His special farewell order ran:

And for recognition of their work in the trenches for the past three weeks, the following was sent from the G.O.C. Second Division to the Officer commanding the Irish Guards:

It was the Brigadier’s reference to their having proved themselves worthy to take place with the other regiments of the Brigade of Guards, “and more so,” that delighted them most; for the Battalion felt that it had won its spurs in every field. Yet, for all that, the Diary which, under the well-worn official phrases, represents the soul of the regiment and knows how that soul is made and tempered, emphasizes the fact that at Béthune there are some “quite good parade-grounds, where a good deal of steady drill will be carried out” and plenty of country for route-marching, where the men could learn how to bear themselves without “budging” beneath the casual shells that dropped miles behind the line.

So they “rested” at Béthune and gave a concert in the theatre, to which they invited many inhabitants of the town who, being new to the manners and customs of the Irish, “could not understand much,” but a French officer sang the “Marseillaise” with great effect, and at dinner afterwards, when the Prince of Wales was among the guests, there were not only red and white roses on the table, but, according to one account, “silver spoons and forks,” provided by the owner of the house. If Béthune did not yet comprehend the songs of these wild outlanders, it had full confidence in them.

Cuinchy

The first week of July saw them returned to their own old trenches at Cuinchy—the fifty times fought-over line that ran from the La Bassée Canal to within a hundred yards of the La Bassée-Béthune road. A couple of companies of the Herts, one on each side of the La Bassée road, lay on their right, and right of those again, the 2nd Coldstream. They boasted as many as six machine-guns in position belonging to the Battalion, and three to the 2nd Grenadiers, their relief. The trenches had not improved by use since February. There were mine-craters directly in front of them, their opposing edges occupied by our men and the enemy; the breastworks were old bursten sandbags; fire-steps had broken down, dug-outs were inadequate against the large-size trench-mortar bombs that the Germans were using, and generally the condition and repair of things was heart-breaking to the new-comers and their Brigadier, who spent most of his time, night and day, in the front line.

Annequin, where two of the companies were billeted, had become more than ever a shell-trap full of English batteries for which the Germans were constantly searching; and, since experts told them that we now had got the upper hand of the enemy at mining, the cynical expected that, at any moment, some really big mine would go up beneath them. As an interlude, the companies in billets were employed in making dug-outs without any material; which trifling task they somehow accomplished. The big shells and the bombing from the trench-mortars forced them to deepen all dug-outs to ten or twelve feet. These were shored with bricks and topped with rails as material became more plentiful.

On the 17th July Captain A. H. L. McCarthy, R.A.M.C., who had broken his arm at Lapugnoy six weeks before, returned to duty and was made welcome. His sick-leave, which he seems to have filled with beseeching letters to the C.O., had been darkened by a prospect of being detached from the Battalion and sent to the Dardanelles. Father Gwynne, also, came back from his two months’ rheumatism cure, relieving Father Knapp. He was not quite restored and so was forbidden by the C.O., to show himself in the front line for at least ten days. It is to be hoped that he obeyed, but in a battalion where the call for the priest goes out with, or before, the call for stretcher-bearers, neither shepherds nor flock are long separated under any circumstances. They tell the tale of one of their priests who, utterly wearied, dropped for an hour’s sleep in a trench that was being deepened under fire. He was roused by a respectful whisper from the working-party: “We’ve dug to your head an’ your feet, Father, an’ now, if you’ll get up, we’ll dig out under the length of ye.”

The Brigade’s system of forty-eight hours’ reliefs enabled them to do more in a given time than battalions who went in for four days at a stretch, as a man could carry two days’ rations on him without drawing on the fatigue-parties, and the knowledge he would be relieved at the end of the time kept his edge. A Brigadier of experience could tell any section of the line held by the Brigade as far as he could see it, simply from the demeanour of the working-parties. This state of things was only maintained by unbroken discipline and the gospel that if one man can keep himself comparatively clean in all that dirt and confusion every one else can. It behoved the Battalion, also, to make and leave a good name among the French upon whom they were quartered, as well as with the enemy over against them. They were at that time, as for long afterwards, almost unmixed Irish, and for that reason, the relations between officers and men were unlike anything that existed elsewhere, even in nominally pure Irish battalions. If there be any mystery in the training of war that specially distinguishes the Brigade of Guards from their fellows it is that the officers lie under discipline more exacting than that of the rank and file; and that even more than in any other branch of the service they are responsible for the comfort of their men. Forced together as they were in the stark intimacy of the trenches, that at any moment may test any soul to the uttermost; revealed to each other, every other day at least, in the long and wearisome march to billets, where the companies and platoons move slowly and sideways through the communication-trenches, gambling against death—if the German heavies are busy—at each step of the road, officers and men came to a mutual comprehension and affection—which in no way prevented the most direct and drastic criticism or penalties—as impossible to describe as it would be to omit, since it was the background against which their lives ran from day to day. The Celt’s national poise and manner, his gift of courtesy and sympathy, and above all the curious and communicable humour of his outlook in those days made it possible for him and his officers to consort together upon terms perhaps debarred to other races. When the men practised “crime” they were thorough and inventive in the act and unequalled in the defence as the records of some court-martials testify. But the same spirit that prompted the large and imaginative sin and its unexpected excuse or justification (as, for example, that three sinners detected in removing a large cask of beer were but exercising their muscles in “rowling it a piece along the pavé”) bred a crop of forceful regimental characters. Many, very many of these, have perished and left no record save the echo of amazing or quaint sayings passed from mouth to mouth through the long years; or a blurred record of some desperately heroic deed, light-heartedly conceived and cunningly carried through to its triumphant end and dismissed with a jest. The unpredictable incidence of death or wounds was a mystery that gave the Irish full rein for sombre speculation. Half an hour’s furious bombardment, with trenches blowing in by lengths at a time, would end in no more than extra fatigues for the disgusted working-parties that had to repair damage. On another day of still peace, one sudden light shell might mangle every man in a bay, and smear the duckboards with blood and horrors. A night-patrol, pinned down by a German flare, where they sprawled in the corn, and machine-gunned till their listening comrades gave up all hope, would tumble back at last into their own trenches unscathed, while far back in some sheltered corner the skied bullet, falling from a mile and a half away, would send a man to his account so silently that, till the body slid off the estaminet bench, his neighbours never guessed. The ironies and extravagances of Fate were so many, so absurd, and so terrible, that after a while human nature ceased to take conscious account of them or clutched at the smallest trifles that could change a mind’s current. The surest anodyne and one that a prudent commanding officer took care to provide was that all hands should have plenty to do. To repair a breach or to cut a fire-step was not enough. There was a standard in these matters to be lived up to, which was insisted upon through all the days of trench-warfare. None knew how long the deadlock would last or when the enemy, wearied of mining, bombs, and heavy artillery, might attempt a break-through. When the first line was cleaned and consolidated and finished with what was deemed then ample dug-out accommodation, supporting parties behind it had to be brought up to a like level; and so on.

