ls,
breweries, dyeworks, machine-shops, brick-fields, lime-kilns, and
intervening patches of intensive agriculture--the most densely crowded
area in the world--with the ultimate result that the advance of the
Germans to the Channel coast was stopped by impregnable lines of
British trenches.

In these operations both the 1st and 2nd battalions of the Leinsters,
the Connaught Rangers, the Irish Rifles, the Irish Fusiliers, and the
Irish Regiment took part, with the 2nd battalions of the Dublins,
Munsters, and Inniskillings, whose first battalions--as we shall see
later--were destined for more terrible enterprises against the Turks
at the Dardanelles. It is not easy to get from the official despatches
the correct proportion of the main events in France and Flanders, not
to speak of being able, by the impersonal generalities of these
documents, rightly to estimate the worth of the services of particular
battalions. My purpose, therefore, is to attempt to depict the war on
the Western Front, as seen through the eyes, not of the commanders,
but of the men in the ranks and the regimental officers, and in doing
so I confine myself necessarily to episodes happening here and there
over the far-spreading field of conflict in which Irish regiments and
individual Irish soldiers distinguished themselves.

There were two tremendous and prolonged struggles for the possession
of Ypres. The chief battle, that of Ypres-Armentieres, lasted from
October 17th to November 15th, 1914. One of the first movements of the
British was to dislodge the enemy from positions they held near Lille.
In these engagements national impetuosity led to the advance of two
Irish battalions too far without supports, and their practical
annihilation. On October 18th the 2nd Leinster Regiment was part of a
Division which chased the Germans out of the French town of
Hazebrouck, about twenty-five miles north-west of Lille, and pursued
them beyond Armentieres, a town on the river Lys, within nine miles of
Lille. The Leinsters were about a mile in advance of the main body.
They pushed on to a French village called Premesque, still nearer to
Lille, and there entrenched, when the Germans surrounded them. For a
day and a half the Leinsters held out until they were relieved by
French troops. The French Commander thanked them for saving the
village, but it cost the battalion more than 500 men and officers.

At the same time another Irish battalion was engaged on a simila