Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/284

 *stand. One minute both Jerries was dancin' hard to oblige him, an' then—nothin', nothin'—nothin'—of the three of them!")

The next day, orders came for the Guards Division to continue their work and attack on a front of two miles along the line of the ridge a thousand yards east of Gouzeaucourt, which ran south through Gonnelieu village and Gauche Wood to Villers Hill. Tanks, they were told, would help and the Divisional Artillery would put down barrages. The Fifty-ninth Division would be on their left and the Cavalry Division on their right. The 1st Guards Brigade were assigned Gauche Wood; the 3rd Brigade had the much more difficult problem of rushing Gonnelieu village in the event of another Division who were attacking it that morning (1st December) failing to make headway. The 1st Brigade's attack on Gauche Wood was undertaken by the 2nd Grenadiers on the right, the 3rd Coldstream, in reserve, in their trenches. They assembled before dawn on the 1st December, waited a while for a promised detachment of tanks and finally started off without them. Their artillery support was meagre, and the troops had to cover three-quarters of a mile over grassy land to the fringe of the wood. The enemy's first barrage fell behind them; the wood itself was crammed with much more effective machine-guns, but, once it had been entered, the issue became a man-to-man affair. Then some tanks turned up and some cavalry, the latter an hour late. The tanks were eventually withdrawn, as they found no trenches to crush in the wood and drew much shell-fire in the open; but the cavalry, which included Bengal Lancers, were of good use on the right flank of the attack. The two Guards Brigades, one attacking Gonnelieu to the north, the other Gauche Wood to the south, drew a little apart from each other as the men closed in where the machine-gun fire was hottest, and about nine o'clock the 1st Irish Guards sent up a company (No. 1) to fill the gap which developed on both sides of the Gouzeaucourt-Gonnelieu road, the boundary between the Brigades.