Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/293

 *ready half buried in mud. The enemy assisted our repairing parties with trench-mortars at intervals, till orders went forth that, though our mortars were nowise to stir up trouble, when once it began they would retaliate for just five minutes longer than the enemy. By the misfortune of a faulty shell, one of our Stokes guns burst on the 14th, killing or wounding eight men. However, it was noted that the enemy transferred his attentions for the next few days to a battalion of East Lancashires on our right.

On the 15th all wiring and defence-work ceased—"employed solely on trying to keep trenches passable." In spite of which the mud gained. Men's boots were pulled off their feet, and it is on joyous record that when Captain Gordon, the adjutant, tried to get up Johnson Avenue, their only communication-trench, he stuck up to his waist in mud and water and, lest he should be engulfed, had to wriggle out of his gum-boots, which came up to his thighs, and continue in his socks. The gum-boots, empty, sank out of sight like a wreck on the Goodwins. They reconnoitred new tracks for the reliefs, across duckboards running in full view of the enemy, who, luckily, had their own conditions to fight, and let a couple of our patrols invade No Man's Land unmolested, prowl round two machine-gun posts and even enter a German front line, "being too busy talking and hammering to notice us." The sodden sand-bags of the revetments bulged outwards and met across the trenches. The men worked day and night, and blessed every battalion's remotest ancestry that had ever used, and neglected, that accursed line.

On the 17th January they were relieved by the 2nd Grenadiers, which merely meant their reverting to Crump Trench, Cordite Reserve, Ceylon Avenue, etc., where, all being equally impassable, every movement had to be effected in the open.

Our artillery chose the 18th to be very active from their positions round Battalion Headquarters near the railway cutting behind, whereby there was some enemy retaliation that the mired front line could have