Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/280

 Grenadiers and the Welsh Guards borrowed, should on the 27th attack Fontaine village and Bourlon Wood. They did so attack; they were cut to pieces with machine-gun fire in the advance; they were shelled out of Bourlon Wood; they were counter-attacked by heavy reinforcements of the enemy; they had no reinforcements; they fell back on Fontaine village in the evening; they withdrew from it in the darkness and fell back on La Justice. It was a full failure with heavy casualties and the news went back, with the speed of all bad news, to the 1st Brigade, which had been relieved on the 26th, the 1st Irish Guards lying at Ribecourt in the ruined farm where their transport had taken refuge. They should have been in a trench outside the village, but a battalion of another division was found in possession of it, and so was not disturbed.

There was no shelter against the driving snowy rain, and the men, without great-coats or blankets, were "very cold, wet and miserable." The next day was no better, and on the 29th the Fifty-ninth Division took over their area from them while the Guards Division was rearranged thus: the 3rd Brigade at Trescault, the 2nd at Ribecourt, and the 1st at Metz-en-Couture, a wrecked, red-brick village, once engaged in the sugar-beet industry, lying on and under a swell of the downs some four thousand yards west of Gouzeaucourt. The Divisional Artillery was at Flesquières, more than four miles away. The Battalion's march to Metz was badly delayed by blocks on the road and a general impression spread that trouble was not far off. Individually, the soldier is easy to deceive: collectively, a battalion has the sure instinct of an animal for changes in the wind. There were catacombs in Metz village where one company was billeted whereby it was nearly choked to death by foul gases. This seemed all of a piece with*