A Charge by the Irish
“It was at this moment, just as we were debouching on to the scragged front line of trench, that we beheld a scene which stirred and thrilled us to the bottommost depths of our souls. The great charge of the Irish division had begun, and we had come up in the nick of time. Mere words must fail to convey anything like a true picture of the scene, but it is burned into the memory of all those who were there and saw it. Let me employ the simile of Parliament Hill. You are more than half way up it now. The flat top, where the village lies a heap of ruins, surrounded by a fence of shattered trees, is about 400 yards away. Between the outer fringe of Ginchy and the front line of our own trenches is No Man’s Land—a wilderness of pits, so close together that you could ride astraddle the partitions between any two of them. As you look half-right, obliquely along No Man’s Land, you behold a great host of yellow-coated men rise out of the earth and surge forward and upward in a torrent—not in extended order, as you might expect, but in one mass—I almost said a compact mass. The only way I can describe the scene is to ask you to picture five or six columns of men marching up hill in fours, with about a hundred yards between each column. Now, conceive those columns being gradually disorganized, some men going off to the right and others to the left to avoid shell holes. There seems to be no end to them. Just when you think the flood is subsiding, another wave comes surging up the beach toward Ginchy.
“We joined in on the left. There was no time for us any more than the others to get into extended order. We formed another stream converging on the others at the summit. By this time we were all wildly excited. Our shouts and yells alone must have struck terror into the Germans, who were firing their machine guns down the slope. But there was no wavering in the Irish host. We couldn’t run. We advanced at a steady walking pace, stumbling here and there, but going ever onward and upward. That numbing dread had now left me completely. Like the others, I was intoxicated with the glory of it all. I can remember shouting and bawling to the men of my platoon, who were only too eager to go on. The German barrage had now been opened in earnest, and shells were falling here, there, and everywhere in No Man’s Land. They were mostly dropping on our right, but they were coming nearer and nearer, as if a screen were being drawn across our front. I knew that it was a case of ‘now or never’ and stumbled on feverishly. We managed to get through the barrage in the nick of time, for it closed behind us, and after that we had no shells to fear in front of us.