Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/179

 was possible to dine in shirt sleeves in the open by candle and starlight. The gentle weather even softened the edge of war for a day or two, till Ypres and the neighbourhood were vigorously shelled on the 5th May. The Battalion was then in Ypres prison and the cellars beneath it, where some unloved enthusiast had discovered that there was plenty of room for drill purposes in the main gaol-corridor, and drilled they were accordingly to the music of the bombardments. On such occasions men were sometimes seen to "budge," i. e. roll their eyes in the direction of plaster and stones falling from the ceiling, for which heinous "crime" their names were justly taken.

On the 9th May they relieved the 2nd Grenadiers on the left sector of their Brigade's front at Wieltje, where what were once trenches had been bombed and shelled into a sketchy string of bombing-posts—or as a man said, "grouse-butts." It was perhaps one degree worse than their stretch at Hooge and necessitated companies and posts being scattered, as the ground served, between what was left of Wieltje, St. Jean, and La Brique. The enemy opened by shelling the Reserve Company (No. 4) at St. Jean and wounding eight men, while their machine-gun fire held up all work in the front line where No. 1 Company was trying to dig a communication-trench through old dirt and dead to No. 2 Company in support.

The demonstration might have meant anything or nothing, but to be on the safe side and to comply with Brigade orders, regular observation and snipers' posts were posted henceforward, and Lieutenant Rodakowski was struck off all trench duties as "Intelligence (and Sniping) Officer." The arrangements and supervision of a dozen or so snipers, imaginative, stolid or frankly bored, as the case might be, and the collation of their various reports based (for very little could be actually seen) on the Celtic imagination operating at large; the whole to be revised and corrected from hour to hour by one's own faculties of observation and deduction; make Intelligence work a little strenuous.