Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/217

 survivors begging to be taken out of that inferno to the nearest prisoners' kraal. Some of these captures, officers included, sincerely expected to be slaughtered in cold blood.

The 2nd Grenadiers, on the right of the 1st Irish Guards, had been unlucky in their position, for the wire in front of their sector being veiled by high crop, our guns had missed it. That Battalion suffered heavily in officers and men, shot down as they tried to work their way through by hand; but they never lost touch, and the advance went on unbrokenly to the next point—a sunken road on the east side of Lesbœufs, five hundred yards ahead of the first objective. All four companies of the Irish were together now—Lieutenant Blom of No. 3 had been wounded at the first trench and 2nd Lieutenant T. F. MacMahon took over. They reached the downward slope to the sunk road and, as at the first objective, found most of their work had been done for them by the barrage. Even while they congratulated themselves and sent off a pigeon, as well as runner messages, to report the capture to Battalion Headquarters, which, "somewhat broken" by the German shelling, had arrived in the first-taken trench, fire fell on them from the south. Our own guns, misranging across the fields, were supposed to be responsible for this; and a second pigeon was despatched praying them to cease, but "there were a number of casualties" before the advance to the last objective began. This was shown on the map as just east of Lesbœufs village, and east again of another sunken road. The final surge forward included a rush across uprooted orchards and through wrecked houses, shops, and barns, with buildings alight or confusedly collapsing round them, and the enemy streaming out ahead to hide in shell-holes in the open. There was not much killing at this point, and, thanks to the tanks and the guns, a good deal less machine-gun fire than might have been expected. The Battalion dug in in a potato field a few hundred yards beyond the village, where the men providently laid aside the largest potatoes for