Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/339

 *vage and cleaning up was their fatigue—a dreadful job at any time, for the ground was filled with ancient offal as well as new—lost French of '14 mingled grotesquely with the raw produce of yesterday's bombing-raid. Yet men's feelings blunt so by use that they will scavenge yard by yard over the very clay of the pit into which they themselves may at any instant be stamped, nor turn a hair at shapes made last year in their likeness. The Battalion was complimented by its Major-General on the extent and neatness of its dump. No mere campaigning interferes with the Army's passion for elaborate economies. A little before this, the entire British Expeditionary Force was exhorted to collect and turn in all solder from bully-beef tins and the like. Naturally, the thing became a game with betting on results between corps; but when a dark, elderly, brooding private of the Irish spent three hours stalking a Coldstream cooker with intent to convey and melt it down, every one felt it had gone far enough.

On the 15th September they relieved the 1st Scots Guards in the old trenches west of Lagnicourt. There they managed to put in a little box-respirator drill which at the best is a dry fatigue, but, be it noted with gratitude, "beer was obtained for the men and sent up from transport-lines." The whole area reeked of the various gases which the enemy were distributing with heavies. They hung in the hollows and were sucked up by the day's heat, and no time or place was safe from them. Gas-discipline had to be insisted on strongly, for even veterans grow careless of a foe they cannot see; and the new hands are like croupy babies.

On the 17th September they relieved the 2nd Scots Guards in support, and No. 2 Company took over from a company of the Welsh Guards. Their trenches were in what had been the British front line of the old time—Fish Avenue, Sprat Post, Shark Support, Rat and Rabbit Avenue, and so forth.

There was desultory shelling on the morning of the 18th, and heavier work in the afternoon, causing six casualties, and slightly wounding Captain Vernon, In