Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/101

 ate their food unperturbed amid all the offal. But there were compensations.

On the 11th February, for example, it is noted that the men had baked meat and suet pudding "for the first time since the war began"; on the 13th not one man was even wounded through the whole day and night; while on the 15th more than half the Battalion had hot baths "for the first time since January." The diaries record these facts as of equal importance with a small advance by the French on their right, who captured a trench but fell into a nest of angry machine-guns and had to retire. The Battalion's share in the work was but to assist in keeping the enemy's heads down; in return for which the Germans shelled them an hour, killing 1 and wounding 5. Our men persisted in under-cutting the sides of the trench to make dugouts, in the belief that unsupported caves of earth were safe against high explosives. Timbers and framing, indeed material of any kind, were still scarce, and doors and boards from wrecked houses were used in erecting parapets. Sand-bags were made out of old petticoats and pyjamas, and the farmers' fences supplied an indifferent sort of wire. Sand-bags, wires, and stakes did not arrive at the front in appreciable quantities till the spring of 1915, and telephones about the same date. There was no abundance of any of these things till late in 1915; for the country had not made any preparation for war till war began, and the price of this was the lives of men.

The simplicity of our battery-work is shown by the joyous statement that "we now have a Gunner officer to live with us in our headquarters in the trenches and a telephone to the battery so that fire can be brought to bear quickly on any part of our front as necessity arises." At times there would be an error in the signals, whereby the Battalion coming up from billets to the trenches through the dark would be urged to make haste because their section was being attacked, and after a breathless arrival would find the artillery busied on some small affair away on a flank.