Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/371

 *noon over muddy roads. By the 6th they were at Villers-St.-Gertrude hill-marching through beautiful scenery, which did not amuse them, because, owing to the state of communications, supplies were delayed again. So, on the 8th December at Lierneux, fifteen miles from Villers-St.-Gertrude, another halt was called for another three days, while company officers, homesick as their men, drilled them in the winter dirt. On the 11th they crossed the German frontier line at Recht, and the drums played the Battalion over to the "Regimental March." ("But, ye'll understand, we was all wet the most of that time and fighting with the mud an' our boots. 'Twas Jerry's own weather the minute we set foot in his country, and we none of us felt like conquerors. We was just dhrippin' Micks.") At Vielsalm, almost the last village outside Germany, they picked up a draft of sixty men to share with them the horrors of peace ahead, and a supply-system gone to bits behind them.

Their road wound through small and inconspicuous hamlets among wooded hills, by stretches of six or seven hours' marching a day. The people they had to deal with seemed meek and visibly oppressed with the fear of rough treatment. That removed from their minds, they stepped aside and looked wonderingly at the incomprehensible enemy that tramped through their streets, leaving neither ruin nor rape behind. By the 18th December the advance had reached Lovenich, and, after two days' rest there, they entered Cologne on the 23rd December with an absence of display that might or might not have been understood by the natives. They had covered more than two hundred miles over bad roads in bad boots that could not be repaired nor thrown away, and but one man had fallen out. The drums played "Brian Boru" when they entered the Hohenzollern Ring; their Major-General beheld that last march, and they were duly photographed in the wet; while the world that saw such photographs in the weekly illustrated papers was honestly convinced that the Great War and all war was at an end for evermore.