Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/107

 On the 15th of March 2nd Lieutenant H. Marion-Crawford was appointed Brigade Bombing Officer to the Guards Brigade with sixty men under him attached to the Irish Guards. The "jam-pot" grenade of 1914 was practically obsolete by now; the "stick" hand-grenade of the hair-brush type and the grenade fired from the rifle had succeeded it and were appearing on the front in appreciable quantities. The Mills bomb, which superseded all others both for hand and rifle, was not born till the autumn of 1915 and was not lavishly supplied till the opening of the next year.

On the 16th March, or five days after their share of the battle of Neuve Chapelle had ended, and they lay in the trenches, a moaning was heard in the darkness of No Man's Land and a corporal sent out to report. He came back saying that he had got into a trench some thirty yards from the front line where he had seen a lighted candle and heard what he believed to be Germans talking. Another patrol was despatched and at last came back with a wounded man of the King's Liverpools, who had been lying out since the 10th. He said he had been wounded in the assault, captured as he was trying to crawl back, stripped of boots, equipment and rations, but left with a blanket, and the enemy apparently visited him every night as they patrolled the trench. An attempt was made to capture that patrol, but in the darkness the trench was missed altogether.

The enemy celebrated the day before St. Patrick's Day and the day itself, March 17, by several hours of brisk shelling of Givenchy, timed to catch the evening reliefs, but luckily without casualties. Queen Alexandra sent the Battalion their shamrock; telegrams wishing them good luck were duly received from Lord Kitchener, Colonel of the Battalion, Brigadier-General Nugent, and a letter from Sir Charles Monro commanding the First Army Corps. Father Gwynne held an open-air service in the early morning, and every man was given a hot bath at Béthune. More important still, every man who wanted it had free beer with his dinner, and in those days beer was beer indeed.