Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/251

 by day the pieces required for the next move on the chessboard of war were pushed into their places along the Salient. The Fifth Army—of four corps and some divisions—under General Gough was to take the weight of the affair between Klein Zillebeeke and Boesinghe, while the First French Army—First and Fifty-first Divisions—would relieve the Belgians from Boesinghe to Noordschoote and extend the line along the Yser Canal north of Ypres to Steenstraate. The Guards Division was to lie next them on the extreme left of our line at Boesinghe.

On the 25th June, the Battalion moved from Proven into the edge of the battle-area near Woesten, a couple of miles or so behind Boesinghe itself, and came under the fire of a long-range German naval gun which merely cut up the fields round them. Both sides were now hard at work in the air, trying to put out each other's eyes; and a German aeroplane brought down one of our observation-balloons hideously alight, close to Woesten camp. All the Salient hummed with opposing aircraft, the bombing of back-areas was cruel and continuous, and men had no rest from strain. But our batteries, profiting by the help of our machines, hammered the enemy line as it had not been hammered there since war began. Oil-drums, gas and thermit shells were added to the regular allowances sent over, and, whenever chance offered, raiding-parties dove in and out of the front lines sharking prisoners for identification. The Battalion's share in this work was the usual fatigue—"unloading trucks" and the like, beneath intermittent artillery-fire which, on the 29th June, ended in three direct hits on the farm-house (Roussel farm) near Elverdinghe, where they lay. One man was killed outright and three others wounded. Their regular routine-work of death had begun again.

On the 1st of July they went into line on the Boesinghe sector, relieving the 2nd Coldstream on the west or near sector of the Yser Canal. Their trenches were of the usual built-up, sand-bagged type. Headquarters were at Bleuet farm, well under fire of all