Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/180

 On the 12th May St. Jean, which included Battalion Headquarters, half way between St. Jean and Wieltje, was heavily shelled for eight hours of the night with heavy stuff—but no casualties beyond a couple of men wounded.

On the 18th May, when they were in the line once more, the enemy who had recently been remarkably quiet made an attempt to rush a bombing-post, but, says the Diary, "Lieutenant Tisdall and 4182 Private A. Young came upon them unexpectedly, and owing to the former's coolness and the latter's vigorous offensive action with rifle and bombs, the hostile party, about twenty, fled." The Diary is never emotional in such little matters as these, and the officers concerned say less than nothing. It is the old-timers among the men who cherish memories of the "vigorous offensive" action. No pen dare put on paper the speech of the orderly who, with rifle and bomb, erupts along the trench or over the edge of the shell-crater either in deadly silence or with threatenings and slaughter in his own dialect, and, when the quick grisly business is over, convulses his associates with his private version of it.

The orderly got the D.C.M. and the officer the Military Cross.

The enemy retaliated next night by shelling the support line and wounded seven men just as the Battalion was going into rest and was relieved late, which they noticed with deep displeasure, by a battalion of the Twentieth Division.

The 20th May saw them in the clean back-area at the pleasant well-treed village of Longuenesse, three miles south-west of St. Omer, all together in good billets and plenty of clean straw at one farm; Headquarters at a neighbouring château, the 2nd Coldstream, their particular friends with them, and the other battalions of their brigade at villages near by. The weather was good; for a week at least work was reasonable, and they all went to pay a visit disguised as a "Battalion Drill" to the parade ground of the cadet-school at Blendecques, of which Lieutenant J. Halligan, late