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
recorded heroism among the confusion of bombs and barricades, there
were hundreds unrecorded as the spouting earth closed over and hid
all after-knowledge of the very site of the agony.
A section of trench held by the Scots Fusiliers on the immediate left
of the Irish Guards was attacked and a hundred yards or so of it were
captured, but the Battalion was not called upon to lend a hand. It
lay under heavy shell and sniping fire in the wet, till it was time
to exchange the comparative security of a wet open drain for the
unsheltered horrors of a relief which, beginning in the dusk at six,
was not completed till close on two in the morning. The last company
reached their miserable billets at Mazingarbe, some three miles’ away
across a well-searched back-area at 6 A. M. One N.C.O. was killed and
ten N.C.O.’s and men were wounded.
They spent the next three days in the battered suburbs of Mazingarbe
while the Twelfth Division took over the Guards’ line and the Ninth
French Army Corps relieved the British troops who were holding the
south face of the Cuinchy-Hulluch-Grenay salient. The 1st Battalion
itself was now drawn upon to meet the demands of the 2nd Battalion
for officers to make good losses in their action of the 27th. Five
officers, at least, were badly needed, but no more than four could
be spared--Captain J. S. N. FitzGerald, as Adjutant, Lieutenant R.
Rankin, Lieutenant H. Montgomery, who had only arrived with a draft
on the 1st October, and 2nd Lieutenant Langrishe. Officers were a
scarce commodity; for, though there was a momentary lull, there had
been heavy bomb and trench work by the Twenty-eighth Division all
round the disputed Hohenzollern redoubt which was falling piece by
piece into the hands of the enemy, and counter-attacks were expected
all along the uncertain line.
THE HOHENZOLLERN TRENCHES
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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