CHAPTER XIITHE GUARDS IN FLANDERS.
“... They (the 3rd French Chasseurs) had neared the cross-road, when Wellingtons’s voice was heard clear above the storm, ‘Stand up, Guards!’ Then from the shelter of the wayside banks rose the line of Maitland’s brigade of Guards, four deep and fifteen hundred strong, which poured a withering volley into the square, and charging, swept them out of the combat.”(“The Guards at Waterloo.” FromThe Life of Wellington, by the RightHon.Sir Herbert Maxwell, Bart., M.P.)
“... They (the 3rd French Chasseurs) had neared the cross-road, when Wellingtons’s voice was heard clear above the storm, ‘Stand up, Guards!’ Then from the shelter of the wayside banks rose the line of Maitland’s brigade of Guards, four deep and fifteen hundred strong, which poured a withering volley into the square, and charging, swept them out of the combat.”
(“The Guards at Waterloo.” FromThe Life of Wellington, by the RightHon.Sir Herbert Maxwell, Bart., M.P.)
“Tangier,” “Namur,” “Gibraltar,” “Blenheim,” “Malplaquet,” “Dettingen,” “Talavera,” “Fuentes d’Onor,” “Waterloo,” “Alma,” “Inkerman,” “Tel-el-Kebir,” “South Africa”—what a host of gallant memories these battle honours of the Guards call forth, what a glorious procession of heroic figures defiling through history amid the fire and smoke of a hundred deathless fights! Men come and go in war. The regiment remains. Its battle honours are the symbol of what it was, the promise of what it will be.
No body of troops in the British Army has redeemed the promise of its battle honours more illustriously in this war than the Guards. Marlborough, Wellington, Raglan, who saw in their careers, each in his turn, that the Guards were true to the promise of their colours, must look down from the Elysian Fieldsin proud admiration of the way in which the Guards in this war have once more maintained the untarnished splendour of their name. It will be with rightful satisfaction that the historian of the future will record how, in an unmilitary age, the British Army proved itself not unmindful of its great traditions, but he will be able to add that no regiments showed themselves more highly imbued with respect for the noblest qualities of the soldier than the Guards.
It is this same respect for soldierly attributes that is the outstanding feature of the Guards on active service. It is not a pose. It is not an affectation of the officers. It is not an individual whim. It is an attitude of mind that pervades the Guards as a whole, from their most senior officer down to the youngest drummer-boy. It is not a creation of this war, for then surely it would have withered for lack of fertile soil, by reason of the number of original Guardsmen who have died. On the contrary, it is seen as strong and as virile as ever, even in men who abandoned their civilian pursuits to take service with the Guards. The young men of good birth who have received commissions in the Guards after the outbreak of war, and the recruits who come out with drafts—novices all, not only to the war, but also to the Guards—are saturated with this manly respect for soldierly virtues.
In what do these soldierly virtues consist? First and foremost, in courage. Courage, indeed, is their alpha and omega, for it is the basis of all merit in the soldier. The standard that the Guards set, the standard that they most emulate and most admire,is the courage that recks not of danger, the courage that thinks first of the common cause, then of the fellow-man, and of self last; the courage that leads the forlorn hope as blithely as the storm, that is uncomplaining in hardships and humane after victory; the courage that hides itself beneath a bushel when the ordeal is past.
Then there is discipline. The strictest discipline on duty, a certain friendly good-fellowship off duty—these are the relations between officers and men of the Guards, as, of course, they are between officers and men right through the British Army. In the field the Guards officer is a guardian to his men. He is eternally preoccupied with their comfort in the trenches and in the billets; he furthers their sports and games, often out of his own pocket; he takes a general interest in their welfare. He is debonair and democratic in his dealings with them off duty, and they respect the familiarity thus allowed them, and in time of need repay their leaders’ generous solicitude by a loyalty and a devotion that are beyond all praise.