The enemy at that time, on that line, interfered very little. They rigged a searchlight on one of the brick-stacks in their possession one evening, but took it down after our guns had protested. Occasionally they shelled Béthune, while trying to hit an observation-balloon near the town; and sometimes they bombed with trench-mortars. There were, however, days on end when nothing could stir them up, or when a few authoritative warnings from our guns would cut short a demonstration almost as it began. They were bombed for some hours to keep them out of the craters and to cover our men at work. In this work No. 4906 Private Henry won the D.C.M. in continuing to throw bombs though twice wounded (the Irish are gifted at hurling things) till he was at last ordered off the field. The enemy replied with everything except rifle-fire and in the darkness of a rainy night “his machine-guns caused some annoyance,” till, after our artillery had failed to find them, the Battalion trench-mortars silenced them and allowed us to finish digging the new trenches and sap. The whole affair lasted four hours and was carried out by No. 1 Company, under Captain M. V. Gore-Langton, at the cost of 1 man killed, 1 officer, Lieutenant the Hon. H. A. V. Harmsworth, slightly wounded, and 7 men wounded.

On the 3rd August Lieutenant H. F. Law was sent out with a patrol to examine yet another mine-crater close to the two which the Battalion had occupied on its first night. He threw bombs into it, found it empty, and the companies began at once to dig up to it from two points and make it all their own. The enemy “interfered” with the working-parties for a while but was bombed off. At daybreak he retaliated with a methodical bombardment along the line of seven-inch minenwerfers—one every three minutes—for an hour and a half. These could be seen dropping perpendicularly ere they exploded but they did no great damage, and the rest of the day was peaceful till a sudden thunderstorm made everything and everybody abominably dirty. (Additional fatigues are always more resented than any additional risks of death.)

When they came up again on the 6th August they found that an enemy mine in the orchard had exploded, wounding several of the Grenadiers whom they were relieving, and done damage to some of our own work. While they were making good, the Mining Company overheard Germans at work in a gallery a few feet from one of ours. The men were withdrawn at once from the forward line till dawn, when our mine was sprung “to anticipate enemy action.” It might have injured some of the enemy’s work, but it certainly disorganized several of our own sap-heads which had to be re-dug.

Into the variegated activities of that morning dropped a staff officer of the First Army Corps anxious to get the C.O.’s notes and instructions on mining for new troops who might later have to hold that line “in accordance with the manner taught by experience.” Captain J. H. T. Priestman of the Lincolnshires, a Sandhurst instructor, arrived with him and was attached to the sector for a few days “to see how things were carried on.” As he was being taken round the trenches by the C.O. and the Adjutant, next morning, a private, on sentry with a bomber, tried to throw a bomb on his own account, but, says the Diary, “not knowing how to, he blew himself up and wounded the bomber.” By breakfast time the enemy were shelling the line in enfilade from the direction of Auchy and two men were blown to pieces. A couple of hours later the bombardment was repeated with, from first to last, 6 killed and 9 wounded. The instructor was but one of many whose unregarded duty was to study at first hand every device of the enemy in action and to lecture upon it at the training-centres in England a few days later.

The Battalion relieved the Grenadiers once more on the 10th August, after another German mine had been exploded on the salient, and had carried away so much German wire that it seemed possible to effect an entry into their trenches across the new-made crater. A patrol under Lieutenant A. F. L. Gordon was therefore sent out at night but reported the slopes too steep to climb and, since another mine had gone up and destroyed four of our own sap-heads with it, the night was spent in repairing these under intermittent bomb-fire on both sides.

On the 11th August fresh attempts were made to work some sort of foothold across the crater-pitted ground into the enemy’s trenches, specially at the spot where a crater had been partially filled up by the explosion of a fresh mine. The day was quiet. Captain M. V. Gore-Langton spent the evening of it in reconnoitring the enemy’s wire, went out across the partly filled crater, found yet another crater which ran into the enemy’s line, and there met one German lying out within a few yards of him, whom Private Dempsey, his orderly, killed, thereby rousing the enemy in that particular point. They opened with bombs on a party of ours at work on a sap in one of the innumerable craters, and were discomfited for the moment. An hour later, Captain Gore-Langton, with one man, went out for the second time across the same crater to put up some more wire. He fell into the arms of a German bombing party, was knocked down thrice by explosions of bombs around him and only got back to the trenches with great difficulty. The C.O., Colonel Trefusis, then “remonstrated” with him on the grounds that “it is not the Company Commander’s business to go out wiring.” On the heels of this enterprise, a really vicious fight with machine-guns as well as bombs developed in the dark. It was silenced by four rounds of our howitzers when the roar of the bombs stopped as though by order. A third affair broke out just on dawn when our men found enemy working-parties in craters below them and bombed with them exceedingly, for the Germans were not good long-range throwers.

On the morning of the 12th August came General Horne to look at the position, which he examined leisurely from every part of the line instead of merely through the covered loop-holes which had been built for his convenience. “I was glad when I got him safely out of it,” wrote the C.O., “for one never knows when bombs may come over.” Just before they were relieved, the C.O., Colonel Trefusis, was telephoned word that he was to command the 20th Brigade and was pathetically grieved at his promotion. He hated leaving the Battalion which, after eleven months of better or worse, he had come to look upon as his own. No man could possibly wish to command a better. He was going to a brigade where he knew no one, and his hope was that he might be allowed to remain one day more with the Battalion “when it goes to the trenches” before going into reserve. He had his wish when they went into the line on the 14th August, and he faced the ordeal, worse than war, of saying good-bye to each company in the morning, and at evening “went round to make sure that the night companies had plenty of bombers in the proper places.” Bombs were the one tool at that time which could deal with nests of occupied craters, and since the work was dangerous the Irish were qualifying for it with zeal and interest, even though they occasionally dropped or released bombs by accident.

They were relieved (August 15) by a battalion from the 5th Brigade, who “had heard all sorts of dreadful stories about the position.” “But I told them,” said Colonel Trefusis, “it was not so bad, provided their bombers kept on bombing at night. Mines, of course, one cannot help, and the only way to minimise their effect is to keep as few men in the front line as possible.”

And so, Colonel the Hon. J. Trefusis passes out of the Battalion’s story, to his new headquarters and his new staff and bombing officers, and his brand-new troops, who “simply out of curiosity to see what was going on put their heads over the parapet while under instruction and so lost two men shot through the head, which I hope will be a lesson to them.”

He had commanded the Battalion since November, 1914, and no sudden occasion had found him wanting. The Diary says: “It is impossible to say all that he has done for the Battalion,” and indeed, high courage, unbroken humour, a cool head, skill, and infinite unselfishness are difficult things to set down in words. He was succeeded in the command by Major G. H. C. Madden who arrived from England on the 16th August, when the Battalion was in rest at Béthune and the hands of their company and platoon officers were closing upon them to make sure once more that such untidy business as mining, counter-mining, and crater-fighting had not diminished smartness on parade. This was doubly needful since the 4th (Guards) Brigade ceased, on the 19th August, to be part of the First Army and became the 1st Guards Brigade in the newly formed Guards Division of four Battalions Grenadiers, four Coldstream, two Scots, two Irish, and the Welsh Guards.

