begun near Langemarck with the choking-out of the French and Canadian troops, and had continued day after day with the sacrifice of battalions and brigades, Regulars and Territorials swallowed up in the low grey-yellow gas banks that threatened Ypres from Langemarck to Hill 60, or beaten to pulp by heavy explosives and the remnant riddled anew by machine-guns. Once again England was making good with her best flesh and blood for the material and the training she had deliberately refused to provide while yet peace held. The men who came out of that furnace alive say that no after experience of all the War approached it for sheer concentrated, as well as prolonged, terror, confusion, and a growing sense of hopelessness among growing agonies. If a world, at that time unbroken to German methods, stood aghast at the limited revelations allowed by the press censorship reports, those who had seen a man, or worse, a child, dying from gas may conceive with what emotions men exposed to the new torment regarded it, what kind of reports leaked out from clearing-stations and hospitals, and what work therefore was laid upon officers to maintain an even and unaffected temper in the battalions in waiting. The records, of course, do not mention these details, nor, indeed, do they record when gas-protectors (for masks, helmets, and boxes were not evolved till much later) were first issued to the troops on the Givenchy sector. But private letters of the 25th April, at the time the German mine in the orchard occupied their attention, remark, “we have all been issued out with an antidote to the latest German villainy . . . i.e. of asphyxiating gases. . . . What they will end by doing one can hardly imagine. The only thing is to be prepared for anything.”
The first “masks” were little more than mufflers or strips of cloth dipped in lime water. A weathercock was rigged up near Headquarters dug-outs, and when the wind blew from the Germans these were got ready. False alarms of gas, due to strange stenches given off by various explosives, or the appearance of a mist over the German line, were not uncommon, and on each occasion, it appeared that the C.O. had to turn out, sniff, and personally pass judgment on the case. The men had their instructions what to do in case of emergency, concluding with the simple order, perhaps the result of experience at Ypres, “in event of the first line being overcome, the second immediately charge through the gas and occupy the front-line trenches.”
But to return to the routine:
The casualties for the month of April were 2 officers and 8 men killed and 1 officer and 42 men wounded. The strength of the Battalion stood at 28 officers and 1133 men, higher than it had ever been before.
The following is the distribution of officers and N.C.O.’s at that time, a little less than three weeks before the battle of Festubert.
| Headquarters | ||
| Major the Hon. J. F. Trefusis | Commanding Officer. | |
| Major the Earl of Rosse | Second in Command. | |
| Capt. Lord Desmond FitzGerald | Adjutant. | |
| Lieut. P. H. Antrobus | Transport Officer. | |
| Lieut. L. S. Straker | Machine-gun Officer. | |
| Capt. A. H. L. M’Carthy | Medical Officer. | |
| Lieut. H. Hickie | Quarter-master. | |
| The Rev. John Gwynne (S.J.) | Chaplain | |
| No. 1 Company | ||
| Capt. J. N. Guthrie. | No. 2535 C.S.M. Harradine. | |
| Lieut. R. G. C. Yerburgh. | No. 3726 C.Q.M.S. P. M’Goldrick. | |
| 2nd Lieut. V. W. D. Fox. | 2nd Lieut. Hon. W. S. P. Alexander. | |
| No. 2 Company | ||
| Capt. E. G. Mylne. | 2nd Lieut. S. G. Tallents. | |
| Lieut. Sir G. Burke, Bart. | No. 3949 C.S.M. D. Moyles. | |
| 2nd Lieut. R. B. H. Kemp. | No. 2703 C.Q.M.S. J. G. Lowry. | |
| No. 3 Company | ||
| Major P. L. Reid. | 2nd Lieut. C. de Persse (attached 7th Dragoon Guards). | |
| 2nd Lieut. J. R. Ralli. | 2nd Lieut. C. Pease. | |
| No. 2112 C.S.M. H. M’Veigh. | 2nd Lieut. E. W. Campbell. | |
| No. 3972 C.Q.M.S. R. Grady. | ||
| No. 4 Company | ||
| Capt. G. E. S. Young. | 2nd Lieut. D. C. Parsons. | |
| Lieut. J. S. N. FitzGerald. | No. 2384 C.S.M. T. Curry. | |
| Lieut. C. D. Wynter. | No. 3132 C.Q.M.S. H. Carton. | |
The first ten days of May passed quietly. Mines, for the moment, gave no further anxiety, bombing and bombardments were light, reliefs were happily effected, and but 1 man was killed and 1 wounded. Two officers, Lieutenant H. A. Boyse and 2nd Lieutenant R. H. W. Heard, joined on the 2nd.
The Battle of Festubert
It was judged expedient while the second battle of Ypres was in full heat that the Germans should, if possible, be kept from sending any help to their front near Arras, in Artois, which at the time was under strong pressure from the French thrusting towards Lens. To this end, our First Army was ordered to attack the German Seventh Corps over the flat ground between Laventie and Richebourg on a front of some ten miles. The affair opened very early on the morning of the 9th May with a bombardment, imposing in itself by the standards of the day, but, as before, insufficient to break the wire or crush enough of the machine-gun nests. The Germans seem to have had full information of its coming, and dealt with it severely. The whole attack from north to south—Indian, Scottish, Territorials, and the rest—was caught and broken as it rolled against the well-wired German trenches.
The Battalion, whose part, then, was to maintain the right of our Army where it joined the French, heard the French guns open on the night of the 8th May, and by dawn the English gun-fire was in full swing to the north—one continuous roar broken by the deep grunt of our howitzer-shells bursting; for these were so few that we could pick them up by ear. The Guards had no concern with these matters till the trouble should thicken. Their business was to stand ready for any counter-attack and keep up bursts of rapid fire at intervals while they waited for what little news came to hand. It was uniformly bad, except that the French in the south seemed to be making some headway, and so far as aeroplanes and artillery observers could make out, there was no concentration of troops immediately in front of them. The Germans were too busy with the immediate English front to extend their commitments to the southward,
