trench littered with wreckage, scraped themselves in, and there found some more of the Division, while the German battery continued to find them. In the long run, that trench, which had been a German covered-way for guns, came to hold about sixty of the 1st Irish Guards, thirty of the 2nd Grenadiers under Captain A. F. S. Cunningham, and a hundred or so of both Battalions Coldstream under Colonel J. V. Campbell, the senior officer present. Somewhere on the left front of it, fifteen of the Irish were found lying out in shell-holes under C. S. M. Carton and Sergeant Riordan. They were in touch, so far as touch existed then, with the 9th Rifle Brigade on their left, but it was not advisable to show one's head above a shell-hole on account of enemy machine-guns which were vividly in touch with everything that moved. Their right was all in the air, and for the second time no one knew—no one could know—where the trench in which they lay was situated in the existing chaos. They fixed its position at last by compass-bearings. It was more or less on the line of the second objective, and had therefore to be held in spite of casualties. The men could do no more than fire when possible at anything that showed itself (which was seldom) and, in the rare intervals when shelling slackened, work themselves a little further into the ground. At this juncture, Captain L. R. Hargreaves, left behind with the Reserve of Officers in Trônes Wood, was ordered up, and reached the line with nothing worse than one wound. He led out a mixed party of Coldstream and Irish to a chain of disconnected shell-holes a few hundred yards in advance of the trench. Here they suffered for the rest of the afternoon under the field-battery shelling them at less than half a mile, and the regular scything of the machine-guns from the Quadrilateral on their right. A machine-gun detachment, under Lieutenant L. C. Whitefoord, went with them, and Lieutenant W. C. Mumford and 2nd Lieutenant F. S. L. Smith with their little detachments of Irish and Coldstream came up later as reinforcements. That scattered forward fringe among the shell-holes