The strict attention to duty which is enforced in the Guards is shown in the personal neatness of the men and the fine condition of their trenches. Be the conditions never so bad, and water never so scarce, a Guardsman in the field will always contrive to present a clean appearance. If his uniform is stained and patched, his puttees will be neatly tied and his boots, cumbrous though they are, will be scraped clean of mud. The army knows that a well-turned-out battalion, clean in appearance and punctilious aboutsaluting, is a good fighting battalion. It has been the ambition of the Guards to set an example to the army in this respect.
The Guards trenches are famous all along our line. Deep, and well made, and clean, and as safe as they can be made, they are named after London streets familiar to the Guards on their “walkings out” on Sunday evenings—Piccadilly and Bond Street and Edgware Road and Praed Street. When the Guards are in their trenches they are kept scrupulously neat and tidy; the greatest attention is paid to hygiene, with the result that the plague of vermin and flies is probably less felt here than in any other part of the line.
There is a fine disdain for the shirker in the Guards. The Guards esteem it an honour to be able to fight with the Guards against the Germans, and therefore among the men there is nothing but contemptuous pity for the young fellow who prefers to loaf at home to earning the proud right to say in after years: “I was with the Guards in Flanders!” But for the Guards officer who should stay away from his battalion in the front line for any reason whatsoever, even to do useful duties in the rear, the officers have nothing but the most withering disdain.
It is no use arguing the question. It is no use pointing out to them that a man who is by temperament not a fighter can render better service to the country by serving on a Staff or doing other work behind the fighting-line. The only reply is that “they cannot imagine how the fellow can stay away from his battalion at a time like this.” You feel that they are often unjust in such wholesale condemnation,but you cannot help admiring the real Guards spirit which is reflected in this attitude of mind.
Their spirit is one of the most jealous exclusiveness. It is apparent in their mental attitude as well as in their dress. The Guards officers have succeeded in investing even their prosaic service khaki with one or two little touches that render their uniform quite distinct from that of officers of the line. In the first place, the different Guards regiments retain their distinctive button groupings in the service tunics of the officers, the buttons being arranged in ones for the Grenadier, in twos for the Coldstream, in threes for the Scots Guards, and in fours for the Irish Guards. It is etiquette that the buttons should be of dulled bronze, and as small and as unobtrusive as possible. No badges are worn on the collar, and the badge on the cap is silver and diminutive in size. Many Guards officers affect excessively baggy breeches, cut like full golfing-knickers, and worn with puttees. They are certainly distinctive, but they can hardly be said to be becoming, and are liable to get sodden and heavy from the wet in the trenches, I am told.
The Guards in the field judge life by two standards—the Guards’ standard and other men’s standard. There is nothing offensive to the rest of the army in their carefully studied exclusiveness. They are genuinely and generously appreciative of the undying gallantry displayed by line regiments. They show themselves friendly and companionable neighbours in the trenches, and stout and reliable comrades in action. But you will find that what they are seriously willing to concede to other regiments they will never allowto the Guards. They have no criticism to offer if a line battalion surrenders after a most gallant stand against overpowering odds, but if you probe their minds you will find that they would naturally expect a Guards battalion in similar circumstances to fight to the last man. And the remarkable thing is that, if you examine their records in this war, you will find that this is the standard the Guards have set and lived up to.
Indeed, the Guards’ spirit is not of this war. It is of another age. It is as old as chivalry itself. It was to the British Guards, if you remember, that the Frenchmen at Fontenoy said: “Messieurs les Anglais, tirez les premiers!” and as far as our Guards are concerned, a similar incident might occur in this war. You will never hear a Guardsman disparage the German as a fighter. He thinks the German is a bad sportsman, and, remembering Belgium and theLusitania, he has a fierce joy in fighting him. But he knows he is a brave man, for our Guards, remember, saw the Prussian Guard advancing in parade order to their death at Ypres in the face of a perfect tornado of shot and shell.
“They were fine, big men all,” a Guards officer who witnessed that last desperate attempt to break our line said to me, “and they walked past the corpses of their dead comrades choking their line of advance, and straight into our machine-gun fire like brave men that were not afraid to die.”
