Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/360

 No. 3 Company

Capt. G. L. St. C. Bambridge.

No. 4 Company

2nd Lieut. O. R. Baldwin.

Battalion Headquarters

Major A. F. Gordon, M.C. Capt. J. B. Keenan. Capt. C. A. J. Vernon.

Cleaning up began the next day where fine weather in "most delightful billets" was cheered by the news that the Second Division's attack on Vertain had been a great success. In those days they looked no further than their neighbours on either side.

Every battle, as had been pointed out, leaves its own impression. St. Python opened with a wild but exciting chase in the wet and dark, which, at first, seemed to lead straight into Germany. It ended, as it were, in the sudden rising of a curtain of grey, dank light that struck all the actors dumb and immobile for an enormously long and hungry stretch of time, during which they mostly stared at what they could see of the sky above them, while the air filled with dirt and clods, and single shots pecked and snarled round every stone of each man's limited skyline; the whole ending in a blur of running water under starlight (that was when they recrossed the Selle River), and confused memories of freezing together in lumps in lorries, followed by a dazed day of "shell-madness," when all ears and eyes were intolerably overburdened with echoes and pictures, and men preferred to be left alone. But they were washed and cleaned and reclothed with all speed, and handed over to their company officers for the drill that chases off bad dreams. The regimental sergeant-major got at them, too, after their hair was cut, and the massed brigade drums played in the village square of Carnières, and, ere the end of the month, inter-company football was in full swing.

A draft of ninety-one other ranks joined for duty on the 22nd October. Lieutenant-Colonel Baggallay, M.C., came back from leave and, in the absence of the