Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/227

 all countin' ourselves for dead men—sooner or later. 'Twas in the air, ye'll understand—like the big stuff comin' over."

On Sunday the 27th November, the day of the requiem mass for the Irish Guards in Westminster Cathedral, a requiem mass was said in Méaulte Church and they moved out to a French camp ("Forked Tree"), south of the town where the big French huts held a hundred men apiece, but cook-houses, etc., were all to build and the "usual routine improvement work began again." Their Brigade bombing officer, Lieutenant the Hon. H. P. O'Brien, was appointed Staff Captain to the 1st Guards Brigade, and Captain R. G. C. Yerburgh left to be attached to the 2nd Guards Brigade H.Q. Staff for instruction in staff duties.

They were visited by their corps and divisional commanders, inspected by their Brigadier and route-marched till the 3rd December, when they moved to Maltz Horn Camp.

It had been decided that the British Army should, by degrees, take over a stretch of the French line from Le Transloy to a point opposite Roye; and the Battalion's share of this was about a thousand yards of trench at Sailly-Saillisel, held by the 160th Regiment of the Twentieth Corps (Corps de Fer). The front line ran a little in front of what had once been that long and prosperous village on the ridge, and, though not continuous, "it held in places." The support-line, through, and among the wreck of the houses, was dry and fairly good. That there were no communication-trenches was a small matter—men preferred to take their chances in the open to being buried in trench mud—but there was no road up to it and "the going was heavy."

Once installed (December 6), after a prompt and workmanlike French relief, which impressed them, they found the 156th French Infantry on their right, a Coldstream Battalion on their left, and an enemy in