The 2nd Battalion of the Irish Guards, raised at Warley, left England for France on the 17th August.

Preparations on what was then considered an overwhelming scale, were under way to break the German line near Loos while the French attacked seriously in the Champagne country; the idea being to arrive at the long-dreamed-of battle of manœuvre in the plain of the Scheldt. Guns, gas-smoke apparatus, and material had been collected during the summer lull; existing communications had been more or less improved, though the necessity for feeder-railways was not at all realised, tanks were not yet created, and the proportion of machine-guns to infantry was rather below actual requirements. As compared with later years our armies were going into action with hammers and their bare hands across a breadth of densely occupied, tunnelled and elaborately fortified mining country where, as one writer observed “there is twice as much below ground as there is above.” Consequently, for the third or fourth time within a twelvemonth, England was to learn at the cost of scores of thousands of casualties that modern warfare, unlike private theatricals, does not “come right at the performance” unless there have been rehearsals.

The training of the men in the forms of attack anticipated went forward energetically behind the front lines, together with arrangements for the massing and distribution of the seventy thousand troops of the First Army (First and Fourth Corps) assigned to the attack. For the next six weeks or so the Irish Guards were under instruction to that end, and the trenches knew them no more.

There was a formal leave-taking as they left Béthune for St. Hilaire, when the ex-4th (Guards) Brigade was played out of Béthune by the band of the 1st King’s Liverpools and marched past General Horne commanding the Second Division between lines of cheering men. A company of the trusty Herts Territorials, who had been with the Brigade since 1914, took part in the ceremony. It was repeated next day before Sir Douglas Haig at Champagne and again in the Central Square of St. Omer, when Sir John French thanked all ranks for “the splendid services they had rendered” and was “much impressed with their soldier-like bearing.”

Major-General Horne’s special farewell order ran as follows:

General Haig on the 20th August handed the following Special Order of the Day to the Brigade Commander:

And the reward of their confused and unclean work among the craters and the tunnels of the past weeks came in the Commander-in-Chief’s announcement:

They lay at Eperlecques for a day or two on their way to Thiembronne, a hot nineteen-mile march during which only five men fell out. It was at St. Pierre between Thiembronne and Acquin that they met and dined with the 2nd Battalion of the Regiment which had landed in France on the 18th August. There are few records of this historic meeting; for the youth and the strength that gathered by the cookers in that open sunlit field by St. Pierre has been several times wiped out and replaced. The two battalions conferred together, by rank and by age, on the methods and devices of the enemy; the veterans of the First enlightening the new hands of the Second with tales that could lose nothing in the telling, mixed with practical advice of the most grim. The First promptly christened the Second “The Irish Landsturm,” and a young officer, who later rose to eminent heights and command of the 2nd Battalion sat upon a table under some trees, and delighted the world with joyous songs upon a concertina and a mouth-organ. Then they parted.

Loos

The next three weeks were spent by the 1st Battalion at or near Thiembronne in training for the great battle to come. They were instructed in march-discipline, infantry attack, extended-order drill and field-training, attacks on villages (Drionville was one of them selected and the French villagers attended the field-day in great numbers) as well as in bussing and debussing against time into motor-buses which were then beginning to be moderately plentiful. Regimental sports were not forgotten—they were a great success and an amusement more or less comprehensible to the people of Thiembronne—and, since the whole world was aware that a combined attack would be made shortly by the English and French armies, the officers of the Guards Brigade were duly informed by Lieutenant-General Haking, commanding the Eleventh Army Corps, to which the Guards Division belonged, that such, indeed, was the case.

The domestic concerns of the Battalion during this pause include the facts that 2nd Lieutenant Dames-Longsworth from the 2nd Middlesex was attached on the 9th September “prior to transfer” to the Irish Guards; Captain C. D. Wynter, Lieutenant F. H. Witts, and 2nd Lieutenant W. B. Stevens were transferred (September 10, from the 1st to the 2nd Battalion) and 2nd Lieutenant T. K. Walker and T. H. Langrishe transferred on the same day from the 2nd to the 1st, while Orderly-Room Quartermaster-Sergeant J. Halligan, of whom later, was gazetted a 2nd Lieutenant to the Leinster Regiment. Captain L. R. Hargreaves was on the 13th “permitted to wear the badge of Captain pending his temporary promotion to that rank being announced in the London Gazette,” and the C. O., Major G. H. C. Madden, was on the 6th September gazetted a temporary Lieutenant-Colonel. These were the first grants of temporary rank in the Battalion.

On the 18th September the C.O.’s of all the battalions in the Guards Division motored to the Béthune district, where a reconnaissance was made “from convenient observation-posts” of the country between Cuinchy and Loos that they might judge the weight of the task before them.

It was a jagged, scarred, and mutilated sweep of mining-villages, factories, quarries, slag-dumps, pit-heads, chalk-pits, and railway embankments—all the plant of an elaborate mechanical civilization connected above ground and below by every means that ingenuity and labour could devise to the uses of war. The ground was trenched and tunnelled with cemented and floored works of terrifying permanency that linked together fortified redoubts, observation-posts, concealed batteries, rallying-points, and impregnable shelters for waiting reserves. So it ran along our front from Grenay north of the plateau of Notre Dame de Lorette, where two huge slag-heaps known as the Double Crassier bristled with machine-guns, across the bare interlude of crop land between Loos and Hulluch, where a high German redoubt crowned the slopes to the village of Haisnes with the low and dangerous Hohenzollern redoubt south of it. Triple lines of barbed wire protected a system of triple trenches, concrete-faced, holding dug-outs twenty feet deep, with lifts for machine-guns which could appear and disappear in emplacements of concrete over iron rails; and the observation-posts were capped with steel cupolas. In the background ample railways and a multitude of roads lay ready to launch fresh troops to any point that might by any chance be forced in the face of these obstacles.

Our armies were brought up for the most part on their own feet and lay in trenches not in the least concreted; nor were our roads to the front wholly equal to the demands on them. The assaulting troops were the First and Fourth Army Corps (less some troops detached to make a feint at Festubert and Cuinchy) disposed in the trenches south from the line of the Béthune-La Bassée Canal to the Vermelles-Hulluch road. Their work, as laid down, was to storm Auchy-La Bassée, Haisnes, capture the Hohenzollern redoubt to the south-west of it and the immensely fortified Mine-head Pit 8 (with which it was connected), the Hulluch quarries, equally fortified, and the long strip of wood beside them, and the village of Cité St. Elie between Hulluch and Haisnes. South of the Vermelles-Hulluch road, the Fourth Army Corps was to occupy the high ground between Loos and Lens, including the redoubt on Hill 69; all the town of Loos, which was a museum of veiled deaths, the Double Crassier, the Chalk-Pit, the redoubt on Hill 70 on the Loos-Haisnes road, and the village of Cité St. Auguste. After which, doubtless, the way would be open to victory. The Eleventh Army Corps formed the main infantry reserve and included the newly formed Guards Division, the Twenty-first and Twenty-fourth Divisions of the New Army and the Twenty-eighth. The Twenty-first and Twenty-fourth were brought up between Beuvry and Nœux-les-Mines; the Twenty-eighth to Bailleul, while the Guards Division lay in reserve near Lillers, ten miles north-west or so from Souchez; the Third Cavalry Division near Sains-en-Gohelle, and the British Cavalry Corps at Bailleul-les-Pernes ten miles west of Nœux-les-Mines, in attendance on the expected break-through.

