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. THIRD YPRES AND THE BROEMBEEK On August 1 Lieutenant the Hon. P. J. Ogilvy joined the Battalion and took over No. 1 Company from Acting Captain W. C. Mumford, who had been appointed Town Major of the busy and occasionally battered town of Elverdinghe; and Lieutenant E. Budd took over the 4th Company from Acting Captain H. F. d’A. S. Law, wounded. On the 15th August, the eve of the Langemarck attack, they were put on one hour’s notice, which was withdrawn the next day, when six divisions (the Forty-eighth, Eleventh, Fifty-sixth, Eighth, Twentieth and Twenty-ninth) struck again along the line from the Menin road to our junction with the French in the north. The weather once more blinded our aeroplanes so that our artillery could not deal effectively with the counter-attacks; the pill-boxes held up our infantry, and though prisoners, guns, and a little ground round Langemarck were gained, the line of the Salient from St. Julien southwards stood as it had since the first. The Battalion was peacefully at bomb-practice on that day, and by some oversight a live bomb got mixed up with the dummies, and caused thirteen casualties, luckily none of them very serious, and the training went forward. As the crops were cut ground was gradually extended and every one was worked hard at practice attacks; for they understood that their lot would be cast in the Salient for some time.