Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/363

 *merain and bivouacs near by. It meant a ten-mile tramp of the pre-duckboard era, in the midst of mired horse- and lorry-transport, over country where the enemy had smashed every bridge and culvert, blocked all roads and pulling-out places with mine-craters, and sown houses, old trenches, and dug-outs with fanciful death-traps. The land was small-featured and full of little hills, so heavily hedged and orcharded that speculative battalions could be lost in it in twenty minutes. There were coveys, too, of French civils, rescued and evacuated out of the villages around, wandering against the stream of east-bound traffic. These forlorn little groups, all persuaded that the war was over and that they could return to their houses to-morrow, had to be shifted and chaperoned somehow through the chaos; but the patience and goodwill of our people were unending.

The wet day closed with a conference at Brigade Headquarters, but the enemy had thrown out our plan for action on that sector by thoughtlessly retiring on both flanks of the Division, as well as a little on the front of it, and final orders were not fixed till after midnight on the 3rd November.

The 1st and 2nd Guards Brigade were to attack, the 3rd in reserve. Of the 1st Brigade, the 2nd Coldstream would take the line as far as the first objective; the 2nd Grenadiers would then come through and carry on to the next line, the Irish Guards in support. The Brigade's assembly area was across the Rhônelle River, east of the long and straggling village of Villers-Pol, on the Jenlain-Le Quesnoy road. Zero was fixed for 7.20. The Battalion marched from Bermerain, and met its first enemy shell as it was going under the Valenciennes railway embankment. What remained of the roads were badly congested with troops, and one gets the idea that the Staff work was casual. To begin with, the Battalion found the 3rd Grenadiers and the 1st Scots Guards between themselves and the 2nd Grenadiers, which was not calculated to soothe any C.O. desirous of keeping his appointment. Apparently they got through the Scots Guards; but when they reached