Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/331

 No. 2 Company (Captain A. Paget) following No. 4 had been held back for a few minutes by the C.O. (Major R. Baggallay) on the fringe of the barrage, to be slipped through when it seemed to lighten. They also launched out into a world that was all flank or support, of battalions which could neither be seen nor found, who were themselves outflanked by machine-guns in a landscape that was one stumbling-block of shallow trenches which suddenly faded out. They crossed the St. Léger-Vraucourt road and bore east, after clearing the St. Léger wood, till they reached the St. Léger reserve trench, and held it from the Longatte road to where it joined the Banks Reserve. Says one record: "At this time, Captain Paget was in ignorance of the success or location of the attacking battalions, and both of his flanks exposed as far as he knew." The enemy machine-guns were hammering home that knowledge, and one of the platoons had lost touch altogether, and was out in the deadly open. So in the trench they lay till an officer of the Coldstream came over and told Paget the "general situation," which, unofficially, ran: "This show is held up." He borrowed a section from No. 5 Platoon to help to build up a flank to guard the east side of St. Léger and vanished among the increasing shell-holes.

Well on in the morning a message arrived from Captain Hegarty, No. 4 Company, that he and his men were on the St. Léger-Vraucourt road and held up like the rest. Captain Paget went over, in the usual way, by a series of bolts from shell-hole to shell-hole, trying to clear up an only too-clear situation. On the way he found a lost platoon, sent it to dig in on the left of No. 2 Company, and also saw the C.O. 2nd Coldstream and explained his own dispositions. They were not made too soon, for in a short time there was an attack on No. 2 Company which came within sixty yards before it was broken up by our small-arm fire. The Germans were followed up as they returned across the Ecoust-Mory ridge by long-range shooting