at least, were badly needed, but no more than four could be spared—Captain J. S. N. FitzGerald, as Adjutant, Lieutenant R. Rankin, Lieutenant H. Montgomery, who had only arrived with a draft on the 1st October, and 2nd Lieutenant Langrishe. Officers were a scarce commodity; for, though there was a momentary lull, there had been heavy bomb and trench work by the Twenty-eighth Division all round the disputed Hohenzollern redoubt which was falling piece by piece into the hands of the enemy, and counter-*attacks were expected all along the uncertain line.
The Hohenzollern Trenches
On October 3 the Guards Division relieved the Twenty-eighth round the Hohenzollern and the Hulluch quarries. The 3rd Brigade of the Division was assigned as much of the works round the Hohenzollern as yet remained to us; the 1st Brigade lay on their right linking on to the First Division which had relieved the Twelfth on the right of the Guards Division. The 2nd Guards Brigade was in reserve at Vermelles. The 1st Battalion acted as reserve to its own, the 1st, Brigade, and moving from Mazingarbe on the afternoon of the 3rd bivouacked in misery to the west of the railway line just outside Vermelles. The 2nd Grenadiers, in trenches which had formed part of the old British front line north-east of the Chapel of Notre Dame de Consolation, supported the 2nd and 3rd Coldstream who held the firing-line in a mass of unsurveyed and unknown German trenches running from St. Elie Avenue, a notorious and most dismal communication-trench, northwards towards the Hohenzollern redoubt, one face of which generously enfiladed our line at all times. The whole was a wilderness of muck and death, reached through three thousand yards of foul gutters, impeded by loops and knots of old telephone cables, whose sides bulged in the wet, and where, with the best care in the world, reliefs could go piteously astray
