Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/264

 *joyed a "fairly quiet time," and had only to find a hundred men or so per night for forward-area work. Rugby, Dulwich and the other camps were all duly and regularly bombed, shelled and gassed, but that was accepted as part of the daily and nightly work.

On the 9th they were up at the front among the "just sufficiently habitable shell-holes" of the Green line beyond the Iron Cross Kortikaar-Cabaret road from the Ypres-Staden railway to the junction with the French. Their guides met them at Bois farm, fifteen hundred yards back, and since, once among the holes, all food sent up risked the life or mutilation of a man, they carried two days' rations and picked up their water from a Decauville railway that ran to the terminus (daily bombed and bombarded) on the Wijden Drift road. While the last two companies (Nos. 2 and 4) were getting their tins at railhead, an hour and a half's barrage was dropped on them and twenty-seven men were killed or wounded. Relief was delayed in consequence till one on the morning of the 10th, and, about an hour later, a wandering covey of eight Germans, who had lost their way in the dark, were rounded up by the forward platoons of No. 3 Company (2nd Lieutenant Corry, D.C.M.). It was a small brisk fight, and it came pleasantly after the barrage at railhead, and the shelling that befell them from three to half-past five. They were annoyed, too, by low-flying enemy aeroplanes who fired at the men in the posts but as a rule missed them. A deserter came in and patrols were sent out to see where the nearest enemy-post might be. One was located near the railway line in front of the right company. Exploration work of this sort in such a blind front as the enemy had arranged here, ends only too often in patrols losing their way as the eight Germans had done; and company officers do not like it.

On the 11th September, after some artillery work on our side, the enemy guns carried out a shoot on the pill-boxes occupied by the right (No. 1) company while their infantry were "unusually active," probably