Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/230

 bursts of artillery marked the hour. And on the 3rd January the whole of the Guards Division went out of the line for refit. The Twentieth Division took its unenvied place, and the 1st Battalion Irish Guards lay at Sandpits Camp near Méaulte.

The strain was beginning to tell. They had had to transfer Lieutenant F. S. L. Smith and 2nd Lieutenant J. Kane to the 2nd Battalion "owing to shortage in that Battalion on account of sickness," and their own coolies were in need of rest and change. The strongest cannot stand up beyond a certain point to exposure, broken rest, alarms all round the clock; laborious physical exertions, knee or mid-thigh deep in mud; sweating fatigues, followed by cooling-off in icy blasts or a broth of snow and chalk-slime; or—more undermining than any bodily stress—the pressure that grows of hourly responsibility. Sooner or later, the mind surrenders itself to a mill-round of harassing obsessions as to whether, if one had led one's platoon up or down by such and such a deviation—to the left or the right of a certain dead horse, for example—if one had halted longer there or whipped up more cautiously elsewhere—one might have saved such and such a casualty, entombment in the mud, or some other shrieking horror of the night. Reason insists that it was not, and could not have been, one's own fault. Memory brings back the face or the eyes of the dying, and the silence, always accusing, as the platoon goes forward. When this mood overtakes an officer he does well to go into rest for a while and pad his nerves, lest he arrive at that dreadful stage when he is convinced that his next turn of duty will see all his men destroyed by his own act. Between this last stage and the dragging weariness, the hoarse Somme cold, and the foul taste in the mouth which are mere signs of "beginning to be fed up," there is every variety of derangement, to be held in check by the individual's own character and that discipline which age and experience have devised to hold him when everything else has dropped away. It is the deadly journey, back and forth to the front-line with material,