Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/194

 *modic efforts it bore them quite fifty kilometres in seven hours to Méricourt l'Abbé, whence they marched to Méaulte in a green hollow under the downs, and found themselves once more in their own Fourteenth Corps under Lord Cavan. More immediately to the point, and a thing long remembered, their billets were damp, dirty, and full of fleas; the weather that was destined to ruin the campaign broke in torrents of rain, and the continuous traffic of stuff had knocked the very bowels out of all the hard-worked roads. This was the first time they realised what the grey clinging Somme mud meant.

They trained in that wet at bombing, at assaulting from trenches, at visual signalling to aeroplanes, and at marking out trenches by night with white tapes, as scores of thousands had done before them, while the roar of the guns rose and dropped without explanation, like the tumult of unseen crowds; and rumours and contradictory orders for standing fast or leaving on the instant kept them in tension for ten days. But, most wonderful of all to the men from The Salient, where silence and guarded movement were automatic, was the loud life of this open-air world of troops around them—men and guns spread over the breadth of counties—horses in the open by thousands ranked in endless horse-*lines—processions of roaring lorries and deep-rumbling heavy guns; and, only a few miles away—the war in full blast. It was possible to catch a ride in a lorry and go up and see "The War," as the saying ran. Yonder, but a very little way, stretched horizons, downs, and tablelands as far as imagination could range. All the firmament groaned to the artillery hidden and striving within them; and statelily, and regularly and unceasingly, the vast spaces of open were plumed with vertical columns of changeful shell-smoke. Men perceived that everything they had known, till then, had been a field-day. Here was The War!

A story that a wonderful new weapon would soon appear was very general. Some one had half-seen or been told about the tanks in their well-screened shelters;