Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/270

 *lowed them. The Battalion's crossing-place at the river, which, after all, proved not so unmanageable as the patrols reported, had no bridges, but there was wire enough on the banks to have made trouble had the enemy chosen that time and place to shell. They went over in three-foot water with mud at the bottom; re-*formed, wet and filthy, and followed the 2nd Grenadiers who had captured the first and second objectives, moved through them at 8.20 and formed up on the right of the 3rd Coldstream under the barrage of our guns for their own advance on the final objective—the edge of the forest.

So far, barring a tendency to bear towards the right or railway side, direction had been well kept and their losses were not heavy. The companies deployed for attack on the new lines necessitated by the altered German system of defense—mopping-up sections in rear of the leading companies, with Lewis-gun sections, and a mopping-up platoon busy behind all.

Meantime, the troops on the Battalion's right had been delayed in coming up, and their delay was more marked from the second objective onward. This did not check the Guards' advance, but it exposed the Battalion's right to a cruel flanking fire from snipers among the shell-holes on the uncleared ground by the Ypres-Staden line. There were pill-boxes of concrete in front; there was a fortified farm buried in sand-*bags, Egypt House, to be reduced; there were nests of machine-guns on the right which the troops on the right had not yet overrun, and there was an almost separate and independent fight in and round some brick-fields, which, in turn, were covered by the fire of snipers from the fringes of the forest. Enemy aircraft skimming low gave the German artillery every help in their power, and the enemy's shelling was accurate accordingly. The only thing that lacked in the fight was the bayonet. The affair resolved itself into a series of splashing rushes, from one shell-hole to the next, terrier-work round the pill-boxes, incessant demands for the Lewis-guns (rifle-grenades, but no