The Irish Guards in the Great War: The First Battalion : edited and compiled from their diaries and papers/ Rudyard Kipling, foreword by George Webb

The Foot Guards are the infantry corps d’élite of the British Army. Of the regiments so designated, — Grenadier, Coldstream, Scots, and Irish, — the Irish Guards was in 1914 the youngest, having been created after the Boer War to give recognition to the work of the Irish in South Africa. The single battalion of which it consisted at the beginning of the Great War set foot in France nine days after England entered the conflict. In the second battalion, which was organized a year later, Rudyard Kipling’s only son, a lad in point of years, held a commission as second lieutenant. He was lost in the first moments of the first engagement (Loos) in which the battalion took part. This is the bond that has drawn England’s most famous man of letters to the humble task of regimental historian, to be the ‘editor and compiler’ of the diaries and papers of the Irish Guards. The story of each battalion is told in a separate volume; there are no illustrations of either men or places; the maps are beautifully and quaintly drawn after the style loved by the old cartographers.

FOOT GUARDS, BRITISH ARMY, IRISH GUARDS, SOUTH AFRICA, GREAT WAR, REGIMENTAL HISTORY