The Irish Guards In The Great War Vol. I Edited and compiled from their diaries and papers by Rudyard Kipling

The Huns had their revenge a few days later when the Battalion's billets and Headquarters at Poperinghe were suddenly, on April 11, shelled just as the Battal- ion was going into line at Ypres. The thing began almost with a jest. The Regimental Chaplain was tak- ing confessions, as is usual before going up, in Poper- inghe Church, when the building rocked to bursts of big stuff obviously drawing nearer. He turned to open the confessional-slide, and smelt gas — chlorine be- yond doubt. While he groped wildly for his gas- helmet in the dusk, the penitent reassured him: "It's all right, Father. I've been to Divisional Gas School to-day. That smell's off my clothes." Relieved, the Padre went on with his duties to an accompaniment of glass falling from the windows, and when he came out, found the porch filled with a small crowd who reported : "Lots of men hit in an ambulance down the road." Thither ran the Padre to meet a man crazy with terror whom a shell-burst had flung across the street, half- stripped and blackened from head to foot. He was given Absolution, became all of a sudden vehemently sick, and dropped into stupor. Next, on a stretcher, an Irish Guardsman crushed by a fallen wall, reported for the moment as "not serious." As the priest turned to go, for more wounded men were being borne up through the dusk, the lad was retaken by a violent haemorrhage. Supreme Unction at once was his need. Captain Woodhouse, R.A.M.C., the regimental doctor, appeared out of the darkness, wounded in the arm and shoulder, his uniform nearly ripped off him and very busy. He had been attending a wounded man in a house near headquarters when a shell burst at the door, mortally wounded the patient, killed one stretcher- bearer outright and seriously wounded two others. The Padre, dodging shells en route, dived into the cellars of the house where he was billeted for the Sacred Ele- ments, went back to the wayside dressing-station, found a man of the Buffs, unconscious, but evidently a Catho- lic (for he carried a scapular sewed in his tunic), an- ointed him, and — the visitation having passed like a thunder-storm — trudged into Ypres unworried by any- thing worse than casual machine-gun fire, and set him- self to find some sufficiently large sound cellar for Battalion Mass next morning. The Battalion followed a little later and went underground in Ypres — Head- quarters and a company in the Carmelite Convent, two companies in the solid brick and earth ramparts that endure to this day, and one in the cellars of the Rue de Malines.

It was the mildest of upheavals — a standard-pattern affair hardly noted by any one, but it serves to show what a priest's and a doctor's duties are when the imme- diate heavy silence after a shell-burst, that seems so astoundingly long, is cut by the outcries of wounded men, and the two hurry off together, stumbling and feeling through the dark, till the electric torch picks up some dim, veiled outline, or hideously displays the wounds on the body they seek. There is a tale of half a platoon among whom a heavy gas-shell dropped as they lay in the flank of a cutting beside a road. Their platoon-commander hurried to them, followed by the sergeant, calling out to know the extent of the damage.


From page 141 and 142

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