Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/85

 1915

LA BASSÉE TO LAVENTIE

They were not disappointed. New Year's Day was marked by the flooding out of a section of forward trenches, and by experiments with a trench-mortar, from which 2nd Lieutenant Keating and some Garrison gunners threw three bombs at an enemy digging-party a couple of hundred yards away. This is the first reference to our use of trench-mortars in the young campaign. The enemy retaliated next day by bombing from their real trench-mortars, at a distance of seven hundred yards, the small farm-house where Battalion Headquarters lay. The bombs could be seen "coming at a very steep angle, but the house was only once hit." Daylight showed the work of the Irish trench-mortar to have been so good—it had blown a gap in the German trench—that they continued it and inflicted and observed much damage.

They were relieved on the 3rd January by the King's Royal Rifles and got to billets near Vieille Chapelle late that night. A London Gazette announced that the Distinguished Conduct Medal had been awarded No. 2535 Sergeant C. Harradine; No. 1664 Corporal C. Moran; No. 4015 Private W. Moore (since killed in action); No. 2853 Lance-Corporal W. Delaney. Also "the new decoration called the Military Cross" had been awarded to Lieutenant the Hon. H. W. Gough.

The Battalion, as a whole, had its reward for the past ten days when the Brigadier expressed his approval of the work of the Guards Brigade "and especially that of the Irish Guards."

Cleaning and refit, classes in bomb-throwing (both