Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/168

 fellows who, crowding altogether in one spot, roared, overturned, and set alight for five or ten wild minutes or through a methodical half-hour. If the storm fell on bare ground, that was churned and torn afresh into smoking clods; if upon men in trenches, on relief, or with the transport, no eye could judge what harm had been done; for often where it had seemed as though nothing could live, dispersed units picked themselves up and reformed, almost untouched, after inconceivable escapes. Elsewhere, a few spurts of stinking smoke in a corner might cover all that remained of a platoon or have ripped the heart out of a silent, waiting company. By night, fantastic traceries of crossing fire-*lines ran along the shoulder of a ridge; shrapnel, bursting high, jetted a trail of swift sparks, as it might be steel striking flint; dropping flares outlined some tortured farm-house among its willow-stumps, or the intolerable glare of a big shell framed itself behind a naked doorway; and coloured lights dyed the bellies of the low clouds till all sense of distance and direction was lost, and the bewildered troops stumbled and crawled from pavé to pot-hole, treading upon the old dead.

Dawn brought dirty white desolation across yellow mud pitted with slate-coloured water-holes, and confused by senseless grey and black lines and curled tangles of mire. There was nothing to see, except—almost pearl-coloured under their mud-dyed helmets—the tense, preoccupied faces of men moving with wide spaces between their platoons, to water-floored cellars and shelters chillier even than the grave-like trenches they had left, always with the consciousness that they were watched by invisible eyes which presently would choose certain of them to be killed. Those who came through it, say that the sense of this brooding Death more affected every phase of life in the Salient than in any other portion of the great war-field.

The German offensive on the Bluff and the necessary measures of retaliation did not concern the Battalion for the moment. After a few days' aimless waiting they were sent, in bitter cold and snow, to