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.
Pages:
810
811
812
813
814
815
816
817
818
819
820
821
822
823
824
825
826
827
828
829
830
831
832
833
834