On the 21st September the Battalion was inspected by Lord Kitchener at Avroult, on the St. Omer road—the first time it was ever paraded before its Colonel-in-chief—who in a few brief words recalled what it had already done in the war and hinted at what lay before it. Lord Cavan commanding the Guards Division, in wishing the men God-speed on the eve of “the greatest battle in the world’s history,” reminded them that the fate of future generations hung on the issue and that great things were expected of the Guards Division. They knew it well enough.

By a piece of ill-luck, that might have been taken as an omen, the day before they moved from Thiembronne to the front, a bombing accident at practice caused the death of Lance-Sergeant R. Matthews and three men, which few casualties, on the eve of tens of thousands to come, were due subjects of a court of inquiry and a full report to Headquarters. Then they marched by Capelle-sur-Lys to Nedon in mist and gathering rain as the autumn weather broke on the 24th, and heard the roar of what seemed continuous bombardment from Vimy to La Bassée. But it was at dawn on the 25th September that the serious work of the heavy guns began, while the Division crawled in pouring rain along congested roads from Nedon to Nœux-les-Mines. All they could see of the battle-front was veiled in clouds of gas and the screens of covering smoke through which our attacks had been launched after two hours of preliminary bombardment. Our troops there found, as chance and accident decreed, either broken wire and half-obliterated trenches easy to overpass for a few hundred yards till they came to the uncut stuff before which the men perished as their likes had done on like fields. So it happened that day to the 6th Brigade of the First Division north of La Bassée, and the 19th Brigade south of it; to the 28th Brigade of the Ninth Division by the Hohenzollern redoubt and Pit 8. These all met wire uncut before trenches untouched, and were slaughtered. The 26th Brigade of the Ninth Division broke through at a heavy cost as far as Pit 8, and, for the moment, as far as the edge of the village of Haisnes. The Seventh Division, working between the Ninth Division and the road from Vermelles to Hulluch, had better fortune. They penetrated as far as the edge of Hulluch village, but were driven back, ere the day’s end, to the quarries a thousand yards in the rear. One brigade, the 1st of the First Division of the Fourth Army on their right, had also penetrated as far as the outskirts of Hulluch. Its 2nd Brigade was hung up in barbed wire near Lone Tree to the southward, which check again exposed the left flank of the next (Fifteenth Highland) Division as that (44th, 45th, and 46th Brigades) made its way into Loos, carried Hill 70, the Chalk Pit, and Pit 14. The Forty-seventh Division on the extreme right of the British line at its junction with the French Tenth Army had to be used mainly as a defensive flank to the operation, since the French attack, which should have timed with ours, did not develop till six hours after our troops had got away, and was then limited to Souchez and the Vimy Ridge.

At noon on the 25th September the position stood thus: The First Army Corps held up between the Béthune-La Bassée Canal and the Hohenzollern redoubt; the Seventh Division hard pressed among the quarries and houses by Hulluch; the Ninth in little better case as regarded Pit 8 and the redoubt itself; the Highland Division pushed forward in the right centre holding on precariously in the shambles round Loos and being already forced back for lack of supports.

All along the line the attack had spent itself among uncut wire and unsubdued machine-gun positions. There were no more troops to follow at once on the heels of the first, nor was there time to dig in before the counter-attacks were delivered by the Germans, to whom every minute of delay meant the certainty of more available reserves fresh from the rail. A little after noon their pressure began to take effect, and ground won during the first rush of the advance was blasted out of our possession by gun-fire, bombing, and floods of enemy troops arriving throughout the night.

Both sides were now bringing up reserves: but ours seem to have arrived somewhat more slowly than the Germans’.

The Guards Division had come up on foot as quickly as the traffic on the roads allowed, and by the morning of the 26th the 1st Brigade (2nd Grenadiers, 2nd and 3rd Coldstream, and 1st Irish) were marched to Sailly-Labourse. The weather had improved, though the ground was heavy enough. Loos still remained to us, Hulluch was untaken. The enemy were well established on Hill 70 and had driven us out of Pit 14 and the Chalk Pit quarry on the Lens-La Bassée road which had been won on the previous day. It was this sector of the line to which the 2nd and 3rd Brigades of the Guards Division were directed. The local reserves (21st and 24th Divisions) had been used up, and as the Brigade took over the ground were retiring directly through them. The 1st Guards Brigade was employed in the work of holding the ground to the left, or north, of the other two brigades. Their own left lay next what remained of the Seventh Division after the furious wastage of the past two days.

On the afternoon of the 26th September the 2nd and 3rd Coldstream, with the 2nd Grenadiers in support, occupied some trenches in a waste of cut-up ground east of a line of captured German trenches opposite Hulluch. The 1st Irish Guards lay in trenches close to the wrecked water-tower of the village of Vermelles, while the confused and irregular attacks and counter-attacks broke out along the line, slackened and were renewed again beneath the vault of the overhead clamour built by the passage of countless shells.

The field of battle presented an extraordinary effect of dispersion and detachment. Gas, smoke, and the continuous splash and sparkle of bombs marked where the lines were in actual touch, but behind and outside this inferno stretched a desolation of emptiness, peopled with single figures “walking about all over the place,” as one observer wrote, with dead and wounded on the ground, and casualties being slowly conveyed to dressing-stations—every one apparently unconcerned beneath shell-fire, which in old-time battles would have been reckoned heavy, but which here, by comparison, was peace.

A premature burst of one of our own shells wounded four men of the Battalion’s machine-gun group as it was moving along the Hulluch road, but there were no other casualties reported, and on Sunday 27th, while the village of Vermelles was being heavily shelled, No. 2 and half of No. 3 Company were sent forward to fetch off what wounded lay immediately in front of them on the battle-field. There was need. Throughout that long Sunday of “clearing up” at a slow pace under scattered fire, the casualties were but eleven in all—2nd Lieutenant Grayling-Major, slightly wounded, one man killed and nine wounded. Three thousand yards to the left their 2nd Battalion, which, with the 2nd and 3rd Guards Brigades, had been set to recapture Pit 14 and Chalk-Pit Wood, lost that evening eight officers and over three hundred men killed and wounded. Officer-losses had been very heavy, and orders were issued, none too soon, to keep a reserve of them, specially in the junior ranks. Lieutenants Yerburgh and Rankin, with 2nd Lieutenants Law, Langrishe, and Walker, were thus sent back to the first-line Transport to be saved for contingencies. 2nd Lieutenant Christie and twenty men from the base joined on the same day. The Battalion lay at that time behind the remnants of the 20th Brigade of the Seventh Division, whose Brigadier, Colonel the Hon. J. Trefusis, had been their old C.O. His brigade, which had suffered between two and three thousand casualties, was in no shape for further fighting, but was hanging on in expectation of relief, if possible, from the mixed duties of trying to establish a line and sending out parties to assist in repelling the nearest counter-attack. Fighting continued everywhere, especially on the left of the line, and heavy rain added to the general misery.

