Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/292

 Avenue, which commanded a fine view of our own lines and the enemy's, and posts K, L, and M just off it (all south of the river), took half the strength. The remainder garrisoned Crump and Cordite Reserve trenches on the north, and supplied an isolated and unpleasant post (F) between the river and the lagoon which could only be reached with comfort after dark, when an officer, twenty men, a Lewis-gun, and a couple of signallers watched there in case an enterprising enemy should be minded to raid along the tow-path.

Next day it thawed and the old horrors of Ypres Salient were their portion. The snow vanished, leaving terrible mud. The day passed quietly. Nos. 1 and 3 Companies had to find "a carrying-party for front companies in the evening." The story behind the entry tells itself. The enemy did not add himself to their burdens. A patrol, under 2nd Lieutenant H. A. Collett, went out the next night (January 11) five hundred yards into No Man's Land—from F post—saw and heard nothing. F post was always a ghostly sort of place, where bullets whistled by without explanation between the furred tree-trunks along the tow-path; and the marshy ground behind it was filled with shell-holes, rusty wire and the black dead of forgotten fights. The ruins of Rœux across the river, suddenly leaping to shape in the flare of Véry lights, looked down on it like the skeleton of a fortress on a stage, and single unexpected shells spattered mud across the cold waters.

On the 13th January they relieved the 2nd Grenadiers at the front in a fresh assortment of decayed posts—Scabbard Alley, Scabbard Support, Welford Reserve and the like, whose names even to this day make men who served there shiver. As thaw and rain worked on them, the trenches "all fell in great lumps."

"Why troops who had held them all the summer had done nothing to revet them and prepare for the winter, I cannot think," one indignant sufferer wrote. "But that is always the fault of the British army. It will not look ahead." He prophesied better than he knew. Then he went to visit his posts, where the men were al