Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/164

 1916

THE SALIENT TO THE SOMME

Brigadier-General G. Feilding, D.S.O., as we know, succeeded Lord Cavan in the command of the Guards Division, and the enemy woke up to a little more regular shelling and sniping for a few days till (January 4) the 1st Guards Brigade was unexpectedly relieved by a fresh brigade (the 114th), and the Battalion moved to billets in St. Floris which, as usual, were "in a very filthy condition." There they stayed, under strong training at bombing and Lewis gunnery, till the 12th. Thence to Merville till the 23rd, when Lieutenant Hon. H. B. O'Brien, a specialist in these matters, as may have been noticed before, was appointed Brigade Bombing Officer. The bomb was to be the dominant factor of the day's work for the next year or so, and the number of students made the country round billets unwholesome and varied. There is a true tale of a bombing school on a foggy morning who, hurling with zeal over a bank into the mist, found themselves presently being cursed from a safe distance by a repairing party who had been sent out to discover why one whole system of big-gun telephone-wires was dumb. They complained that the school had "cut it into vermicelli."

The instruction bore fruit; for, so soon as they were back in the trenches at Ebenezer farm, which they had quitted on the 4th, bombing seems to have been forced wherever practicable. A weak, or it might be more accurate to say, a sore point had developed on the front in a crater thrown up by one of our own mines, which it was necessary to sap out to and protect by intermittent bombing. This brought retalia