By the 28th September we might have gained on an average three thousand yards on a front of between six and seven thousand, but there was no certainty that we could hold it, and the front was alive with reports—some true, others false—that the enemy had captured a line of trench here, broken through there, or was massing in force elsewhere. As a matter of fact, the worst of the German attacks had spent themselves, and both sides were, through their own difficulties, beginning to break off their main engagements for the bitter localised fightings that go to the making of a new front.

In rain, chalky slime, and deep discomfort, after utter exhaustion, the broken battalions were comparing notes of news and imperturbably renewing their social life. Brigadier-General Trefusis slips, or wades, through rain and mud to lunch with his old battalion a few hundred yards away, and one learns indirectly what cheer and comfort his presence brings. Then he goes on with the remnants of his shattered brigade, to take over fresh work on a quieter part of the line and en route “to get his hair cut.”

The Battalion, after (Sept. 29) another day’s soaking in Vermelles trenches, relieved the 3rd Brigade, First Division, in front-line trenches just west of Hulluch.

The ground by Le Rutoire farm and Bois Carré between the battered German trenches was a sea of shell craters and wreckage, scorched with fires of every sort which had swept away all landmarks. Lone Tree, a general rendezvous and clearing-station for that sector of the line and a registered mark for enemy guns, was the spot where their guides met them in the rainy, windy darkness. The relief took four hours and cost Drill-Sergeant Corry, another N.C.O., and a private wounded. All four company commanders went ahead some hours before to acquaint themselves with the impassable trenches, the battalions being brought on, in artillery formation, by the Adjutant.

On the 30th September, the English losses having brought our efforts to a standstill, the troops of the Ninth French Army Corps began to take over the trenches defending Loos and running out of the ruins of that town to Hill 70. Foch and D’Untal in their fighting since the 27th had driven, at a price, the Germans out of Souchez, and some deceptive progress had been made by the Tenth French Army Corps up the Vimy heights to the right of the English line. In all, our armies had manufactured a salient, some five miles wide across the bow of it, running from Cuinchy Post, the Hohenzollern redoubt, the Hulluch quarries, the edge of Hill 70, the south of Loos, and thence doubling back to Grenay. On the other hand, the enemy had under-driven a section south of this at the junction of the Allied forces running through Lens, Liévin, Angres by Givenchy-en-Gohelle over the Vimy heights to the Scarpe below Arras. There may, even on the 30th, have remained some hope on our part of “breaking through” into the plain of the Scheldt, with its chance of open warfare to follow. The enemy, however, had no intention of allowing us any freedom of movement which localised attacks on his part could limit and hold till such time as his reserves might get in a counter-attack strong enough to regain all the few poor hundreds of yards which we had shelled, bombed, and bayoneted out of his front. The fighting was specially severe that day among the rabbit-warrens of trenches by the Hohenzollern redoubt. Sections of trenches were lost and won back or wiped out by gun-fire all along a front where, for one instance of recorded heroism among the confusion of bombs and barricades, there were hundreds unrecorded as the spouting earth closed over and hid all after-knowledge of the very site of the agony.

A section of trench held by the Scots Fusiliers on the immediate left of the Irish Guards was attacked and a hundred yards or so of it were captured, but the Battalion was not called upon to lend a hand. It lay under heavy shell and sniping fire in the wet, till it was time to exchange the comparative security of a wet open drain for the unsheltered horrors of a relief which, beginning in the dusk at six, was not completed till close on two in the morning. The last company reached their miserable billets at Mazingarbe, some three miles’ away across a well-searched back-area at 6 A. M. One N.C.O. was killed and ten N.C.O.’s and men were wounded.

They spent the next three days in the battered suburbs of Mazingarbe while the Twelfth Division took over the Guards’ line and the Ninth French Army Corps relieved the British troops who were holding the south face of the Cuinchy-Hulluch-Grenay salient. The 1st Battalion itself was now drawn upon to meet the demands of the 2nd Battalion for officers to make good losses in their action of the 27th. Five officers, at least, were badly needed, but no more than four could be spared—Captain J. S. N. FitzGerald, as Adjutant, Lieutenant R. Rankin, Lieutenant H. Montgomery, who had only arrived with a draft on the 1st October, and 2nd Lieutenant Langrishe. Officers were a scarce commodity; for, though there was a momentary lull, there had been heavy bomb and trench work by the Twenty-eighth Division all round the disputed Hohenzollern redoubt which was falling piece by piece into the hands of the enemy, and counter-attacks were expected all along the uncertain line.

The Hohenzollern Trenches

On October 3 the Guards Division relieved the Twenty-eighth round the Hohenzollern and the Hulluch quarries. The 3rd Brigade of the Division was assigned as much of the works round the Hohenzollern as yet remained to us; the 1st Brigade lay on their right linking on to the First Division which had relieved the Twelfth on the right of the Guards Division. The 2nd Guards Brigade was in reserve at Vermelles. The 1st Battalion acted as reserve to its own, the 1st, Brigade, and moving from Mazingarbe on the afternoon of the 3rd bivouacked in misery to the west of the railway line just outside Vermelles. The 2nd Grenadiers, in trenches which had formed part of the old British front line north-east of the Chapel of Notre Dame de Consolation, supported the 2nd and 3rd Coldstream who held the firing-line in a mass of unsurveyed and unknown German trenches running from St. Elie Avenue, a notorious and most dismal communication-trench, northwards towards the Hohenzollern redoubt, one face of which generously enfiladed our line at all times. The whole was a wilderness of muck and death, reached through three thousand yards of foul gutters, impeded by loops and knots of old telephone cables, whose sides bulged in the wet, and where, with the best care in the world, reliefs could go piteously astray and isolated parties find themselves plodding, blind and helpless, into the enemy’s arms.

Opinions naturally differ as to which was the least attractive period of the war for the Battalion, but there was a general feeling that, setting aside the cruel wet of The Salient and the complicated barren miseries of the Somme, the times after Loos round the Hohenzollern Redoubt and in the Laventie sector were the worst. Men and officers had counted on getting forward to open country at last, and the return to redoubled trench-work and its fatigues was no comfort to them. But the work had to be done, and the notice in the Diary that they were “responsible for improving and cleaning up the trenches as far as the support battalions”—which meant as far as they could get forward—implied unbroken labour in the chalky ground, varied by carrying up supplies, bombs, and small-arm ammunition to the front line. There were five bombing posts in their sector of the front with as many sap-heads, all to be guarded. Most of the trenches needed deepening, and any work in the open was at the risk of a continuous stream of bullets from the Hohenzollern’s machine-guns. High explosives and a few gas-shells by day, aerial torpedoes by night, and sniping all round the clock, made the accompaniment to their life for the nine days that they held the line.

