D. HAIG,General Commanding 1st Army.
And the reward of their confused and unclean work among the craters and the tunnels of the past weeks came in the Commander-in-Chief’s announcement:
GUARDS DIVISION,
The Commander-in-Chief has intimated that he has read with great interest and satisfaction the reports of the mining operations and crater fighting which have taken place in the Second Division Area during the last two months.
He desires that his high appreciation of the good work performed be conveyed to the troops, especially to the 170th and 176th Tunnelling Cos. R.E., the 2nd Battalion Irish Guards, the 1st Battalion K.R.R.C., and the 2nd Battalion South Staffordshire Regiment.
The G.O.C. Second Division has great pleasure in forwarding this announcement.
(Sd.) H. P. HORNE,
Major-General,
Commanding Second Division.
Second Division,
21.8.15.
They lay at Eperlecques for a day or two on their way to Thiembronne, a hot nineteen-mile march during which only five men fell out. It was at St. Pierre between Thiembronne and Acquin that they met and dined with the 2nd Battalion of the Regiment which had landed in France on the 18th August. There are few records of this historic meeting; for the youth and the strength that gathered by the cookers in that open sunlit field by St. Pierre has been several times wiped out and replaced. The two battalions conferred together, by rank and by age, on the methods and devices of the enemy; the veterans of the First enlightening the new hands of the Second with tales that could lose nothing in the telling, mixed with practical advice of the most grim. The First promptly christened the Second “The Irish Landsturm,” and a young officer, who later rose to eminent heights and command of the 2nd Battalion sat upon a table under some trees, and delighted the world with joyous songs upon a concertina and a mouth-organ. Then they parted.
Loos
The next three weeks were spent by the 1st Battalion at or near Thiembronne in training for the great battle to come. They were instructed in march-discipline, infantry attack, extended-order drill and field-training, attacks on villages (Drionville was one of them selected and the French villagers attended the field-day in great numbers) as well as in bussing and debussing against time into motor-buses which were then beginning to be moderately plentiful. Regimental sports were not forgotten—they were a great success and an amusement more or less comprehensible to the people of Thiembronne—and, since the whole world was aware that a combined attack would be made shortly by the English and French armies, the officers of the Guards Brigade were duly informed by Lieutenant-General Haking, commanding the Eleventh Army Corps, to which the Guards Division belonged, that such, indeed, was the case.
The domestic concerns of the Battalion during this pause include the facts that 2nd Lieutenant Dames-Longsworth from the 2nd Middlesex was attached on the 9th September “prior to transfer” to the Irish Guards; Captain C. D. Wynter, Lieutenant F. H. Witts, and 2nd Lieutenant W. B,. Stevens were transferred (September 10, from the 1st to the 2nd Battalion) and 2nd Lieutenant T. K. Walker and T. H. Langrishe transferred on the same day from the 2nd to the 1st, while Orderly-Room Quartermaster Sergeant J. Halligan, of whom later, was gazetted a 2nd Lieutenant to the Leinster Regiment. Captain L. R. Hargreaves was on the 13th “permitted to wear the badge of Captain pending his temporary promotion to that rank being announced in the London Gazette,” and the C. 0., Major G. H. C. Madden, was on the 6th September gazetted a temporary Lieutenant-Colonel. These were the first grants of temporary rank in the Battalion.
On the 18th September the C.O.’s of all the battalions in the Guards Division motored to the Béthune district, where a reconnaissance was made “from convenient observation-posts” of the country between Cuinchy and Loos that they might judge the weight of the task before them.
It was a jagged, scarred, and mutilated sweep of mining-villages, factories, quarries, slag-dumps, pitheads, chalk-pits, and railway embankments—all the plant of an elaborate mechanical civilization connected above ground and below by every means that ingenuity and labour could devise to the uses of war. The ground was trenched and tunnelled with cemented and floored works of terrifying permanency that linked together fortified redoubts, observation-posts, concealed batteries, rallying-points, and impregnable shelters for waiting reserves. So it ran along our front from Grenay north of the plateau of Notre Dame de Lorette, where two huge slag-heaps known as the Double Crassier bristled with machine-guns, across the bare interlude of crop land between Loos and Hulluch, where a high German redoubt crowned the slopes to the village of Haisnes with the low and dangerous Hohenzollern redoubt south of it. Triple lines of barbed wire protected a system of triple trenches, concrete-faced, holding dug-outs twenty feet deep, with lifts for machine-guns which could appear and disappear in emplacements of concrete over iron rails; and the observation-posts were capped with steel cupolas. In the background ample railways and a multitude of roads lay ready to launch fresh troops to any point that might by any chance be forced in the face of these obstacles.
Our armies were brought up for the most part on their own feet and lay in trenches not in the least concreted; nor were our roads to the front wholly equal to the demands on them. The assaulting troops were the First and Fourth Army Corps (less some troops detached to make a feint at Festubert and Cuinchy) disposed in the trenches south from the line of the Béthune–La Bassée Canal to the Vermelles–Hulluch road. Their work, as laid down, was to storm Auchy–La Bassée, Haisnes, capture the Hohenzollern redoubt to the south-west of it and the immensely fortified Minehead Pit 8 (with which it was connected), the Hulluch quarries, equally fortified, and the long strip of wood beside them, and the village of Cité St. Elie between Hulluch and Haisnes. South of the Vermelles–Hulluch road, the Fourth Army Corps was to occupy the high ground between Loos and Lens, including the redoubt on Hill 69; all the town of Loos, which was a museum of veiled deaths, the Double Crassier, the Chalk-Pit, the redoubt on Hill 70 on the Loos–Haisnes road, and the village of Cité St. Auguste. After which, doubtless, the way would be open to victory. The Eleventh Army Corps formed the main infantry reserve and included the newly formed Guards Division, the Twenty-first and Twenty-fourth Divisions of the New Army and the Twenty-eighth. The Twenty-first and Twenty-fourth were brought up between Beuvry and Nœux-les-Mines; the Twenty-eighth to Bailleul, while the Guards Division lay in reserve near Lillers, ten miles north-west or so from Souchez; the Third Cavalry Division near Sains-en-Gohelle, and the British Cavalry Corps at Bailleul-les-Pernes ten miles west of Nœux-les-Mines, in attendance on the expected break-through.
On the 21st September the Battalion was inspected by Lord Kitchener at Avroult, on the St. Omer road—the first time it was ever paraded before its Colonel-in-chief—who in a few brief words recalled what it had already done in the war and hinted at what lay before it. Lord Cavan commanding the Guards Division, in wishing the men God-speed on the eve of “the greatest battle in the world’s history,” reminded them that the fate of future generations hung on the issue and that great things were expected of the Guards Division. They knew it well enough.
By a piece of ill-luck, that might have been taken as an omen, the day before they moved from Thiembronne to the front, a bombing accident at practice caused the death of Lance-Sergeant R. Matthews and three men, which few casualties, on the eve of tens of thousands to come, were due subjects of a court of inquiry and a full report to Headquarters. Then they marched by Capelle-sur-Lys to Nedon in mist and gathering rain as the autumn weather broke on the 24th, and heard the roar of what seemed continuous bombardment from Vimy to La Bassée. But it was at dawn on the 25th September that the serious work of the heavy guns began, while the Division crawled in pouring rain along congested roads from Nedon to Nœux-les-Mines. All they could see of the battle front
