Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/158

 *diers 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 soliders 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