Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/186

 their turn came, and that, meantime, deep trenches were not bad things after all. When they had looked for a little on the full face of war, they were content to copy their elders and ask no questions. They understood it was to be a wearing-out battle. Very many men had already been worn out and cast aside in the mere detail of preparation, in building the light and broad-gauge railways of supply and the roads beside them; in fetching up and installing timber, hutments, hangars, telephones, hospitals, pipe-lines for water, and the thousand other necessities of mechanical war. As it happened to individuals, so, they knew, would it be with the battalions, brigades and divisions of all the armies which General Rawlinson on the 1st of July moved up against that fortress of a whole countryside, called in history "The Somme."

And while that storm gathered and broke, the Battalion went on with its horrible necessary work in the Salient till the hour should come for it and its Division to be cast into the furnace and used up with the rest.

On the 7th July they moved as a support to the broken and filthy banks of the Canal north of Ypres and sat in dug-outs connected by a tunnel and begirt with water and mud. Except for a mere nightly fatigue of a couple of hundred men, the Diary noted that "there was no training possible but there was little shelling." The 2nd Grenadiers were in the line which the Battalion relieved (11th July) on a broken and marshy front, between Buffs Road and Forward Cottage with Battalion Headquarters near St. Jean and the 3rd Coldstream on their left. They were shelled during relief, when Lieutenant Christy, who, but a little while before, had just escaped a sniper's bullet through the loophole, was killed.

That same morning four Germans wormed their way through the rank grass and broken ground and for a while almost captured an isolated post of six men of No. 1 Company. They tried, indeed, to march them off as prisoners, but the Irish edged away under cover of the