XXVIII THE IRISH AT GINCHY

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September 10

The capture of Ginchy by the Irish Brigades should be told not in journalist’s prose but in heroic verse. Poor Ireland will weep tears over it, for many of her sons have fallen, but there will be pride also in the heart of the Irish people, because these men of Munster, Dublin, and Connaught, and of all parts of the west and the south, have done such splendid things in courage and endurance, adding a very noble episode to the history of the Celtic race.

When they came out of the battle this morning they were weary and spent, and they had left many good comrades behind them, but the spirit of the war sustained them, and they came marching steadily with their heads held high. It was one of the most moving things I have ever seen in this war.

A great painter would have found here a subject to thrill his soul, that long trail of Irish regiments, horribly reduced by their losses, and with but few officers to lead them, coming across a stretch of barren country strewn with the wreckage of two years’ bombardment, and crowded with the turmoil of the present fighting.

Behind them arose the black curtain of smoke across the battlefields through which there came the enormous noise of the unending gun-fire, and around them were some of our own batteries hard at work with great hammer-strokes as their shells went on their way to the enemy’s lines, but ahead of them walked one Irish piper playing them home to the harvest-fields of peace with a lament for those who will never come back.

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A brigadier came riding over the fields to meet them. It was the first time he had seen them together since the early dawn of to-day, when they were still fighting beyond the ruins of Ginchy, which they had won by a great assault.

He stood, a solitary figure by the side of the track down which his men came, and there was a great tenderness in the eyes of this brigadier as he watched them pass, and called out to them words of thanks, and words of good cheer, and turned to me now and then to say how splendid they had been.

“Eyes right!” shouted the officers or sergeants who were leading their companies, and the general said, “Carry on, there,” and “Well done—you did gloriously.” “Bravo, Dublins!... You did well, damned well, Munsters, my lads!”

The men’s eyes brightened at the sight of him; and they squared up, and grinned under German caps and German helmets.

“Hullo, Greene!” called out the brigadier to a very tall fellow tramping in the outside file. “Glad to see you’re all right. And a big target, too!”

The music of the Irish pipes went calling down to the valley, and I watched the men out of sight with something stirring at my heart. Earlier in the morning, before they had formed up, I had been among them and had heard many stories of great adventure and of great courage, told sometimes with an Irish humour that finds a whimsicality even in the most awful moments, and sometimes with the sadness of men who mourn for their friends, but wonderfully untouched by the fearful strain of it all and with a grim joy in their victory.

Some of them had been in Gallipoli, and one sergeant of the Munsters told me that the taking of Ginchy was the “hottest” thing he had seen since the landing on August 21 at Suvla Bay. There were two men in his regiment who had fought all through from Mons, and had escaped from the hell of the Dardanelles, but had fallen now, at last, on the way up from Guillemont. He and other men of the old Regulars spoke of the regiments of the New Army who had fought with them to-day.

“They were just great. The Irish Rifles went through like a whirlwind. There was no stopping them. When the Germans ran you couldn’t see them for dust.”

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The story of the Irish Brigades does not begin at Ginchy. It begins last Sunday, a week ago, at Guillemont, when one brigade, as I have already described in an earlier despatch, went through the northern part of that village in one fierce assault which would not be checked. After that (as well as before) they lay under heavy shell-fire, without sleep and without hot food or much water, until the new attack, when they were on the right of the assault.

The brigade on the left, which had the greatest triumph yesterday, was lying out in connected shell-craters (the old kind of trench, neatly revetted, with strong traverses and cosy dug-outs, does not exist in this part of the battle-line). For five days they held on stubbornly under ceaseless shell-fire. When the hour of “zero” came for the attack they were not broken in spirit, as weaker men would have been after all this trial, but eager to get out and get on—“to get some of their own back.”

The Germans in Ginchy would have had more terror in their hearts if they had known the character of the men who were about to storm their stronghold. They would have prayed to God to save them from the Irish. As it was, these German soldiers were not feeling safe. They were new men just sent up to the line, and conscious of a frightful menace about them. They belonged to the 185th Division, the 19th Bavarian Division, and the machine-gun company of the 88th Division. They crouched down in a network of dug-outs and tunnels under the ruins of the village expecting attack, and determined, as we know now, to sell their lives dearly. They were brave men.

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The attack began yesterday afternoon shortly before five o’clock after a heavy bombardment. The Irish sprang up and went forward cheering. They shouted “Go on, Munsters!” “Go on, Dublins!” and old Celtic cries. “Now then, Irish Rifles!” Our shell-fire crept up in front of them. They went from the south in four waves in open order, with about 50 yards between each wave, and on the left the troops reached their first halting place in the village, right across the first German trenches and dug-outs, in eight minutes after starting time—a distance of 600 yards, which is a wonderful record.

On the right the Irish were checked by three machine-guns well placed for very deadly work and sweeping the ground with waves of bullets. Many poor fellows dropped. Others fell deliberately with their faces to the earth so that the bullets might skim above their prone bodies. At the same time the Irish officers and men were being sniped by German marksmen who had crept out into shell-craters. It was a serious situation here unless the machine-guns could be “killed.”

