The Irish Guards in the Great War, Volume 2 (of 2) — Text and Context

The Barrage as Stage Machinery

Kipling describes the artillery barrage before the Broembeek action with an unusual simile: it 'moved and halted with the precision of stage machinery or, as a man said, like water-hoses at a conflagration.' The comparison is striking—mechanical, almost theatrical—and it recurs in the text's attention to the choreography of attack. The three objectives, the creeping barrage, the standing barrage, and the back-barrage are laid out with the exactness of a drill manual. Yet Kipling also notes the human cost: the division suffered 'only two thousand casualties—say four battalions of a peace establishment.' The word 'only' is chilling, a measure of how the scale of loss had become routine.

Tennis Courts and Ghost Roads

In a rare psychological aside, Kipling records that laying out white tapes for forming-up had 'always a depressing influence on men's minds.' One officer was reminded of 'tennis-courts and girls playing on them at home'; a man saw the tapes as 'a road for ghosts,' with reflections on how many who crossed that line would return only for their rum-ration. These two images—domestic leisure and spectral procession—capture the jarring disconnection between the soldiers' past and present. Kipling does not elaborate, but the juxtaposition lingers, suggesting a mind struggling to reconcile the ordinary with the horrific.

Weather as an Adversary

The Broembeek action is framed by the weather: 'the traitorous weather' that threatened to make all work impossible, and the rain that 'shut down dismally' on the Houthulst Forest. Kipling treats the landscape as an active participant—the Broembeek might flood, making crossing 'difficult' and 'worse'—and the rain is personified as 'traitorous.' This is not mere scene-setting; it reflects the tactical reality that mud and water could derail an attack as effectively as enemy fire. The eventual clearing of the weather—'a good drying wind'—is noted with relief, as if nature had momentarily relented.

Kipling's history is a document of process: the forming-up, the barrage, the objectives, the casualties. He rarely pauses for reflection, but when he does—the ghost road, the tennis court—the effect is powerful precisely because it is understated. Readers should attend to these moments of psychological weight, for they reveal the human cost behind the meticulous regimental record.

I often find myself returning to Kipling’s Irish Guards, that solemn ledger of mud and duty. Yet beside it, my hand lingers on a quieter companion—the East African campaign’s scattered record, its heat and distances. They share a particular silence, these two, the weight of men who endured far from the grand maps. Three years of war in East Africa — A Reader’s Guide holds that same patient grief, wordless and knowing.