Here is the bare record. On the 6th October, two men killed and three wounded, while strengthening parapets. On the 7th, Lieutenant Heard and three men with him wounded, while superintending work in the open within range of the spiteful Hohenzollern. On the 8th, six hours’ unbroken bombardment, culminating, so far as the Battalion knew, in an attack on the 2nd Coldstream whom they were supporting and the 3rd Grenadiers on their left. The Grenadiers, most of their bombers killed, borrowed No. 1 Company’s bombers, who “did good work,” while No. 1 Company itself formed a flank to defend the left of the Brigade in case the Germans broke through, as for a time seemed possible. Both Grenadiers and Coldstream ran out of bombs and ammunition which the Battalion sent up throughout the evening until it was reported that “all was normal again” and that the Germans had everywhere been repulsed with heavy loss. The Battalion then carried up rations to the Coldstream and spent the rest of the night repairing blown-in ammunition trenches. They had had no time to speculate or ask questions, and not till long afterwards did they realise that the blast of a great battle had passed over them; that the Germans had counter-attacked with picked battalions all along the line of the Cuinchy-Hulluch-Grenay Salient and that their dead lay in thousands on the cut-up ground from Souchez to Hohenzollern. In modern trench-warfare any attack extending beyond the range of a combatant’s vision, which runs from fifty yards to a quarter of a mile, according to the ground and his own personal distractions, may, for aught he can tell, be either an engagement of the first class or some local brawl for the details of which he can search next week’s home papers in vain.

The battalions got through the day with only six men killed, eleven wounded, and one gassed, and on the 9th, when they were busiest in the work of repairing wrecked trenches, they were informed that certain recesses which they had been cutting out in the trenches for the reception of gas-cylinders would not be required and that they were to fill them in again. As a veteran of four years’ experience put it, apropos of this and some other matters: “Men take more notice, ye’ll understand, of one extra fatigue, than any three fights.”

A few aerial torpedoes which, whether they kill or not, make unlimited mess, fell during the night, and on the morning of the 10th October Lieutenant M. V. Gore-Langton—one of the Battalion’s best and most efficient officers—was shot through the head and killed by a German sniper while looking for a position for a loop-hole in the parapet. He was buried six hours later in the British Cemetery at Vermelles, and the command of his company devolved on Lieutenant Yerburgh. Our own artillery spent the day in breaking German wire in front of the Hulluch quarries at long range and a little more than a hundred yards ahead of our trenches. Several of our shells dropped short, to the discomfort of the Irish, but the wire was satisfactorily cut, and two companies kept up bursts of rapid fire during the night to stay the enemy from repairing it. Only 5 men were killed and 5 wounded from all causes this day.

On the 11th our guns resumed wire-cutting and, besides making it most unpleasant for our men in the front trenches, put one of our own machine-guns out of action, but luckily with no loss of life.

The tragedy of the day came later when, just after lunch, a shell landed in the doorway of Headquarters dug-out, breaking both of Colonel Madden’s legs, and mortally wounding the Rev. Father John Gwynne, the Battalion’s R.C. chaplain (Colonel Madden died in England a few weeks later). The Adjutant, Lord Desmond FitzGerald, was slightly wounded also. The other two occupants of the dug-out, Captain Bailie, who had gone through almost precisely the same experience in the same spot not three days before, and the Medical Officer, were untouched. It was difficult to get two wounded men down the trenches to the Headquarters of the supporting battalion, where they had to be left till dark. And then they were carried back in the open—or “overland” as the phrase was. Father Gwynne died next day in hospital at Béthune, and the Battalion lost in him “not merely the chaplain, but a man unusually beloved.” He had been with them since November of the previous year. He feared nothing, despised no one, betrayed no confidence nor used it to his own advantage; upheld authority, softened asperities, and cheered and comforted every man within his reach. If there were any blemish in a character so utterly selfless, it was no more than a tendency, shared by the servants of his calling, to attach more importance to the administration of the last rites of his Church to a wounded man than to the immediate appearance of the medical officer, and to forget that there are times when Supreme Unction can be a depressant. Per contra , Absolution at the moment of going over the top, if given with vigour and good cheer, as he gave it, is a powerful tonic. At all times the priest’s influence in checking “crime” in a regiment is very large indeed, and with such priests as the Irish Guards had the good fortune to possess, almost unbounded.

Colonel Madden was succeeded by Captain Lord Desmond FitzGerald as commanding officer, and the rest of the day was spent in suffering a bombardment of aerial torpedoes, very difficult to locate and not put down by our heavy guns till after dark. Besides the 3 wounded officers that day 3 men were wounded and, 3 killed.

On the morning of the 13th, after heavy shelling, a bomb attack on the 2nd Grenadiers developed in the trenches to the right, when the Battalion brought up and detonated several boxes for their comrades. Their work further included putting up 120 scaling-ladders for an attack by the 35th Brigade.

Next day they were relieved by the 7th Norfolks, 35th Brigade of the North Midland Division of Territorials, and went to rest at Verquin, five or six miles behind the line. It took them nearly seven hours to clear the trenches; Colonel Madden, on account of his wounds, being carried out on a sitting litter; Lord Desmond FitzGerald, who, as Adjutant, had been wounded when Father Gwynne had been killed, overdue for hospital with a piece of shrapnel in his foot, and all ranks utterly done after their nine days’ turn of duty. They laid them down as tired animals lie, while behind them the whole north front of the Cuinchy-Hulluch Salient broke into set battle once again.

A series of holding attacks were made all along the line almost from Ypres to La Bassée to keep the enemy from reinforcing against the real one on the Hohenzollern redoubt, Fosse 8, the Hulluch quarries and the heart of the Loos position generally. It was preceded by bombardments that in some cases cut wire and in some did not, accompanied by gas and smoke, which affected both sides equally; it was carried through by men in smoke-helmets, half-blinding them among blinding accompaniments of fumes and flying earth, through trenches to which there was no clue, over the wrecks of streets of miners’ cottages, cellars and underground machine-gun nests, and round the concreted flanks of unsuspected artillery emplacements. Among these obstacles, too, it died out with the dead battalions of Regulars and Territorials caught, as the chances of war smote them, either in bulk across open ground or in detail among bombs and machine-gun posts.

