Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/177

 weak position, always worth an attack in the intervals of its regular use as a gunnery school for German artillery. The enemy knew that we were on the way to take the pressure off the French at Verdun, which had been a factory of death since February, and argued that it would be well to make trouble anywhere they could. They chose the 1st and 2nd Canadian Divisions round Ypres, and fought them for two days with very little profit beyond filling more shell-holes with more dead.

At that date men had learned by experience the comparative values of their flanking divisions and the battalions immediately beside them. When a local attack fell on some of these, those unaffected would rest as unconcernedly as the watch below takes its ease when the watch on deck is struggling with the squall. The syren-like hoot of the gas-horns, one or two miles off, might break their rest on relief, but the division involved being known to be adequate, the Battalion was not roused and "spent a quiet day." Other divisions, new to the line caused anxiety and interfered with regular routine, till they had shaken into place; and yet others might be always trusted to hoot and signal for help on the least provocation. These peculiarities would be discussed in the cantonments and coffee-bars of the rest-areas, or, later, out on the roadside with an occasional far-ranging German shell to interrupt a really pleasant inter-battalion or divisional argument where, if reports be true, even the Military Police sometimes forget to be impartial. And there were unambitious, unimproving units quite content to accept anything that their predecessors had left them in the way of openwork parapets, gapped sandbags, and smashed traverses. Against these, experienced corps builded, not without ostentation, strong flanks so that if their neighbours went of a sudden, they themselves might still have a chance for their lives. The Irish had a saying of their own—a sort of lilting call that ran down the trenches at odd times—to the effect that God being in his Heaven and