ipoli, Beck House and Borry
Farm, became an Irish shambles. In spite of their dreadful losses
the survivors in the Irish battalion went forward to the assault
with desperate valor on the morning of August 16th, surrounded the
pill-boxes, stormed them through blasts of machine-gun fire, and toward
the end of the day small bodies of these men had gained a footing on the
objectives which they had been asked to capture, but were then too weak
to resist German counter-attacks. The 7th and 8th Royal Irish Fusiliers
had been almost exterminated in their efforts to dislodge the enemy from
Hill 37. They lost seventeen officers out of twenty-one, and 64 per cent
of their men. One company of four officers and one hundred men, ordered
to capture the concrete fort known as Borry Farm, at all cost, lost four
officers and seventy men. The 9th Dublins lost fifteen officers out of
seventeen, and 66 per cent of their men.

The two Irish divisions were broken to bits, and their brigadiers called
it murder. They were violent in their denunciation of the Fifth Army for
having put their men into the attack after those thirteen days of heavy
shelling, and after the battle they complained that they were cast aside
like old shoes, no care being taken for the comfort of the men who had
survived. No motor-lorries were sent to meet them and bring them down,
but they had to tramp back, exhausted and dazed. The remnants of the
16th Division, the poor, despairing remnants, were sent, without rest or
baths, straight into the line again, down south.

I found a general opinion among officers and men, not only of the Irish
Division, under the command of the Fifth Army, that they had been the
victims of atrocious staff-work, tragic in its consequences. From what I
saw of some of the Fifth Army staff-officers I was of the same opinion.
Some of these young gentlemen, and some of the elderly officers,
were arrogant and supercilious without revealing any symptoms of
intelligence. If they had wisdom it was deeply camouflaged by an air
of inefficiency. If they had knowledge they hid it as a secret of their
own. General Gough, commanding the Fifth Army in Flanders, and afterward
north and south of St.-Quentin, where the enemy broke through, was
extremely courteous, of most amiable character, with a high sense of
duty. But in Flanders, if not personally responsible for many tragic
happenings, he was badly served by some of his subordinates; and
battalion officer