There was here, as many times before, and very many times after, heroism beyond belief, and every form of bravery that the spirit of man can make good. The net result of all, between the 27th of September and the 15th of October, when the last groundswell of the long fight smoothed itself out over the unburied dead, was a loss to us of 50,000 men and 2000 officers, and a gain of a salient seven thousand yards long and three thousand two hundred yards deep. For practical purposes, a good deal of this depth ranked as “No Man’s Land” from that date till the final break-up of the German hosts in 1918. The public were informed that the valour of the new Territorial Divisions had justified their training, which seemed expensive; and that our armies, whatever else they lacked at that time—and it was not a little—had gained in confidence: which seemed superfluous.

After Loos

But the Battalion lay at Verquin, cleaning up after its ten days’ filth, and there was Mass on the morning of the 14th, when Father S. Knapp came over from the 2nd Battalion and “spoke to the men on the subject of Father Gwynne’s death,” for now that the two battalions were next-door neighbours, Father Knapp served both. No written record remains of the priest’s speech, but those who survive that heard it say it moved all men’s hearts. Mass always preceded the day’s work in billets, but even on the first morning on their return from the trenches the men would make shift somehow to clean their hands and faces, and if possible to shave, before attending it, no matter what the hour.

Then on the 14th October they moved from Verquin to unpleasing Sailly-Labourse, four miles or so behind the line, for another day’s “rest” in billets, and so (Oct. 17) to what was left of Vermelles, a couple of miles from the front, where the men had to make the wrecked houses habitable till (Oct. 19) they took over from the Welsh Guards some reserve-trenches on the old ground in front of Clerk’s Keep, a quarter of a mile west of the Vermelles railway line.

The 20th October was the day when the 2nd Battalion were engaged in a bombing attack on the Hohenzollern, from which they won no small honour, as will be told in their story. The 1st Battalion lay at Vermelles, unshelled for the moment, and had leisure to make “light overhead cover for the men against the rain.” The Division was in line again, and the Battalion’s first work was to improve a new line of trenches which, besides the defect of being much too close to the Hohenzollern, lacked dug-outs. In Lord Desmond FitzGerald’s absence, Major the Hon. H. R. Alexander from the 2nd Battalion took command of the Battalion, and they relieved the 2nd Coldstream on the 21st and resumed the stale routine—digging saps under fire, which necessitated shovelling the earth into sand-bags, and emptying it out by night; dodging snipers and trench-mortars, and hoping that our own shells, which were battering round the Hohenzollern, would not fall too short; fixing wire and fuses till the moon grew and they had to wait for the dawn-mists to cloak their work; discovering and reconnoitring old German communication-trenches that ran to ever-new German sniping-posts and had to be blocked with wire tangles; and losing in three days, by minenwerfers, sniping, the fall of dug-outs and premature bursts of our own shells, 7 men killed and 18 wounded. The two companies (1 and 2) went back to Vermelles, while 3 and 4 took over the support-trenches from the 3rd Coldstream, reversing the process on the 24th October.

When letters hint at “drill” in any connection, it is a sure sign that a battalion is on the eve of relief. For example, on the 24th, 2nd Lieutenant Levy arrived with a draft of fifty-eight men, a sergeant, and two corporals, who were divided among the companies. The Diary observes that they were a fair lot of men but “did not look too well drilled.” Accordingly, after a couple of days’ mild shelling round and near Vermelles Church and Shrine, we find the Battalion relieved by the Norfolks (Oct. 26). All four companies worked their way cautiously out of the fire-zone—it is at the moment of relief that casualties are most felt—picked up their Headquarters and transport, and marched for half of a whole day in the open to billets at pleasant, wooded Lapugnoy, where they found clean straw to lie down on and were promised blankets. After the usual clean-up and payment of the men, they were ordered off to Chocques to take part in the King’s review of the Guards Division at Haute Rièze on the afternoon of the 28th, but, owing to the accident to His Majesty caused by the horse falling with him, the parade was cancelled.

“Steady drill” filled the next ten days. Lieutenant the Hon. B. O’Brien started to train fresh bombing-squads with the Mills bomb, which was then being issued in such quantities that as many as twenty whole boxes could be spared for instruction. Up till then, bombs had been varied in type and various in action. As had been pointed out, the Irish took kindly to this game and produced many notable experts. But the perfect bomber is not always docile out of the line. Among the giants of ’15 was a private against whom order had gone forth that on no account was he to be paid on pay-days, for the reason that once in funds he would retire into France at large “for a day and a night and a morrow,” and return a happy, hiccuping but indispensable “criminal.” At last, after a long stretch of enforced virtue, he managed, by chicane or his own amazing personality, to seduce five francs from his platoon sergeant and forthwith disappeared. On his return, richly disguised, he sought out his benefactor with a gift under his arm. The rest is in his Sergeant’s own words: “‘No,’ I says, ‘go away and sleep it off,’ I says, pushin’ it away, for ’twas a rum jar he was temptin’ me with. ‘’Tis for you, Sergeant,’ he says. ‘You’re the only man that has thrusted me with a centime since summer.’ Thrust him! There was no sergeant of ours had not been remindin’ me of those same five francs all the time he’d been away—let alone what I’d got at Company Orders. So I loosed myself upon him, an’ I described him to himself the way he’d have shame at it, but shame was not in him. ‘Yes, Sergeant,’ he says to me, ‘full I am, and this is full too,’ he says, pattin’ the rum jar (and it was!), an’ I know where there’s plenty more,’ he says, ‘and it’s all for you an’ your great thrustfulness to me about them five francs.’ What could I do? He’d made me a laughing-stock to the Battalion. An awful man! He’d done it all on those five unlucky francs! Yes, he’d lead a bombin’ party or a drinkin’ party—his own or any other battalion’s; and he was worth a platoon an’ a half when there was anything doing, and I thrust in God he’s alive yet—him and his five francs! But an awful man!”

Drunkenness was confined, for the most part, to a known few characters, regular and almost privileged in their irregularities. The influence of the Priest and the work of the company officers went hand in hand here. Here is a tribute paid by a brother officer to Captain Gore-Langton, killed on the 10th October, which explains the secret. “The men liked him for his pluck and the plain way in which he dealt with them, always doing his best for the worst, most idle, and stupidest men in our company.... One can’t really believe he’s gone. I always expect to see him swinging round a traverse.” The Battalion did not forget him, and while at Lapugnoy, sent a party to Vermelles to attend to his grave there.

On the 31st October Lieut.-Colonel R. C. McCalmont arrived from commanding a battalion of the New Ulster Army Division and took over the command from Major Alexander who reverted to the 2nd Battalion, from which he had been borrowed.

Laventie

On the 10th of the month the Guards Division were for duty again on the Laventie sector, which at every time of the year had a bad reputation for wet. The outcome of Loos had ended hope of a break-through, and a few thousand yards won there against a few thousand lost out Ypres way represented the balance of the account since November 1914. Therefore, once again, the line had to be held till more men, munitions and materials could be trained, manufactured and accumulated, while the price of making war on the spur of the moment was paid, day in and day out, with the bodies of young men subject to every form of death among the slits in the dirt along which they moved. It bored them extremely, but otherwise did not much affect their morale. They built some sort of decent life out of the monotonous hours; they came to know the very best and the very worst in themselves and in their comrades upon whom their lives and well-being depended; and they formed friendships that lasted, as fate willed, for months or even years. They lied persistently and with intent in their home letters concerning their discomforts and exposure, and lent themselves to the impression, cultivated by some sedulous newspapers, that the trenches were electrically-lighted abodes of comfort and jollity, varied with concerts and sports. It was all part of the trial which the national genius calls “the game.”

