Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/348

 so they drew fire, and when they were knocked out (our people did not know this at first, being unused to working with them), made life insupportable with petrol-fumes for a hundred yards round.

About half-past four in the afternoon a Guards Battalion—they thought it was the 1st Coldstream—came up on their left, and under cover of what looked like a smoke-barrage, cleared Orival Wood and silenced the two guns there. The Irish, from their dress-circle in Silver Street, blessed them long and loud, and while they applauded, Lieut.-Colonel Lord Gort, commanding the 1st Grenadiers, came down the trench wounded on his way to a dressing-station. He had been badly hit once before he thought fit to leave duty, and was suffering from loss of blood. The Irish had always a great regard for him, and that day they owed him more than they knew at the time, for it was the advance of the 1st Grenadiers under his leading, almost up to Premy Chapel, which had unkeyed the German resistance in Graincourt, and led the enemy to believe their line of retreat out of the village was threatened. The Second Division as it came through found the enemy shifting and followed them up towards Noyelles. So the day closed, and, though men did not realize, marked the end of organized trench-warfare for the Guards Division.

The Battalion, with two officers dead and five wounded out of fifteen (killed: Lieutenant B. S. Close, and 2nd Lieutenant A. H. O'Farrell; wounded: Captain the Hon. B. A. A. Ogilvy, Captain C. W. W. Bence-Jones, and 2nd Lieutenants A. R. Boyle, G. F. Mathieson, and C. S. O'Brien, M.C., died of wounds), and one hundred and eighty casualties in the ranks, stayed on the ground for the night. It tried to make itself as comfortable as cold and shallow trenches allowed, but by orders of some "higher authority," who supposed that it had been relieved, no water or rations were sent up; and, next morning, they had to march six thousand yards on empty stomachs to their trench-shelters and bivouacs in front of Demicourt. As the last company arrived a cold rain fell, but they were all