The Irish on the Somme Part 4

CHAPTER V

COMBATIVENESS OF THE IRISH SOLDIER

THE BRITISH BLENDS OF COURAGE

There is a story of Wellington and his army in the Peninsular campaign which embodies, in a humorous fashion, the still popular idea of the chief national characteristics of the races within the United Kingdom.

It says that if Wellington wanted a body of troops to get to a particular place quickly by forced marches he gave an a.s.surance that on their arrival Scottish regiments would be given their arrears of pay; English regiments would have a good dinner of roast beef, and the bait held out to Irish regiments to give speed to their feet, however weary, was an all-round tot of grog. The Welsh, it will be noticed, are not in the story. This cannot be explained by saying they had yet to achieve separate national distinction on the field of battle. The 23rd Regiment of Foot (Royal Welsh Fusiliers) served under Wellington and contributed more than their fair share to the martial renown of the British Army. It is solely due, I think, to the fact that they had not yet emerged from their absorption in the English generally. But, to round off the story, what motive of a material kind would impel the Welsh Regiments to greater military exertions? Shall we say any one of the three inducements mentioned--pay, grub or grog, or, better still, all of them together?

The present war has provided the most searching tests of the qualities of the races involved in it. They have all been profoundly moved to the uttermost deeps of their being, both in the ma.s.s and as individuals. The superficial trappings of society and even of civilisation have fallen from them, and they appear as they really are--brave or cowardly, n.o.ble or base, unselfish or egotistical. We see our own soldiers, English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish, not perhaps quite as each came from the hands of Nature, but certainly as the original minting of each has been modified only by the influence of racial environment. All the races within the United Kingdom are alike in this, that each is a medley of many kinds of dissimilar individuals with very varied faculties and attributes. But there are certain broad, main characteristics which distinguish in the ma.s.s each racial aggregate of dissimilar units; and it is these instincts, ideas, habits, customs, held in common, that fundamentally separate each nationality from the other. That is what I mean by racial environment.

The soldiers of the United Kingdom possess in general certain fine qualities of character and conduct which may be ascribed to the traditions and training of the British Army. But when we come to consider them racially we find that their points of difference are more striking even than their points of similarity. Each nationality evolves its own type of soldier, and every type has its distinctly marked attributes. As troops, taken in the ma.s.s, are the counterpart of the nations from which they spring, and, indeed, cannot be anything else, so they must, for one thing, reveal in fighting the particular sort of martial spirit possessed by their race. Though I am an Irishman, I would not be so boastful as to say that the Irish soldiers have a superior kind of courage to which neither the English, the Scottish nor the Welsh can lay claim. They are all equally brave, but the manifestation of their bravery is undoubtedly different--that is, different not so much in degree as in kind. In a word, courage, like humour, is not racial or geographical, but, like humour also, it takes on a racial or geographical flavour.

General Sir Ian Hamilton has written: "When, once upon a time, a Queen of Spain saw the Grenadier Guards she remarked they were strapping fellows; as the 92nd Highlanders went by she said, 'The battalion marches well'; but, at the aspect of the Royal Irish, the words 'b.l.o.o.d.y War!' were wrung from her reluctant lips." After a good deal of reading on the subject, and some thought, I venture to suggest the following generalisations as to the qualities which distinguish the English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish, in valour, one from another.

English--the courage of an exalted sense of honour and devotion to duty, and of the national standard of conduct which requires them to show, at all costs, that they are better men than their opponents, whoever they may be.

Scottish--the courage of mental as well as physical tenacity, coolly set upon achieving the purpose in view.

Welsh--the courage of perfervid emotion, religious in its intensity.

Irish--the courage of dare-devilry, and the rapture of battle.

All these varieties of courage are to be found, to some extent, in each distinct national unit, and thus they cross and recross the racial boundary lines within our Army. Still, I think they represent broadly the dominant distinguishing characteristics of the English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish as fighting men. The qualities lacking in one race are supplied by the others; and the harmonious whole into which all are fused provide that fire and dash, cool discipline, doggedness and high spirits for which our troops have always been noted. The Commander-in-Chief, Sir Douglas Haig, is said to have made a most interesting estimate of the qualities of the soldiers of the three home races under his command. The Irish are best for brilliant and rapid attack, and the English are best for holding a position against heavy onslaughts. The Scottish, he thinks, are not quite so fiery and dashing in a.s.sault as the Irish, but they are more so than the English, and not quite so tenacious in holding on under tremendous fire as the English, but they are more so than the Irish.

