An Irishman’s Diary on Patrick MacGill and the Battle of Loos

In the lamentable roll call of first World War battlefields, the name of the old French mining town of Loos does not chill the blood as do the names of the Somme, Verdun or Passchendaele.

Yet, in its time, it was uniquely terrible. This was to be the “biggest battle in the history of the world”, according to Gen Richard Haking. It was certainly the biggest single battle to that date in British history.

The first day of the Battle of Loos was also the bloodiest day of the war for the British army aside from the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

On September 25th, 1915, some 75,000 British soldiers rose from their trenches under the cover of a gas cloud the British swore they would never use.

They attacked the German lines centred on Loos-en-Gohelle, an unremarkable place, framed, then as now, by two huge slag heaps which dominate the flat terrain for miles around.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) lists some 10,240 British deaths from September 25th, 1915, including 8,500 who fell on the battlefield of Loos. The six British divisions in action that day suffered more casualties per unit than during the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

Fatal mistake

The tragedy of Loos was compounded by a fatal mistake on the part of the commander-in-chief of the British army, Sir John French. Just as the attack threatened to turn into a rout, the call came through for reinforcements but, for reasons which are unclear to this day, French kept them too far back.

All momentum was lost. The attack was renewed on the second day, but against an enemy which had time and space to bring up reinforcements. Of the 15,000 or so soldiers involved in the second day of Loos, more than half were killed and injured. The third day involved the Guards Division. The 1st and 2nd battalions of the Irish Guards suffered grievous losses. The battle continued for another fruitless three weeks, but was effectively over after three days.

Of the 20,000 British soldiers who died during the Battle of Loos, some 7,000 were Scottish, yet what remains in the folk memory of this largely forgotten catastrophe is very Irish in character.

The best-known casualty of the Battle of Loos was Lieut John Kipling, the son of Rudyard Kipling. John Kipling could barely see the second line on an eye chart and was physically unfit for active service, but his father knew Lord Roberts, the old Anglo-Irish war hero, who was commander-in-chief of the regiment, and who was able to get John Kipling a commission. Kipling wrote the poem My Boy Jack in memory of his lost son, which became a stage play in 1997 and a film 10 years later.

There are two memorable accounts in literature of the Battle of Loos. The first is Robert Graves's Goodbye To All That and the second Patrick MacGill's The Great Push.

The Great Push was written with amazing haste after MacGill was wounded on the first day of the battle.

He had written much of it while waiting to go over the top; a lot more on the "highway of pain" between Loos and Victoria Station. It was published in 1916. He was just 24, but was already a literary sensation with the publication of his novel Children of the Dead End.

When war broke out in 1914, he was working in, of all places, Windsor Castle, as a librarian. Though his inclinations were decidedly nationalist in character, he nevertheless joined the London Irish Rifles as a stretcher bearer.

This storied regiment had been formed in 1859 to facilitate the huge influx of Irish emigrants to Britain. Though MacGill was to remark that he was one of only two Irishmen in his unit, the London Irish Rifles was composed of Irish-born, second- and third-generation Irish and a lot of haitch-dropping Cockneys. It was a favourite of John Redmond who visited regularly while in London.

MacGill chronicles them all memorably in The Great Push which covers the lead-up to the Battle of Loos and his own fortunate "blighty" – a wound bad enough to be invalided out but not bad enough to cripple one for life.

The Great Push begins with a memorable line. "The justice of the cause which endeavours to achieve its object by the murdering and maiming of Mankind is apt to be doubted by a man who has come through a bayonet charge. The dead lying on the fields seem to ask, 'Why has this been done to us?'" War, he would later write, was "an approved licence for brotherly mutilation".

The novel tells the story of the assault by the 1st battalion of the London Irish Rifles. It includes his own account of the memorable, and possibly apocryphal, story of Frank Edwards, the footballer of Loos, who cheerily kicked a football across no-man’s land and lived to tell the tale.

To mark the centenary of the London Irish involvement in the Battle of Loos, the regimental association will unveil a stone plaque in the town square of Loos, rebuilt after the war on Saturday, September 26th.

MacGill also wrote poetry about the battle and his poem In The Morning will be recounted 100 years after he survived the terrible battle.

Food of the bomb and the hand-grenade;

Still the slushy pool and mud –

Ah, the path we came was a path of blood,

When we went to Loos in the morning.