because the Thirty-eighth Division on the Guards' right was being relieved that night by the Twentieth. As a side-issue of the fight the Battalion on their left was attacked, which, so far as the Irish Guards were concerned, meant that the left company (No. 2) swiftly manufactured a fresh post on their left to improve communication with their neighbours, and prevent the enemy working round their flank through the remnants of a wood. In this work they had to disperse with rifle-fire several parties of the enemy who might have interfered with their arrangements, and Captain T. F. MacMahon was wounded. This bald record covers a long, tense night of alarms and fatigues, and fatigue-parties dropping like partridges where the barrage found them, to creep forward as soon as it was lifted; and, somewhere on the left, the crackle and blaze of an attack on a battalion which was entirely capable of taking care of itself.
Their relief on the night of the 13th by the 1st Scots Guards was "very much delayed." Two detachments got lost, one through the guide being killed and the other "through the guide losing himself." Yet it was a very dark, and, therefore, theoretically a safe, night, with very little shelling—proof of the utter uncertainty of every detail connected with war.
They had lost in that fortnight one officer (2nd Lieutenant Boyd) and fourteen men killed; one officer (Captain T. F. MacMahon) and seventy-eight other ranks wounded. For the rest of the month they were training in camps—Cariboo and Poll Hill—of which the former was not out of reach of shell-fire, and studied new methods of attack to combat the enemy's new methods of defence in his protected and fortified shell-holes. These he now held in depth, one shell-hole post covering or flanking the next, so that men fought their way up a landscape of miniature redoubts, invisible to guns, almost invisible to aeroplanes, and much more expensive to reduce than the narrow-slotted pill-boxes.
On the 21st September their Brigadier-General Jeffreys saw the Battalion on parade, near Proven, and