It is this combination of attributes which enables the British Army, more perhaps than any other army, to get out of a desperate situation with superb serenity and honour. There is an old saying that it never knows when it is beaten. Soult, Marshal of France, whose brilliant tactics in the Peninsular War so often countered the consummate strategy of Wellington and the furious dash of the Irish infantry, bore testimony in a novel and vivid way to this trait of the British.

"They could not be persuaded they were beaten," he said. "I always thought them bad soldiers," he also said. "I turned their right, pierced their centre, they were everywhere broken; the day was mine; and yet they did not know it and would not run."

Any other troops, in a hopeless pa.s.s, would retreat or surrender, and would do so without disgrace. There are numberless instances in British military history where our troops, faced with fearful odds, stood, magnificently stubborn, with their backs to the wall, as it were, willing to be fired at and annihilated rather than give in. Mr.

John Redmond tells a story of a reply given by an English General when asked his opinion of the Irish troops. "Oh," he said, "they are magnificent fighters, but rotten soldiers. When they receive an order to retire their answer is, 'Be d.a.m.ned if we will.'" I may add, in confirmation of this story, that one of the incidents of the retreat from Mons, which was the subject afterwards of an inquiry by the military authorities, was the refusal of a few hundred men of a famous Irish regiment to retire from what appeared to be an untenable position, much less to surrender, one or other of which courses was suggested by their superior officer. The answer of the men was as stunning as a blow of a shillelagh, or as sharp as a bayonet thrust.

"If we had thrown down our arms," one of them said to me, "we could never have shown our faces in Ireland again."

Racial distinctions are to be seen on the weak side as well as on the strong side of character. Each nationality, regarded as fighters, has therefore its own particular failing. The Irish are disposed to be foolhardy, or heedless of consequences. It is the fault of their special kind of courage. "The British soldier's indifference to danger, while it is one of his finest qualities, is often the despair of his officers," says Mr. Valentine Williams, one of the most brilliant and experienced of war correspondents, in his book, _With our Army in Flanders_, and he adds, "The Irish regiments are the worst. Their recklessness is proverbial." They are either insensible to the perils they run, or, what is more likely, contemptuous of them.

I have been given several examples of the ways they will needlessly expose themselves. Though they can get to the rear through the safe, if wayward, windings of the communication trenches, it is a common thing for them to climb the parapets and go straight across the open fields under fire so as to save half an hour. To go by the trenches, they will argue, doubles the time taken in getting back without halving the risk. In like manner, they prefer to go down a road swept by the enemy's artillery, which leads direct to their destination, rather than waste time by following a secure but circuitous way round.

There is an Irish proverb against foolhardy risks which says it is better to be late for five minutes than dead all your lifetime, but evidently it is disregarded by Irish soldiers at the Front.

An English officer in the Royal Irish Regiment writes: "Really the courage and cheerfulness of our grand Irish boys are wonderful. They make light of their wounds, and, owing to their stamina, make rapid recoveries. The worst of them is they get very careless of the German bullets after a while and go wandering about as if they were at home."

Another English officer begins an amusing story of an Irish orderly in an English regiment with the comment: "I shall never now believe that there is on this earth any man to beat the Irish for coolness and pluck." The officer was in his dug-out, and first noticed the Irishman chopping wood to make a fire for cooking purposes on a road which was made dangerous during the day by German snipers. He remarked to another officer, "By Jove! that man will get shot if he isn't careful." "No sooner had I said the word," he writes, "when a bullet splattered near his head. Then another between his legs. I saw the mud fly where the bullet struck. The man, who is the Captain's servant, turned round in the direction of the sniper and roared, 'Good shot, Kaiser. Only you might have hit me, though, for then I could have gone home.' After this the orderly proceeded to roast a fowl, singing quite unconcernedly, 'I often sigh for the silvery moon.' Another bullet came and hit him in the arm. He roared with delight; and, as he basted the fowl, exclaimed, 'Oh, I'm not going to lave you, me poor bird.'

The officer shouted to him to come into the dug-out. He did so, but when he had licked the wound in his arm, and bound it up, he said he must get the fowl, or it would be overdone; and before the officer could utter a word of protest, he ran across the road to the fire, started singing again, though the bullets, once more, came whistling past his ear. When he returned to the dug-out with the fowl nicely roasted he remarked cheerily, 'People may say what they like, but them Germans are some marksmen, after all.'"

