Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/79

 *tenants H. S. Keating, H. Marion-Crawford, Hon. H. A. V. Harmsworth, A. C. Innes, and L. C. Lee. With this draft the strength of the Battalion stood at 700 men and 15 officers. Of the latter the Diary notes that nine are in the Special Reserve, "seven of them having done no sort of soldiering before the war." Mercifully, men lived but one day at a time, or the Diarist might have drawn conclusions, which would have fallen far short of what the future was to bring, from the fact that as many as twelve machine-gunners were kept at the base by the order of the authorities. There was need to train machine-gunners, and even greater need for the guns themselves. But the Battalion was not occupied with the larger questions of the war. They had borne their part against all odds of numbers and equipment in barring the German road to the sea in the first month-long battle of Ypres. They knew very little of what they had done. Not one of their number could have given any consecutive account of what had happened, nor, in that general-post of daily and nightly confusion whither they had gone. All they were sure of was that such as lived were not dead ("The Lord only knows why") and that the enemy had not broken through. They had no knowledge what labours still lay before them.

On the 3rd December, after an issue of new equipment and a visit from Sir Douglas Haig, commanding the First Army Corps, they lined the road from Meteren towards Bailleul for the visit of the King who walked down the lines of the 4th (Guards) Brigade and, after shaking hands with the four Commanding Officers of the Brigade, said: "I am very proud of my Guards and am full of admiration for their bravery, endurance, and fine spirit. I wish I could have addressed them all, but that is impossible, so you must tell them what I say to you. You are fighting a brave and determined enemy, but if you go on as you have been doing and show the same fine spirit, there can be only one end, please God, and that is victory. I wish you all good luck."