he would have needed a good sense of humour at the time. ‘We had nothing … only Japanese rifles and Japanese bullets … We were only on a bluff, bluffing the Germans.’ The Naval division was able to do little to prevent the fall of Antwerp on October 9th and when it changed hands Doyle and his colleagues were safely back in England after a stay of about six weeks. ‘We never seen [sic] a German … We were in the trenches for about a fortnight and then they withdrew us … we got out in the dark, back into Antwerp and from there we docked in Dover.’56
The stasis along the Aisne and the British race to the sea secured a front which hardly varied for the next three and a half years. The opposing war machines were like stricken dinosaurs, unable, through their own sheer weight and lack of formidable brainpower to push each other far beyond the countryside where the fighting started. One of Neville Woodroffe’s last letters reflected the reality of what life held in store for the Irish Guards for the next fifty-two months of attrition.
Things look very much the same, and it is comparatively monotonous after our previous adventure. We had a small patrol out in front of our trenches yesterday and it was awful to see the massacre and refuse which a wood to our left disclosed. Dead Germans and a few of the Wiltshire regiment which had been there fully a fortnight ago and in terrible conditions. Legs stuck in boots lay out in the open and corpses shattered from shell fire lay at short intervals. Kits and rifles, ammunition, helmets, tools etc. all lay in heaps. The stink was awful. We buried what we could, but the most one could not touch. However, enough!57
Less than a month after sending that letter Woodroffe himself was dead, he had failed to survive the first 100 days of the war. In a photograph taken of him in his Irish Guards uniform he looks more like a pre-pubescent drummer boy than a soldier, but the conflict was to claim younger lives than his. He had barely been a year out of school, and had experienced little of what life had to offer when he died.
An indication of the haemorrhage which was taking place even at this relatively early stage in proceedings was that the 2nd Royal Irish Regiment, to maintain its complement, was sent seven drafts of new recruits or fresh soldiers between the flight from Mons and the ‘Race to the Sea’. A draft of six officers and 353 men arrived on 15 October, in time for an attack on Le Pilly a small town on the spine of a ridge near the Ypres sector, a low-lying area of fields, dykes and muddy streams. The town was taken in the afternoon of 19 October. The failure of a French attack, however, left the 2nd Royal Irish, under its acting CO Major Daniell, exposed and vulnerable. Early on the morning of the 20th the Germans, who had only retired about 400 yards from the town, countered and surrounded the isolated Irish battalion. According to John Breen, Major Daniell offered them the choice of capitulation, so hopless was their situation. ‘He gave us the option. Would we fight through or would we surrender. We said we’d fight through and we’d get through some way or another.’58 Some did, including Breen, but most died or were taken prisoner. Daniell himself was shot and killed along with six other officers and 170 other ranks. The Germans took more than 300 Royal Irish prisoners, most of whom were wounded.
On that day the Germans attacked along a line between Arras and the sea and the 2nd Leinsters were back on the defensive, baulked in their attempt to reach Lille, the great industrial city of the French north west. In defence of a town called Premesques, near Armentieres, one of the most bizarre incidents of the entire war occured. It involved the historian of the Leinsters, F.E. Whitton, then a Captain, and fellow Captain R.A. Orpen-Palmer. The latter was the son of a Kerry-based Church of Ireland rector, Rev. Abraham Orpen-Palmer. His younger brother later commanded a battalion of the Royal Irish Fusiliers. R.A. Orpen-Palmer was known, simply as ‘O-P 1’ while his brother was ‘O-P 2’.59 Both Whitton and Orpen-Palmer were wounded and captured. Whitton was unable to walk and Orpen-Palmer, who had lost an eye in the fighting, was temporarily blind. Somehow both managed to escape from their captors, members of a regiment from Saxony. But their hopes of reaching the British lines were slim, given their disabilities. Nonetheless they succeeded in overcoming them. Writing two years later Frank Hitchcock, whose diary of the trenches Stand To became a classic of the war, recalled that, ‘some years afterwards I met a Sergeant in the 1st Royal Fusiliers who recalled the fact of seeing Leinster officers stumbling into their entrenchments. The blinded one, he said, was being directed by the one he was carrying.’60 Under cover of darkness and with a single pair of eyes and legs the two men had managed to blunder their way to the British lines.
The war now settled into a slough of entrenched immobility. All along the line from Alsace-Lorraine to the sea a narrow strip of land was given over to the belligerents. Civilians (who are rarely mentioned in First World War diaries), other than the owners of the ubiquitous hostelries known as estaminets, simply left the armies to it. In retrospect many were to see the first three months of hostilities as the heady halcyon days of innocence. Then, the war was fought, largely, between professional soldiers who were disposed to take a broadminded approach to the prospect of unalloyed discomfort and violent death. These were men who cared little who their enemy was nor who their allies were. As their ranks thinned they were replaced by a far less jaundiced breed, men to whose youthful idealism the British government had appealed. From the trauma of the Great War a new moral order would emerge. But that was in a future not yet predetermined.
Let us leave the last word to the men digging trenches across Northern France and Southern Belgium and coming to grips with narrowing horizons and the shock of the new quotidien. ‘No sooner is a trench dug than it fills with water … the soil is clay, and so keeps the water from draining away even if that were possible … pumping has been tried, but not with much success. The weather continues wet, and there does not seem to be any likelihood of a change. Consequently, we may expect some fresh discomforts daily.’61
2. GALLIPOLI: THE V BEACH LANDINGS
Where Aegean cliffs with bristling menace front
The Threatening splendour of that isley sea
Lighted by Troy’s last shadow, where the first
Hero kept watch and the last Mystery
Shook with dark thunder, hark the battle brunt!
A nation speaks, old Silences are burst.1
(Francis Ledwidge, ‘The Irish in Gallipoli’)
‘Murphy’s Law’ (‘everything that can go wrong, will’) in all its military applications is wasteful and profligate of human life. When cruel misfortune is allied to human error and incompetence on a vast scale the result is pure tragedy. Such was the confluence of physical and metaphysical forces which resulted in the carnage of Gallipoli, a campaign which could have changed the trend of the war (even of history itself) but whose legacy instead was one of bitterness and recrimination.
The underlying idea was as flawless as the planning and execution were flawed. Force the Dardanelles, draw thousands of German troops from the Western Front to reinforce a tottering Turkish army, take Turkey out of the war and open up a short, warm-weather supply route to your Russian ally. It was worth the commitment of the resources of the Navy and the overstretched army. But like so many of the grand designs of the Great War it was bungled by men inadequate to the prodigious tasks allocated to them. The plan was conceived by Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty. Kitchener was unenthusiastic. The Secretary of State for War was already overcommitted to the Western Front and preparing for a Spring offensive in 1915. He had only one division (the 29th) to spare and his new volunteer troops were not yet adequately trained.
The Gallipoli campaign began as a naval operation. Royal Navy vessels bombarded Turkish forts along the Gallipoli peninsula and Royal Marines even effected a landing. But the element of surprise seemed to apply almost equally to both sides. The Marines withdrew for lack of follow-up support and the Turks, with the aid of German officers, led by Field Marshall Liman von Sanders, began