The whimsical side of Irish daring is further ill.u.s.trated by a story of some men of the Royal Munster Fusiliers. To while away the time in the trenches one night they made bets on doing this or that. One fellow wagered a day's pay that he would go over to the German lines and come back with a maxim gun, which was known to be stationed at a particular point. In the darkness he wriggled across the intervening s.p.a.ce on his stomach, and, coming stealthily upon the guard, stabbed him with a dagger. Then slinging the maxim across his shoulder, he crawled safely back to the trenches. "Double pay to-day!" he cried to the comrade he made the bet with. "But you haven't won," said the other. "Where's the machine's belt and ammunition?" The next night he sallied forth on his belly again, and returned with the complete outfit. The spirit of the anecdote is true to the Irish temperament, though the episode it records may be fanciful. There is no doubt that things of the kind are done very frequently by Irish soldiers. They call it "gallivanting"; and the mood takes on an air of, say, recklessness which, at times, seems very incongruous against the frightful background of the war.

The very root of courage is forgetfulness of self. Self-consciousness is, in no great degree, an Irish failing, or virtue, either, if it is to be regarded as such. Especially when he is absorbed in a martial adventure, the Irishman has no room in his mind left for a thought of being afraid, or even nervous. He likes the thrill of movement, the fierce excitement of advancing under fire for a frontal attack on the enemy, the ferocity of a contest at close grips. This is the temperament that responds blithely to the whistle--"Over the parapets!" His blood is stirred when the actual fighting begins, and as it progresses he is carried more and more out of himself. The part of warfare repugnant to him, most trying to his temper, is that of long watching and waiting. For the work of lining the trenches a different kind of courage is required. The slush, the miseries, the herding together, the cramped movements, are enough to drive all the heat out of the blood. The qualities needed for the severe and incessant strain of this duty are an immovable calm, a tireless patience, an endurance which no hardships can break down. Here the English and the Scottish shine, for by nature they are more disciplined, more submissive to authority, and they hold on to the end with an admirable blend of good-humour and doggedness. On the other hand, I am told, on the authority of an officer of the Welsh Guards, that when the Irish Guards are in the trenches they find the long dreary vigil and the boredom of inaction so insupportable that it is a common thing for parties of them to go to the officer in command and say, "Please, sir, may we go out and bomb the Germans?"

As Lord Wolseley had "the Irish drop in him," perhaps it is not to be wondered at that he discounts the old proverb that the better part of valour is discretion. "There are a great many men," he writes, "who pride themselves upon simply doing their duty and restricting themselves exclusively to its simple performance. If such a spirit took possession of an army no great deeds can ever be expected from it." What more can one do, it may be asked, than one's duty? Evidently Lord Wolseley would have duty on the battlefield spiced or gingered with audacity. The way the Irish look at it is well ill.u.s.trated, I think, in a letter which I have seen from a private in a Devon regiment. He states that while he and some comrades were at an observation post in a trench near the enemy's line six Germans advanced close to them, and though they kept firing at them they could not drive them back. "Two fellows of the Royal Irish Rifles came up,"

continues the Devon man, "and asked us what was on. We told them. Then one turned round to the other and said, 'Come on, Jim, sure we'll shift them.' Then the two of them fixed their bayonets and rushed at the Germans. You would have laughed to see the six Germans running away from the two Irishmen." We have here an exhibition of the spirit of the born fighter who does not stop to count the odds or risks too cautiously. The incident recalls, in a sense, the scene depicted by Shakespeare in _King Henry V_ at the camp before Harfleur, France, when Fluellen the Welshman--all shilly-shallying and dilly-dallying in enterprise--wants to argue with Captain Macmorris, the Irishman, concerning the disciplines of war. But the Irishman wants not words but work. Away with procrastination! So he bursts out, in Shakespeare's most uncouth imitation of the brogue--

"It is no time to discourse, so Chrish save me: the day is hot, and the weather, and the wars and the King, and the dukes: it is no time to discourse. The town is beseeched, and the trumpet call us to the breach, and we talk, and, be Chrish, do nothing; 'tis shame for us all: so G.o.d sa' me 'tis shame to stand still; it is shame by my hand; and there is throats to be cut, and works to be done; and there isn't nothing done, so Chrish sa'

me, la!"

