Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/248

 a picnic of it, while the long-drawn battle of the Ancre in the north died down to mere bloody day-and-night war among the villages covering the Hindenburg Line and its spurs. The talk in the camps turned on great doings—everything connected with the front-line was "doings"—against Messines Ridge that looks over the flat shell-bitten Salient where there is more compulsory trench-bathing than any man wants. It had commanded too much of that country for too long. At its highest point, where Wytschaete village had once stood, it overlooked Ypres and the British positions around, and was a menace over desolate Plugstreet far towards Armentières. Rumour ran that arrangements had been made to shift it bodily off the face of the earth; that populations of miners had burrowed there through months, for miles; that all underground was riddled with workings where men fought in the dark, up and down tunnels that caved, round the sharp turns of boarded and bagged galleries, and on the lips of black shafts that dropped one into forty-foot graves. Yet, even were Messines Ridge wiped out, the enemy had large choices of commanding positions practically all round the Salient, and it seemed likely, by what news sifted into their area, that the Guards might be called upon before long to help in further big doings, Ypres way—perhaps a "break-through" towards Lille.

The Salient had been the running sore in our armies' side since the first. Now that we had men, guns, and material, it looked as if it might be staunched at last. A battalion does not think beyond its immediate interests—even officers are discouraged from trying to run the war by themselves—but it did not need to be told that it had not been fattened up the last few weeks for Headquarters' pleasure in its appearance. Men know when they are "for it," and if they forget, are reminded from the doors of crowded estaminets and