his foot, and all
ranks utterly done after their nine days’ turn of duty. They laid
them down as tired animals lie, while behind them the whole north
front of the Cuinchy-Hulluch Salient broke into set battle once again.
A series of holding attacks were made all along the line almost from
Ypres to La Bassée to keep the enemy from reinforcing against the
real one on the Hohenzollern redoubt, Fosse 8, the Hulluch quarries
and the heart of the Loos position generally. It was preceded
by bombardments that in some cases cut wire and in some did not,
accompanied by gas and smoke, which affected both sides equally; it
was carried through by men in smoke-helmets, half-blinding them among
blinding accompaniments of fumes and flying earth, through trenches
to which there was no clue, over the wrecks of streets of miners’
cottages, cellars and underground machine-gun nests, and round the
concreted flanks of unsuspected artillery emplacements. Among these
obstacles, too, it died out with the dead battalions of Regulars and
Territorials caught, as the chances of war smote them, either in bulk
across open ground or in detail among bombs and machine-gun posts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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