Lord Wolseley also lays greater store on the spontaneous courage of the blood, the intuitive or unconscious form of courage, which is peculiarly Irish, than on moral courage, the courage of the mind, the courage of the man who by sheer will-power masters his nervous system and the shrinking from danger which it usually excites. In Lord Wolseley's opinion the man who is physically brave--the man of whom it may often be said that he has no sense of fear because he has no perception of danger--is the true military leader who draws his men after him to the achievement of deeds at which the world wonders.

That is the kind of courage which of old led the mailed knight, bent on a deed of derring-do, to cleave his way with sword or battle-axe to the very heart of the enemy's phalanx for the purpose of bringing their banner to the ground, or dealing them a more vital blow by slaying their commander. There may be little opportunity in trench warfare and in duels between heavy guns, both sides concealed behind the veils of distance, for such a show of spectacular bravery. War is no longer an adventure, a game or a sport. It is a state of existence, and what is needed most for its successful prosecution, so far as the individual fighter is concerned, is a devotion to duty which, however undramatic, never quails before any task to which it is set.

But the Irish soldier still longs for the struggle to the death between man and man, or, better still, of one man against a host of men. At dawn one day a young Irish soldier, inexperienced and of a romantic disposition, took his first turn in the trenches. He had come up filled with an uplifting resolve to do great things. The Germans immediately began a bombardment. The lad at first was filled with vague wonderments. He was puzzled especially by the emptiness of the battlefield. He had in mind the opposing armies moving in sight of each other, as he had seen them in manoeuvres. Where was the enemy?

Whence came these sh.e.l.ls? Then the invisibility of the foe, and this mechanical, impersonal form of fighting appalled him. One of his comrades was blown to pieces by his side. A dozen others disappeared from view in an upheaval of the ground. This was a dastardly ma.s.sacre and not manly warfare, thought the youth.

He could stand the ordeal no longer. He ran, bewildered, up the trench, shouting "Police! police!" "h.e.l.lo, there; what are you up to?"

said an officer, barring the way. "Oh, sir," cried the young soldier, "there's b.l.o.o.d.y murder going on down there below, and I am looking for the police to put an end to it."

CHAPTER VI

WITH THE TYNESIDE IRISH

OVER THE HEIGHTS OF LA BOISELLE, THROUGH BAILIFF'S WOOD TO CONTALMAISON

The men of the Tyneside Irish battalions stood to arms in the a.s.sembly trenches by the Somme on the morning of July 1, 1916. Suddenly the face of the country was altered, in their sight, as if by a frightful convulsion of Nature. Their ears were stunned by shattering explosions, and looking ahead, they saw the earth in two places upheaving, hundreds of feet high, in black ma.s.ses of smoke. The ground rumbled under their feet, so that many feared it would break apart and bring the parapets down on top of them. Two mines had been sprung beneath the first line of the German trenches to the south-west and north-east of the heap of masonry and timber that once had been the pretty little hamlet of La Boiselle. It was the signal to the Division, which included the Tyneside Irish, that the hour of battle had come.

The part in the general British advance allotted to the Division was first to seize the heights on which La Boiselle stood. This was a few miles beyond the town of Albert, held by the Allies, on the main road to the town of Bapaume, in the possession of the Germans. Thence they were to move forward to Bailiff's Wood, to the north-west of Contalmaison, and to a position on the cross-roads to the north-east of that village. Contalmaison lay about four miles distant, almost in ruins amid its devastated orchards, and with the broken towers of its chateau standing out conspicuously at the back. One brigade had to take the first line of German trenches, other battalions of the Division had to take the second and third lines, after which the Tyneside Irish were to push on over all these lines to the farthest point of the Brigade's objective, the second ridge on which Contalmaison stood, where they were to dig themselves in and remain.

The Tyneside Irish had already had their baptism of fire, and had proved themselves not unworthy of the race from which they have sprung. Captain Davey--formerly editor of the _Ulster Guardian_ (a Radical and Home Rule journal)--records a stirring incident of St.

Patrick's Day, 1916. On the night of March 15-16 a German patrol planted a German flag in front of the Tyneside Irish, half-way across "No Man's Land." It was determined to wipe out the insult. During the day snipers were allowed to amuse themselves firing at the flag, and it was not long before a lucky shot smashed the staff in two, and left the German ensign trailing in the dust. But the real work was reserved for the night. There were abundance of volunteers, but Captain Davey, with pride in his own province, selected an Ulsterman for the adventure. The man chosen was Second-Lieutenant C.J. Ervine, of Belfast. Mr. Ervine, supported by two Tyneside Irishmen, set out on the eve of St. Patrick's Day, and entered the gloomy depths of "No Man's Land." An hour pa.s.sed and they returned--but without the flag.

