At that date men had learned by experience the comparative values of their flanking divisions and the battalions immediately beside them. When a local attack fell on some of these, those unaffected would rest as unconcernedly as the watch below takes its ease when the watch on deck is struggling with the squall. The syren-like hoot of the gas-horns, one or two miles off, might break their rest on relief, but the division involved being known to be adequate, the Battalion was not roused and “spent a quiet day.” Other divisions, new to the line caused anxiety and interfered with regular routine, till they had shaken into place; and yet others might be always trusted to hoot and signal for help on the least provocation. These peculiarities would be discussed in the cantonments and coffee-bars of the rest-areas, or, later, out on the roadside with an occasional far-ranging German shell to interrupt a really pleasant inter-battalion or divisional argument where, if reports be true, even the Military Police sometimes forget to be impartial. And there were unambitious, unimproving units quite content to accept anything that their predecessors had left them in the way of openwork parapets, gapped sandbags, and smashed traverses. Against these, experienced corps builded, not without ostentation, strong flanks so that if their neighbours went of a sudden, they themselves might still have a chance for their lives. The Irish had a saying of their own--a sort of lilting call that ran down the trenches at odd times--to the effect that God being in his Heaven and “the Micks in the line, all was well. Pom-pom!” Every battalion, too, had its own version of the ancient war-song which claims that they themselves were in the front line with their best friends of the moment immediately behind them, but that when they went to look for such-and-such a battalion with whom they were unfriends for the moment, they were blessed (or otherwise) if they could find them.
Theirs was the misfortune to be the only battalion of the division available for fatigues during their sixteen days’ tour; so they supplied parties without intermission, both to the trenches round Railway Wood, and in battered Ypres in the cellars where they rested by candle-light to the accompaniment of crashing masonry and flying pavement blocks. A fatigue-party, under Lieutenant T. K. Walker, carrying Engineers’ stuff to near Railway Wood, was caught and shelled on the 24th, on the last two hundred yards or so of utterly exposed duckboards, every piece of which the enemy guns had taped to a yard. The water-logged soil made any sort of trenches here out of the question. Men slid, and staggered across the open under their loads till the shells chose to find them, or they reached Railway Wood and found some cover in the mine which was always being made there and always pumped out. Lieutenant Walker and four men were killed at once and seven men were wounded, of whom two afterwards died. It was as swift as the shelling of Headquarters at Poperinghe on the 11th; and Captain Woodhouse, the M.O., had to get forward to the wreckage under a heavy fire of shells and aerial torpedoes. With, or not far from him, went, crawled, ran or floundered the priest; for if by any means the body could be relieved, repaired or eased, so could the soul. It is true that both these men more or less respected direct orders not to expose themselves too much, but they suffered from curious lapses of memory.