It was the spirit of the Guards in Marlborough’s day that sent the Guardsman William Lettler across the river at Lille to cut the chains of the drawbridge.It was the same spirit that carried the Guards forward at Talavera with such impetuosity that a catastrophe was only narrowly averted, that at Waterloo welded them into a solid wall of steel. It was the Guards’ spirit that transformed the little Irishman, Michael O’Leary, into an epic hero; that inspired the Coldstreams at Ypres, the Scots Guards at Festubert, to fight to the last man.
This book is not a history, and I must leave the story of the Guards’ achievements in this war to an abler pen than mine. From the outset they have been in the very thick of the fighting. At Mons we find the famous Guards Brigade—2nd Grenadiers, 2nd and 3rd Coldstream and 1st Irish Guards—with the Second Division, and with the First Division the 1st Coldstream and the 2nd Scots Guards. With Sir Henry Rawlinson’s Seventh Division in Belgium—that splendidly gallant division of whose exploits in the early days of the war we heard so little—were the 1st Grenadiers and the 2nd Scots Guards. At Mons the Guards battalions played their part gallantly in beating back the desperate attempt of the Germans to overwhelm “French’s contemptible little army” with vastly superior numbers.
No battle honour will figure more gloriously in years to come on the colours of the four battalions of the Guards Brigade than Landrecies. The magnificent stand which the brigade, under General Scott-Kerr, made in this little town averted a disaster and inflicted enormous losses on the enemy. The Germans delivered a surprise attack on the place in the mist and darkness of the night of August 25, hoping,by dint of tremendously superior numbers, to overwhelm the Guards and burst through our line. The Guards hastily improvised a defence, and throughout the night, through hours of bloody and desperate hand-to-hand fighting in the narrow streets, held their own. At last the Germans realized that the surprise had failed, and withdrew, leaving their dead piled up in ramparts on the cobblestones.
With the rest of the British Army, sorely pressed and exhausted, but not beaten, the Guards fell back from Mons. We hear of the Guards Brigade again in the woods of Villers-Cotterets, fighting a desperate rear-guard action, engaged at close quarters, as they love to be. Here the Irish Guards, on active service for the first time in this war—and right gallantly have they acquitted themselves—lost their Colonel, Lieutenant-Colonel Morris, a man as brave as he was big.
When fortune changed, and to the stern ordeal of the retreat and the bad news from Belgium succeeded the spirited pursuit of Von Kluck falling back baffled from Paris, once more we find the Guards in the centre of things. They fought in the battle of the Marne, and advanced with the rest of the army to the Aisne. Carrying out Sir John French’s historic order to “make good the Aisne,” the Guards Brigade had a stiff fight at Chavonne, but managed to cross the river at this place, after overcoming severe German resistance in the woods, by ferrying a battalion over the stream.
In the first great struggle about Ypres in October, 1914, the Guards—like every other British regiment engaged there, be it said—gave of their best in thedefence of our line. The 2nd Scots Guards, holding the trenches at Kruseik, north-east of Zandvoorde, came in for the brunt of the smashing attempt of the Germans to pierce the line of the Seventh Division. The enemy actually managed to break through, but the gap was closed and the bulk of the storming party killed or made prisoner. The 2nd Scots Guards counter-attacked with splendid dash, and the German attempt failed, but in a subsequent vigorous assault by the enemy the gallant battalion was all but exterminated. That was on October 25. On October 31—by Sir John French’s own admission, the critical day of the battle—when the Germans broke through the line of the First Division, the 1st Coldstreams held on till the end, and were practically destroyed.
Meanwhile, the Guards Brigade, which had come into line on the previous evening, was fighting desperately on the left of the First Division. I have already mentioned in my chapter on Sir John French how the 2nd Worcester Regiment, by its gallant charge at Gheluvelt, saved the British Army on that fateful 31st of October. For a time the peril was averted. But after a short respite from their persevering efforts to obey the Emperor’s command to win Ypres at all costs, the Germans attacked again on November 6, this time against the Klein Zillebeke position, defended by the 2nd and the Guards Brigades and a French division—the Ninth—under General Moussy.
