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
The Battalion relieved the 1st Scots Guards in the front line near
Mœuvres on the 7th--a quiet relief followed by severe gassing. Here
they passed two days in the delicate and difficult business of
feeling all about them among the mass of old trenches, to locate
enemy’s posts and to watch what points of vantage might offer. The
wreckage of the houses round Mœuvres, into which the trenches ran,
lent itself excellently to enemy activity; and men played blind-man’s
buff round bits of broken walls wherever they explored. Their left
was in the air; their right under the care of Providence; and their
supports were far off. No. 3 Company (Captain G. L. Bambridge,
M.C.), while trying to close a gap between the two front companies (3
and 1) by peaceful penetration with a bombing-party, found enemy in
the trench, drove him up it as far as they could, built a barricade,
and were then heavily counter-raided by a couple of officers and
twenty men whom they ejected after, as the Company justly owned, “a
good attempt.” The enemy “attempted” again about midnight on the 8th,
when he was bombed off, and again on the afternoon of the 9th in an
outlying trench, mixed up with smashed cellars and broken floors,
where he captured two unarmed stretcher-bearers and three men who
had not been in the line before. Though it does new hands no harm
to realize that front-line trenches are not Warley Barracks (and
stretcher-bearers, like orderlies, are prey to all the world), still
the matter could not be passed over. Our trench-mortars attended
vigorously to the enemy posts whence the raid had been launched, and
in the afternoon sent a strong patrol to make the outraged trench
secure. Later on, a platoon of No. 1 Company got into touch with
the battalion (8th King’s) on their left, and took part in a small
“bicker,” as it was described, but with no casualties.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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