Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/106

 the communication-trenches were far too shallow. Part of our front had to be evacuated while our bombardment was going on as it was too close to the enemy for safe shelling. The failure of the 6th Brigade's attack in this quarter reduced the next day's operation to a holding affair of rifle and heavy-gun fire, delayed and hampered by the morning fog, and on the 13th March the Battalion went into billets at Le Préol. The battle round Neuve Chapelle itself, they were told, had yielded more prisoners; but heavy German reinforcements were being moved up.

Late that night a draft of eighty N.C.O.'s, and men arrived under Lieutenant J. S. N. FitzGerald, among them the first detachment of specially enlisted (late) R.I. Constabulary—large drilled men—who were to play so solid a part in the history and the glory of the Battalion. The strength of the Battalion at that moment was 1080 with some 26 officers—much greater than it had been at any time during the War. They were all turned into the endless work of cleaning out and draining foul trenches, and the dog's life of holding them under regular and irregular bombardments.

It was safer to relieve by daylight rather than by night, as darkness brought bursts of sudden rifle- and machine-gun fire, despatched at a venture from behind the five-deep line of German chevaux-de-frise not seventy yards away. Tempting openings, too, were left in the wire to invite attack, but the bait was not taken. Neuve Chapelle had been a failure except in so far as it had shown the enemy that winter had not dulled any of our arms, and it was recognized we must continue to sit still till men and material should accumulate behind us. The documents and diaries of those weeks admit this with the unshaken cheerfulness of the race. Yet, even so, the actual and potential strength of the enemy was not realised.

Very slowly, and always with the thought at the back of the mind that the deadlock might break at any moment, the Army set itself, battalion by battalion, to learn the war it was waging.