London Exhibition Gallery

The London Irish Rifles Loos Football

London Irish Rifles - The Loos Football
This is the football wich the LIR kicked across No Mans Land on Sept 25th 1915 as they attacked the German positions in the town of Loos.
The following description was written by Patrick Macgill who achieved fame after the war as a poet and writer and who was a stretcher bearer during the battle.
I peered over the top. The air blazed with star-shells, and Loos in front stood out like a splendid dawn. A row of impassive faces, sleep-heavy they looked, lined our parapet; bayonets, silver-spired, stood up over the sandbags; the dark bays, the recessed dug-outs with their khaki-clad occupants dimly defined in the light of little candles took on fantastic shapes. From the North Sea to the Alps stretched a line of men who could, if they so desired, clasp, one another's hands all the way along. A joke which makes men laugh at Ypres at dawn may be told on sentry-go at Souchez by dusk, and the laugh which accompanies it ripples through the long, deep trenches... until it breaks itself like a summer wave against the traverse where England ends and France begins.
Many of our men were asleep, and maybe dreaming. What were their dreamsja... I could hear faint, indescribable rustlings as the winds loitered across the levels in front; a light shrapnel shell burst, and its smoke quivered in the radiant light of the star-shells. Showers and sparks fell from high up and died away as they fell. Like lives of men, I thought, and again that feeling of proximity to the enemy surged through me.
A boy came along the trench carrying a football under his arm. "What are you going to do with thatja" I asked.
"It's some idea, this," he said with a laugh.
"We're going to kick it across into the German trench."
"It is some idea," I said. "What are our chances of victory in the gameja"
"The playing will tell," he answered.
It was now grey day, hazy and moist, and the thick clouds of pale yellow smoke curled high in space and curtained the dawn off from the scene of war. The word was passed along. "London Irish lead on to assembly trench." The assembly trench was in front, and there the scaling ladders were placed against the parapet, ready steps to death, as someone remarked. I had a view of the men swarming up the ladders when I got there, their bayonets held in steady hands, and at a little distance off a football swinging by its whang from a bayonet standard.
Ahead the clouds of smoke, sluggish low-lying fog, and fumes of bursting shells, thick in volume, receded towards the German trenches, and formed a striking background for the soldiers who were marching up a low slope towards the enemy's parapet, which the smoke still hid from view. There was no haste in the forward move, every step was taken with regimental precision, and twice on the way across the Irish boys halted for a moment to correct their alignment. Only at a point on the right there was some confusion and a little irregularity. Were the men waveringja No fear! The boys on the right were dribbling the elusive football towards the German trench.
By the German barbed wire entanglements were the shambles of war. Here our men were seen by the enemy for the first time that e and roving that makes up the life of a soldier gone for ever. Here, too, I saw, bullet-riddled, against one morning. Up till then the foe had fired erratically through the oncoming curtain of smoke; but when the cloud cleared away, the attackers were seen advancing, picking their way through the wires which had been cut to little pieces by our bombardment. The Irish were now met with harrying rifle fire, deadly petrol bombs and hand grenades. Here I came across dead, dying and sorely wounded; lives maimed and finished, and all the romancof the spider webs known as chevaux de frise, a limp lump of pliable leather, the football which the boys had kicked across the field

© Mike St. Maur Sheil / westernfrontphotography.com

Nimy Canal Bridge - Mons

The original bridge was held by 4th Batt. Royal Fusiliers on Aug 23rd. Lt Dease & Pvt. Godley were both awarded V.C.s for their action at this point. Dease commanded two machine guns which were on the embankment on the left of shot with the Germans attacking from the other side of the canal. By midday one MG was out of action and Dease was firing the other single-handedly although he had been hit three times. When he finally succumbed to his wounds, Pvt. Godley took over and held off the attack for almost an hour before he too was wounded and captured although not before he had thrown the MG into the canal. Dease is buring in St Sy phorien CWGC but Godley survived the war in captivity.
Original bridge was blown up in 1940

© Mike St. Maur Sheil / westernfrontphotography.com

Tel el Saba - Palestine

Tel el Saba was a Turkish held artillery position on Oct 31st 1918 when British and Anzac units attacked Beersheba
The hillock on right horizon in the shot is Tel el Saba which was a Turkish artillery position taken on 31st Oct 1918 by the Anzac Light Horse with support from an HAC battery. This shot is taken from a ridge about 400m to the east which still has, to my eye at least, evidence of gunpits. The low ground to left of centre is the plain across which the Australian Light Horse made their famous charge to capture the town itself.
The site was a fortified city in 9th C. BC and was almost certainly referred to in the Bible in 2 Kings 18:13-19:37 when Sennacherib, King of Assyria captured King Hezekiah and destroyed 46 of his walled cities in 701 BC. Later it was the site of a fort built by Herod and a later Roman settlement and is best known to us as Beersheba.
This is described on the The Taylor Prism which is a six-sided baked clay document (or prism) discovered at the Assyrian capital Nineveh, in an area known today as Nebi Yunus. It was acquired by Colonel R. Taylor, British Consul General at Baghdad, in 1830, after whom it is named. The British Museum purchased it from Taylor's widow in 1855. As one of the first major Assyrian documents found, this document played an important part in the decipherment of the cuneiform script.
It describes the campaigns of King Sennacherib (704-681 BC0 thus
As for Hezekiah the Judahite, who did not submit to my yoke: forty-six of his strong, walled cities, as well as the small towns in their area, which were without number, by levelling with battering-rams and by bringing up seige-engines, and by attacking and storming on foot, by mines, tunnels, and breeches, I besieged and took them. 200, 150 people, great and small, male and female, horses, mules, asses, camels, cattle and sheep without number, I brought away from them and counted as spoil. (Hezekiah) himself, like a caged bird I shut up in Jerusalem, his royal city. I threw up earthworks against him

© Mike St. Maur Sheil / westernfrontphotography.com