A brilliant little piece of tactics was done by the troops on the left of the right wing, who swung round and attacked the machine-gun position from the west and north, in an encircling movement so that the German teams had to run out of the loop with their weapons to some broken trenches 300 yards away, where they again fired until knocked out by some trench mortars attached to one of the Irish battalions. This enabled the right wing to advance and join the left, and they then advanced together through the village, with the Irish Rifles remaining to hold the captured ground, and the Dublins charging ahead.

In the centre of the village among all the dug-outs and tunnels was the ruin of an old farm in which the enemy had another machine-gun which they served with bursts of fire. Again our trench mortar men saved the situation. They came on with the infantry, and ranged their little engines on to the farm, aiming with such skill that the hostile machine-gun was put out of action by a short storm of high explosives.

The men were still suffering from snipers and ordinary riflemen hidden in all kinds of places in the northern half of the village, where there were concreted and tunnelled chambers with loop-holes level with the ground, through which they shot. The Irish were reckless of all this and swept over the place fiercely, searching out their enemies. In shell-craters and bits of upheaved earth and down in the dug-outs there was hand-to-hand fighting of the grimmest kind. The Bavarians struggled savagely, using bombs and rifles, and fighting even with the bayonet until they were killed with the same weapon.

It was all very quick. Within ten minutes of reaching the line half-way through the village the leading Dublins had got to the northern end of it and sent out advanced parties 200 yards beyond. But there was one menace, which might have led to disaster but for quick wit and fighting genius.

The Irish had expected that their left flank would be supported by other troops attacking between Ginchy and Delville Wood, but owing to the difficulty of the ground in that neighbourhood and the rapidity of the Irish advance this had not been possible, and the victors of Ginchy found themselves with an exposed flank to the north-west of the village. A young sapper officer from Dublin realised the situation, and taking command of a body of men dug a defensive flank and established strong posts as a protection against a counter-attack. The situation on the extreme right was for some time equally perilous, as the troops engaged in an enterprise on that side had not yet made good their ground, and the splendid achievement of the Irish Brigade, from a military point of view, is their success—quite astoundingly good—of taking a hostile front of 900 yards to the depth of nearly a mile with no supporting troops on either flank.

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From a non-military, untechnical, human point of view the greatness of the capture of Ginchy is just in the valour of those Irish boys who were not cowed by that sight of death very close to them and all about them, and who went straight on to the winning-posts like Irish racehorses. The men who were ordered to stay in the village almost wept with rage because they could not join in the next assault.

“We would have gone on into the blue,” said one of them, “except for all this confounded diplomacy.” Diplomacy is a fine word for the simple law of safeguarding the captured ground; but you see the spirit which used it. It was the same spirit which caused the temporary desertion of three Irish servants on the Brigade Staff. One of them left a note yesterday morning on his master’s table: “As I could not be at Guillemont I am going to Ginchy. I hope to be back again, so please excuse.”

Fine and wonderful men! There was a Sinn Feiner among them, with all the passion of his political creed and “a splendid soldier,” said one of his officers, who is an Englishman. Nationalists and Catholics, Irish to the bone, with every tradition of their race in their blood and spirit, they fought yesterday and in the dawn of to-day without any thought of grievance or any memory of hatred, except against the enemy whom they call “jerry,” instead of Fritz.

In fair fight they were relentless, but they were kind to their prisoners. It is queer how hatred and kindness alternate in these men. One man told me the strangest tale with absolute truth, I am sure, because of his fine, steady eyes. He captured a big Saxon in a shell-hole the night before the attack. The man was wounded in the leg and back, but held a revolver, and was not too ill to fight. But he had no fight left in him when the Irishman jumped down to him.

“Are you going to kill me?” he asked, in good English.

“Sure, no,” said the Irishman. “But just put away that pistol, won’t you?” Then the Irish sergeant undid his own field dressing and bound up the man’s leg and back (it was all under the loud whistling of shells), and said, “Now get along with you back to your own lines, for faith I don’t mean any harm to you.”

So away went the German into Ginchy, and afterwards, no doubt, wished he hadn’t.

A tall Irishman, describing the great charge to me, said: “The small, little men went over with the greatest pluck, sir, so that it was a real pleasure to see. And the Jerry boys ran that fast the dust was in their throats, it was.”

“How did you get that Boche cap?” one man asked another. “Did you kill your man?”

“Did I kill him?... I brought down fourteen prisoners all by myself, I did, and if you don’t believe it, here’s my receipt for the same.”

He held out a slip of paper, and there sure enough was the officer’s receipt for the fourteen men.

One German climbed up a tree during the attack. He had a white cap-band and a white ribbon on his shoulder, and seemed to be signalling.

“Now, come down, Jerry,” shouted five Irishmen in a chorus. “If you don’t come down we’ll shoot you, we will.”

The man would not come down.

“And sure we shot him,” was the end of the story.

The honours of the day are with the Irish, and these gallant men hope—they spoke about it, pleadingly—that their losses will be filled up by Irishmen, so that the spirit of their regiments may be kept.