General Scott-Kerr, who commanded the Guards Brigade at Mons, wounded at Villers-Cotterets, relinquished the command to Brigadier-General the Earlof Cavan, who came out from England to take up the appointment. Lord Cavan commanded at Ypres. The achievements of the Guards Brigade in this war will for ever be associated with his name. A short, stoutly built little man, there is nothing particularly suggestive of the great soldier in his personal appearance, but a few minutes’ talk with him will show you the fine courage in his keen eyes, the tremendous virility in his language and gestures, that bespeak the leader of men.
Cavan is the Guards’ spirit incarnate. All his admiration goes to the fearless man. I wish I could tell you in his own words, as he told me, the now familiar story of how Mike O’Leary of the Irish Guards won the V.C. at Cuinchy. The General (who believes that where the Guards are there he should also be) witnessed the incident himself. He tells how he saw O’Leary, right ahead of his company, dash up one bank and kill the Germans there, then dash up another and kill the Germans there, then, going round the back, seize two Germans working a machine-gun by the scruff of the neck, and with either hand gripping their collars firmly, call to his comrades to relieve him of his prisoners. “A most extraordinary fellow,” says the General. “By rights he should have been killed a dozen times.”
Lord Cavan’s own fearlessness and complete indifference to danger are a by-word in the army. His officers swear by him. His men adore him, regarding him, with true Guards’ exclusiveness, as a treasured possession, a peculiar acquisition of the Guards. More than once he has been mentioned in despatches. Thisis what the Commander-in-Chief, on the recommendation of Sir Douglas Haig, wrote of his conduct at the first battle of Ypres: “He was conspicuous for the skill, coolness, and courage with which he led his troops, and for the successful manner in which he dealt with many critical situations.” Lord Cavan has no enemies, I believe, and no one who has seen him in the field will think that what I have written in praise of him is excessive.
A sudden German attack on November 6 drove back the troops on the left of the Guards Brigade, which was left exposed. A splendid charge by the Household Cavalry brought a British cavalry brigade to fill the gap on the left of the Guards, and the next day the Guards delivered a successful counter-attack, but could not retain the ground they had won against the overwhelming German odds.
On November 11 the final desperate effort of the Germans to break through to the sea, in the shape of the attack of the Prussian Guard, failed, and the battle came to a close. The First Brigade, with which were the 1st Coldstream and the 1st Scots Guards, with the rest of the First Division, stemmed the tide and threw the flower of the German Army back in confusion. The First Brigade left its commander on that blood-stained field in the person of the gallant Brigadier-General Fitzclarence, V.C., who, as I have told elsewhere, was the author of the famous order to the 2nd Worcesters that saved the day at Ypres on October 31.
The next serious fighting in which the Guards were involved was to the south, in the wet and dreary blackcountry opposite La Bassée. In December the First Division was ordered up to Givenchy to relieve the Indian Corps, which had been having a very bad time, and on December 21 the First Brigade found itself holding the trenches from Givenchy down to the La Bassée Canal. The prompt intervention of this fine division enabled our line, from which the Indians had been partially forced back, to be re-established.
This ugly and sinister region from Givenchy to Cuinchy, situated on the other side of the La Bassée Canal, was destined to be the home of the Guards for many months, and the scene of some of their most heroic exploits in this war. On January 24 the First Brigade, under Brigadier-General Cecil Lowther, found itself holding the line in the Cuinchy brick-fields opposite the famous La Bassée Railway triangle formed by the Béthune-La Bassée line and the Lens-La Bassée line, which joins the first in two branches. The 1st Scots Guards and the 1st Coldstreams were in the trenches. On the 25th the Germans opened a heavy bombardment of the Guards’ trenches, which were practically destroyed. The line was broken, and the Germans managed to secure a footing in the brick-fields. A counter-attack, delivered with great gallantry by the Black Watch, the Cameron Highlanders, and the King’s Royal Rifles, succeeded in partially clearing our second line. The First Brigade lost heavily, and was relieved during the night.
