by Givenchy-en-Gohelle over the Vimy heights to the Scarpe below Arras. There may, even on the 30th, have remained some hope on our part of "breaking through" into the plain of the Scheldt, with its chance of open warfare to follow. The enemy, however, had no intention of allowing us any freedom of movement which localised attacks on his part could limit and hold till such time as his reserves might get in a counter-*attack strong enough to regain all the few poor hundreds of yards which we had shelled, bombed, and bayoneted out of his front. The fighting was specially severe that day among the rabbit-warrens of trenches by the Hohenzollern redoubt. Sections of trenches were lost and won back or wiped out by gun-fire all along a front where, for one instance of recorded heroism among the confusion of bombs and barricades, there were hundreds unrecorded as the spouting earth closed over and hid all after-knowledge of the very site of the agony.
A section of trench held by the Scots Fusiliers on the immediate left of the Irish Guards was attacked and a hundred yards or so of it were captured, but the Battalion was not called upon to lend a hand. It lay under heavy shell and sniping fire in the wet, till it was time to exchange the comparative security of a wet open drain for the unsheltered horrors of a relief which, beginning in the dusk at six, was not completed till close on two in the morning. The last company reached their miserable billets at Mazingarbe, some three miles' away across a well-searched back-area at 6 A. M. One N.C.O. was killed and ten N.C.O.'s and men were wounded.
They spent the next three days in the battered suburbs of Mazingarbe while the Twelfth Division took over the Guards' line and the Ninth French Army Corps relieved the British troops who were holding the south face of the Cuinchy-Hulluch-Grenay salient. The 1st Battalion itself was now drawn upon to meet the demands of the 2nd Battalion for officers to make good losses in their action of the 27th. Five officers,