The enemy was too keenly on the alert. But in the early hours of St.

Patrick's Day Lieutenant Ervine set off again--this time by himself.

What happened is thus described by Captain Davey--

"For an hour and a half we waited for his return, expecting each minute to hear the confounded patrol and machine-gun making the familiar declaration that 'We will not have it.' So keen were the sentries that even when relieved they would not leave their posts. After an hour had pa.s.sed, Mr. Ervine's sergeant, getting impatient, went over the parapet and crawled to our wire so as to see better. Punctually at a quarter to three a German star-light went up, and by it we could see a dark form making in our direction. In five minutes it reached our wire, and in ten it was over the parapet. The Germans had been caught napping. In less than half an hour, while the spoiler of the Huns stood by in the crude garb of a Highlander in trench boots--for he had fallen into a ditch full of water on the way and we bring no change of clothing to the trenches--another officer and myself had erected a flagstaff in a firing-bay and nailed to it was the German ensign, while ABOVE it floated a green flag with the harp which had been presented to our company before we left home. And so we ushered in St. Patrick's Day!"

Captain Davey proceeds--

"Proudly the green banner floated out, while, of course, we flattered ourselves that the black, white and red of Prussia hung its head in shame below. It was not long before the Germans showed that they were wide awake at last, and the bullets began to sing about our newly-erected monument to Ireland and Ireland's patron saint. But it was a stout flagstaff, and though dozens of bullets struck it, nothing short of a sh.e.l.l could have shifted it. And there it stood all day with the Green above the Black, White and Red. It was no longer a case of 'Deutschland'

but of 'Ireland Uber Alles.' I don't know if any similar sight has been seen in a British trench. I know the green flag has led Irish troops to victory in this war, but I think this is the first time the spectacle has been seen of the Irish ensign hoisted above a captured German flag. At any rate the spectacle was sufficiently novel to cause us to have admiring visitors all day long from other parts of the line."

Unfortunately there is a sad pendant to this story of St. Patrick's Day at the Front. Lieutenant Ervine, the gallant hero of the exploit, died from wounds.

The country which faced the Tyneside Irish on July 1, 1916, had been an agricultural country, inhabited by peasant cultivators before the war. The ravages of war had turned it into a barren waste. The productive soil was completely swept away. Nothing remained but the raw, elemental chalk. It was bare of vegetation, save where, in isolated spots, the hemlock, the thistle, and other gross weeds, proclaimed the rankness of the ground, and also that the processes of Nature ever go on unchecked, even in a world convulsed by human hate.

Not only were the villages pounded into rubbish by gun-fire, but the woods--also numerous in these parts--appeared, as seen from a distance, to be but mere cl.u.s.ters of gaunt and splintered tree stumps devoid of foliage. Not a human being was to be seen. Yet that apparently empty waste was infested with men--men turned into burrowing animals like the badger, or, still more, like the weasel, so noted for its ferocious and bloodthirsty disposition. In every shattered wood, in every battered hamlet, in all the slopes and dips by which the face of the country was diversified, they lie concealed, tens of thousands of them, in an elaborately and cunningly contrived system of underground defences, armed with rifles, bombs, machine-guns, trench-mortars, and ready to spring out, with all their claws and teeth displayed, on the approach of their prey, the man in khaki. But, as things turned out, the man in khaki pared the nails of Fritz, and broke his jawbone.

"Before starting, and when our guns were at their heaviest, there was a good deal of movement, up and down, and talking in the trenches. A running fire of chaff was kept up, and there was many a smart reply, for Irish wit will out even in the face of death," said Lieutenant James Hately, who was wounded in that battle. "Some of the fellows were very quiet, but none the less determined. Most of us were laughing. At the same time I felt sorry, for the thought would obtrude itself on my mind that many of the poor chaps I saw around me would never see home again. As for myself, curiously enough, it never occurred to me that I would even be hit. Perhaps that was because I am of a sanguine or optimistic disposition. I started off, like many another officer, with a cigarette well alight. Many of the men were puffing at their pipes. Officers and men exchanged 'good-lucks,'

'cheer-ohs' and other expressions of comradeship and encouragement."