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
Into the variegated activities of that morning dropped a staff
officer of the First Army Corps anxious to get the C.O.’s notes and
instructions on mining for new troops who might later have to hold
that line “in accordance with the manner taught by experience.”
Captain J. H. T. Priestman of the Lincolnshires, a Sandhurst
instructor, arrived with him and was attached to the sector for a
few days “to see how things were carried on.” As he was being taken
round the trenches by the C.O. and the Adjutant, next morning, a
private, on sentry with a bomber, tried to throw a bomb on his own
account, but, says the Diary, “not knowing how to, he blew himself up
and wounded the bomber.” By breakfast time the enemy were shelling
the line in enfilade from the direction of Auchy and two men were
blown to pieces. A couple of hours later the bombardment was repeated
with, from first to last, 6 killed and 9 wounded. The instructor was
but one of many whose unregarded duty was to study at first hand
every device of the enemy in action and to lecture upon it at the
training-centres in England a few days later.
The Battalion relieved the Grenadiers once more on the 10th August,
after another German mine had been exploded on the salient, and had
carried away so much German wire that it seemed possible to effect
an entry into their trenches across the new-made crater. A patrol
under Lieutenant A. F. L. Gordon was therefore sent out at night but
reported the slopes too steep to climb and, since another mine had
gone up and destroyed four of our own sap-heads with it, the night
was spent in repairing these under intermittent bomb-fire on both
sides.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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