Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/225

 On the 10th they regretfully quitted that hospitable village for the too familiar camping grounds near Carnoy beyond Méaulte, which in winter becomes a marsh on the least provocation. They were accommodated "in bell-tents in a sea of mud" with weather to match.

Next day (11th November) they shifted to "a sort of camp" near Montauban, "quite inadequate" and served by bottomless roads where they were shelled a little after mass—a proof, one presumes, that the enemy had news of their arrival.

On the 13th November, in cold but dry weather, they took over a line of trench north of Lesbœufs between that village and Gueudecourt. These were reached by interminable duckboards from Trônes Wood and up over the battered and hacked Flers ridge. There were no communication-trenches and, in that windy waste of dead weed and wreckage, no landmarks to guide the eye. Trench equipment was utterly lacking, and every stick and strand had to be man-handled up from Ginchy. In these delectable lodgings they relieved the 7th Yorkshires and the 8th South Staffordshires, losing one man wounded by shell-fire, and Major the Hon. T. E. Vesey was sent down sick as the result of old wounds received at Loos and in '14. The Somme was no place for such as were not absolutely fit, and even the fittest had to pay toll.

Shelling for the next three days was "continuous but indiscriminate." Four men were killed, fourteen wounded, and three disappeared—walked, it is supposed, into enemy ground. The wonder was there were not more such accidents. Wiser men than they would come up to the front line with a message, refuse the services of a guide back because, they protested, they knew every inch of the ground and—would be no more seen till exhumation parties three or four years later identified them by some rag of Guards' khaki or a button.

The Battalion was relieved by the 2nd Grenadiers at midnight (16th November), but were not clear till morning, when they crawled back to camp between Carnoy and Montauban, packed forty men apiece into the