The Battalion (Lieut.-Colonel R. C. McCalmont commanding) was at Pacaut, due north of Béthune, on the 11th, at Merville on the 14th, training young soldiers how to use smoke-helmets—for gas was a thing to be expected anywhere now—and enjoying every variety of weather, from sodden wet to sharp frost. The effects of the gas-helmet on the young soldiers were quaintly described as “very useful on them. ’Twas like throwin’ a cloth over a parrot-cage. It stopped all their chat.”

On the 20th November they took over reserve-billets from the 1st Scots Guards near Bout Deville, and the next day, after inspection of both battalions by General Feilding, commanding the Division, and the late Mr. John Redmond, M.P., went into trenches with the happy fore-knowledge that they were likely to stay there till the 2nd of January and would be lucky if they got a few days out at Christmas. It was a stretch of unmitigated beastliness in the low ditch-riddled ground behind Neuve Chapelle and the Aubers Ridge, on the interminable La Bassée-Estaires road, with no available communication-trenches, in many places impassable from wet, all needing sandbags and all, “in a very neglected state, except for the work done by the 2nd Guards Brigade the week before the Battalion moved in.” (It is nowhere on record that the Guards Division, or for that matter, any other, was ever contented with trenches that it took over.) The enemy, however, were quiet, being at least as uncomfortable as our people. Even when our field-guns blew large gaps in their parapets a hundred yards away there was very little retaliation, and our casualties on relief—the men lay in scattered billets at Riez Bailleul three miles or so up the road—were relatively few.

In one whole week not more than four or five men were killed and fifteen or sixteen wounded, two of them by our own shrapnel bursting short while our guns experimented on block-houses and steel cupolas, as these revealed themselves. Even when the Prince of Wales visited the line at the Major-General’s inspection of it, and left by the only possible road, “Sign Post Lane,” in broad daylight in the open, within a furlong of the enemy, casualties did not occur! There is no mention, either, of any of the aeroplane-visitations which sometimes followed his appearances. As a personal friend of one of the officers, he found reason to visit along that sector more often than is officially recorded.

At the beginning of the month the 1st Guards Brigade was relieved by the 3rd of its Division, and the Battalion handed its line over to the 4th Grenadiers, not without some housewifely pride at improvements it had effected. But, since pride ever precedes a fall, the sharp frost of the past week dissolved in heavy rain, and the neat new-made breastworks with their aligned sandbags collapsed. If the 4th Grenadiers keep veracious diaries, it is probable that that night of thaw and delayed reliefs is strongly recorded in them.

La Gorgue, under Estaires, upon the sluggish Lys in sodden wet weather (December 3-8) gave them a breathing space for a general wash-up and those “steady drills” necessary to mankind. The new stretch that they took over from their own 2nd Battalion was about two miles north of their previous one and south-east of Laventie, running parallel to the Rue Tilleloy, that endless road, flanked, like all others hereabouts, with farm-houses, which joins Armentières to Neuve Chapelle. The ground was, of course, sop, the parapets were perforable breastworks, but reliefs could arrive unobserved within five hundred yards of the front, and the enemy’s line lay in most places nearly a quarter of a mile from ours. More important still, there was reasonable accommodation for Battalion Headquarters in a farm-house (one of the many “Red Houses” of the war) which, by some accident, had been untouched so far, though it stood less than a mile from the front line. Where Headquarters are comfortable, Headquarters are happy, and by so much the more placable. Only very young soldiers grudge them protection and warmth.

For a few days it was a peaceful stretch of the great line that buttressed on Switzerland and the sea. Christmas was coming, and, even had the weather allowed it, neither side was looking too earnestly for trouble.

A company of Welsh Fusiliers with their C.O. and Adjutant came up for eight days’ instruction, and were distributed through the Battalion. The system in the front line at that moment was one of gangs of three, a digger, an armed man, and a bomber, relieving each other by shifts; and to each of these trios one Welshman was allotted.

The Welsh were small, keen and inquisitive. The large Irish praised their Saints aloud for sending them new boys to talk to through the long watches. It is related of one Welshman that, among a thousand questions, he demanded if his tutor had ever gone over the top. The Irishman admitted that he had. “And how often does one go over?” the Welshman continued. “I’ll show you. Come with me,” replied the other Celt, and, moving to a gap in the parapet, lifted the Welshman in his arms that he might the better see what remained, hung up in German wire, of a private of some ancient fight—withered wreckage, perhaps, of Neuve Chapelle. “He went over wanst,” said the Irishman. The working-party resumed their labours and, men say, that that new boy put no more questions “for the full of the half an hour—an’ that’s as long as a week to a Welshman.”

All four companies were held in the first line except for three posts—Picantin, Dead End, and Hougoumont—a few hundred yards behind that were manned with a platoon apiece, but on the 12th December rumours of a mine made it wise to evacuate a part of the right flank till one of our 9.2’s should have searched for the suspected mine-shaft. Its investigations roused the enemy to mild retaliation, which ended next day in one of our men being wounded by our own 9.2, and three by the enemy’s shrapnel—the first casualties in four days.

The wet kept the peace along the line, but it did not altogether damp the energies of our patrols. For a reason, not explained officially, Lieutenant S. E. F. Christy was moved to go out with a patrol and to hurl into the German lines a printed message (was it the earliest workings of propaganda?) demanding that the Germans “should surrender.” There is no indication whether the summons was to the German army at large or merely to as many of them as lay before the Battalion; but, the invitation being disregarded, Lieutenants Christy and Law made themselves offensive in patrol-work to the best of their means. On one excursion the latter officer discovered (December 15) a water-logged concrete-built loop-hole dug-out occupied by Germans. Being a hardened souvenir-hunter, he is reported to have removed the official German name-board of the establishment ere he went back for reinforcements with a view of capturing it complete. On his return he found it abandoned. The water had driven the enemy to a drier post, and the cutting-out expedition had to be postponed. Too long in the line without incident wears on every one’s temper, but luck was against them and an attempt on the 20th December by a “selected party” under some R.E.’s and Lieutenants Law and Christy was ruined by the moonlight and the fact that the enemy had returned to their concrete hutch and were more than on the alert. By the light of later knowledge the Battalion was inclined to believe that the dug-out had been left as bait and that there were too many spies in our lines before Laventie.

On the 21st December the Battalion came out for Christmas and billeted at Laventie, as their next turn would be in the old sector that they had handed over to the 4th Grenadiers three weeks ago. The same Battalion relieved them on this day, and, as before, were an hour late in turning up—a thing inexcusable except on one’s own part.