On February 1 Cavan’s Guards Brigade was holding the line through the Cuinchy brick-fields. At half-past two in the morning the 2nd Coldstreams were driven out of their trenches, but managed to hold outtill daylight in a position close to their old trench. A counter-attack launched in the small hours by some of the Irish Guards and Coldstreams was checked by the enemy’s rifle-fire.
Another counter-attack was arranged for 10.15 a.m. It was preceded by a splendid artillery preparation—the kind of ruthless and accurate rain of high-explosive projectiles that puts a fine heart into men waiting to attack. Then the storming-party went forward, a grand array of big, stalwart men in whose great hands their rifles with bayonets fixed seemed as light and as inconsiderable as toothpicks. Captain A. Leigh Bennett led the way at the head of fifty of the 2nd Coldstreams, bent on “getting their own back”; following came Second-Lieutenant F. F. Graham with thirty Irish Guards, with whom went one Michael O’Leary in the front line, and a party of Royal Engineers with barbed wire in rolls, and sandbags, to “organize” the trenches that might fall into our hands.
It was a magnificent piece of work. The Guards were irresistible. They swept like an avalanche over the lost trench, bayoneting their way. All the ground lost was retaken, and another trench besides, while two machine-guns and thirty-two prisoners fell into our hands. It was here that Michael O’Leary performed his prodigious exploit.
But the achievements of the Guards were not confined to brilliance in the open with the bayonet. They proved themselves well-disciplined, uncomplaining, resourceful, and patient through the long winter months in the trenches in this sordid region, whichvies with the Ypres salient as being the ugliest, wettest, and most depressing portion of our whole line.
Neuve Chapelle saw the 1st Grenadiers and 2nd Scots Guards in line with the Seventh Division. The latter stages of that historic fight made great demands on the courage and tenacity of the troops engaged, and these two famous battalions maintained their high reputation for both. The Guards were not engaged in the second battle of Ypres. Their services were required farther south, where the attack on the Fromelles ridge, to support the French “push” in the Artois, was preparing. In the operations which began on May 9, and, continuing with intervals until the middle of June, resulted in the gain of a mile or two of front and the capture of several hundred prisoners, all the brigades in which the Guards are serving were concerned.
After the attack by the Seventh Division on May 15 on the German trenches south of Richebourg l’Avoué, the greater part of a company of the 2nd Scots Guards, including Captain Sir Frederick Fitzwygram, was found to be missing. Presently word came down to the brigade—I think from the Canadians, who had taken over the line here—that some Scots Guards’ graves had been located. Would the brigade send up an officer to investigate?
An officer was despatched. He was destined to elucidate the mystery of the missing company. He did not find Fitzwygram, who had been wounded and captured. But he found the dead bodies of sixty Scots Guards lying huddled together in the open, thecentre of a grim circle of some 200 German corpses, and close by two rough white crosses marking the spot where the Canadians had laid two Scots Guards officers to rest.
The Scots Guards, who had advanced side by side with the Border Regiment, had outdistanced their fellows. They were found dead, amid heaps of empty cartridge cases, with their rifles still grasped in their stiffened fingers, in the place where they had last been seen through a drifting haze of high-explosive vapours, standing shoulder to shoulder together under a murderous fire poured in on them from three sides. Soaked by the rain and blackened by the sun, their bodies were not beautiful to look upon, but monarch never had nobler lying-in-state than those sixty Guardsmen dead on the coarse grass of the dreary Flanders plain.
It has been my privilege to have seen a good deal of the Guards in this war. You would scarcely recognize in these battle-stained warriors the spruce Guardsmen ofSt.James’s and the Park. The first Guardsmen I met in this war were a battalion of Irish Guards and a battalion of the Coldstreams on an evening in May, as they were marching down a road near Chocques towards the firing-line. Their creased caps and stained khaki, their dull green web equipment and short brown rifles, made them look at the first superficial glance like any other Regular troops. But something about their stride, the way they bore themselves, their alignment (though they were marching easy), made me look again. That magnificent physique, that brave poise of the head, that clear,cool look of the eye—that could only be of the Guards!
