our armies, as had happened so often on the Somme, were immobilised. The clay ground was cullendered and punched by the shells into chains of pools and ponds. All valleys and hollows turned into bogs where, if men wandered from the regular tracks across them, they drowned or were mired to death. If they stayed on the plankings the enemy's guns swept them away. When all had been done that man could do, the first phase of the Third Battle of Ypres closed in a strengthened conviction that all the powers of evil were in strict alliance with Germany. Our armies held off seven counter-attacks along the line, settled themselves in it and then, perforce, waited for the weather to clear.
It rained on and off till the 15th August, and, as most of the corn in the fields round Poll Hill Camp had, owing to the wet, not been cut, training-ground was limited just at the very time when the new German system of holding a line with a chain of carefully camouflaged posts called for a change in attack methods. So the Battalion was practised in "surprise situations"—i.e. discovering invisible enemies with machine-guns in shell-holes that turned the advancing line into a ragged scattering "scrum." Their dummy barrages were slowed, too, as the Diary says, "to enable the surprise situations to be dealt with and to give time for the line to re-form behind the barrage after having dealt with these situations." This was a kind of work for which, like bombing, the Irish had considerable natural aptitudes. It was summed up, unofficially, thus: "In the ould days, a trench was a trench, ye'll understand, an' something to lay hould upon. Third Ypres was failin' into nothin' and then findin' 'twas two pill-boxes an' a fort on your flank." Therefore, the specialists in the shape of the Lewis-gunner and the "mopper-up" who dealt with the débris of attacks were important persons and were instructed accordingly when the Battalion was not indented upon for working-parties on the gun-tracks and bridges round Boesinghe.
