Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/205

 Suddenly a party of snipers and machine-guns appeared behind the Irish in a communication-trench, fired at large, as much out of bewilderment as design, wounded the sole surviving company officer of the four companies (Lieutenant J. K. Greer), and owing to the jamming of our Lewis-guns got away to be killed elsewhere. A mass of surrendering Germans, disturbed by the advance of a division on the left, drifted across them and further blinded the situation. Nobody knew within hundreds of yards where they were, but since it was obvious that the whole attack of the Division, pressed, after the failure of the Sixth Division, by the fire from the Quadrilateral, had sheered too far towards the left or north, the need of the moment was to shift the men of the 2nd Guards Brigade back along the trench towards their own area; to sort out the mixed mass of officerless men on the left; and to make them dig in before the vicious, spasmodic shelling of the congested line turned into the full roll of the German barrage.

They cleared out, as best they could, the mixed English and German bodies that paved the bottom of the trench, and toiled desperately at the wreckage—splinters and concrete from blown-in dug-outs, earth-slides and collapses of head-cover by yards at a time, all mingled or besmeared with horrors and filth that a shell would suddenly increase under their hands. Men could give hideous isolated experiences of their own—it seemed to each survivor that he had worked for a lifetime in a world apart—but no man could recall any connected order of events, and the exact hour and surroundings wherein such and such a man—private, N.C.O., or officer—met his death are still in dispute. It was a still day, and the reeking, chemical-tainted fog of the high explosives would not clear. Orders would be given and taken by men suddenly appearing and as suddenly vanishing through smoke or across fallen earth, till both would be cut off in the middle by a rifle bullet, or beaten down by the stamp and vomit of a shell. There was, too, always a crowd of men seated