Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/167

 mines under the British front line and an infantry attack, which ended in the capture by the enemy of four or five hundred yards of trench and the low ridge called "The Bluff," over which they ran. The affair bulked big in the newspaper-press of the day; for a battalion, the 10th Lancashire Fusiliers, was literally buried by one of the mine explosions. The German gain was well held, but prevented from extending by a concentration of our artillery, and later on (March 2) the whole position was recaptured after desperate fighting and the line there came to rest.

For the first time the Battalion seems impressed by the hostile aircraft with which the Salient was filled. Poperinghe and Hazebrouck were bombed almost as soon as they came in, and their camp was visited by four aeroplanes at high noon, after a snow-fall, which showed up everything below. They had been attending a demonstration to prove the harmlessness of a Flammenwerfer if only one lay flat on the ground and let the roaring blast hiss over. Ribald men have explained, since, that these demonstrations were more demoralising than the actual machine in action, especially when, as occasionally happened, the nozzle of the flame-*shooter carried away and, in the attempts to recontrol the thing, the class, bombed from above and chased by fire below, broke and fled.

But the whole Salient was a death-trap throughout. The great shells crossed each other's path at every angle, back and forth, single or in flights. For no certain cause that our side could guess, fire would concentrate itself on some half-obliterated feature of the landscape—a bank, the poor stumpage of a wood, a remnant of a village or the angle of a road, that went out in smoke, dust, and flying clods, as though devils were flinging it up with invisible spades. The concentrated clamours would die down and cease; the single shells would resume their aimless falling over a line of fields, with the monotony of drips from a tap, till, again, it seemed as though one of them had found something worthy of attention and shouted back the news to its