They had come a long way. It was a close, warm evening, and the roads were a smother of choking dust. The Guards wore their caps pushed back off their foreheads, and their tunics unbuttoned at the neck, showing a patch of white skin where the deep tan of their faces and necks ended. The perspiration poured off them in streams. It traced little channels in the dust that lay thick on their sunburnt cheeks. Every now and then a man, with a grunt, would wipe the sweat from his eyes, and in the same motion administer that little hoist to his pack that is peculiar to the British soldier marching with a full load.
Many a time, on German manœuvres, I have passed a regiment on the march, like these Guardsmen, in the stifling dust of a summer day. I have been all but choked by the sour odour which the breeze has wafted over from the marching men, and have been only too glad to follow the advice of the old hands to put the wind between them and me. But these British Guardsmen, grimy and travel-stained though they were on the outside, were clean of body, and the air about them was pure. Looking at them closer, I saw that under the dust their haversacks were neatly packed and fastened, their uniform well-fitting and whole, their puttees beautifully tied. These things may seem trifles to you who will read this in the sheltered atmosphere of England, where one man in khaki with a gun seems as another. But they are the mark of a good battalion, and, noting them on that dusty French road, with the guns drumming faintly inthe distance and an aeroplane droning aloft, I knew that the trenches for which those troops were bound would be well held.
One of the most stirring military spectacles it has ever been my good-fortune to witness was a parade of some battalions of the Guards before the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Kitchener, and M. Millerand, the French Minister of War. I have seen many reviews of the Prussian Guard before the German Emperor, both in Berlin and in Potsdam. My eye has been fascinated by the perfect precision of the movements of the Prussian drill, the long lines of heads thrown stiffly over at the left shoulder at the same angle, of feet flung forward in theParadeschrittwith such mathematical exactitude that they seemed as one movement, of white-gloved hands swinging to and fro in absolute accord.
I have watched the rippling line of the French infantry swing past the saluting-point at Longchamps reviews with a wiry elasticity that gave better promise of efficiency in the field than the stiff precision of the Prussian, and have delighted in the brilliant array of colours, the red and blue and gold and silver against the deep green background of the historic racecourse.
But I have never seen, and never wish to see, a more inspiring picture than those four battalions of Guards drawn up in their drab khaki on a heath in Flanders over against the Tricolour and the Union Jack flying side by side. An ancient military tradition, a high purpose and perfect physical condition, never combined to produce a more sublime spectacle of troops than this. There was no display, no searchingafter cheap effects. The Guards were there in their khaki, as they had come from the trenches; the officers carried no swords; the colours were guarded in churches at home. The Grenadiers and Coldstreams had their drums and fifes; the Scots Guards their pipers, wearing the proud red tartan of the ancient House of Stuart. The four battalions stood there in four solid phalanxes, unbeautiful and undecorative, save when, to the crash of the opening bars of the “Marseillaise,” three distinct ripples ran through those serried ranks, and with a dazzling flash of steel the Guards presented arms.
Memories of Mons and Landrecies, of Klein Zillebeke and Cuinchy and Festubert, went shuddering by, pale shadows escaping from the prison of the imagination, as the stalwart giants of the King’s Company of the Grenadiers led off the march past. The drums and fifes crashed through “The British Grenadiers” again and again and again before the serried files of men, marching with an iron tread that fairly shook the earth, had all gone by, and the skirling of the pipes proclaimed the approach of the Scots Guards.
There were faces in that procession like faces on a Greek frieze, fighters all, radiant with youth and strength and determination to conquer or readiness to die, men who had looked Death in the eyes, and, in that they had withstood the ordeal, had risen above man’s puny fears of the Unknown. It was a spectacle to thrill a soldier, to inspire a poet, to make an Englishman vibrate with pride at the thought that these are his brothers.
The army in the field loves the Guards. It is notjealous of their exclusiveness, for the Guards have shown in this war that they are not content to rest upon their laurels. The army trusts the Guards, for it knows that, when in a critical hour Wellington’s voice shall be heard once more above the storm crying, “Stand up, Guards!” the Guards will rise again in a solid wall of steel, as invulnerable as their phalanx at Waterloo.