The system of the Guards’ company training always allowed large latitude to company officers as long as required results were obtained; and they fell back on it when bombers and Lewis-gun teams were permanently added to the organization. With the reservation that bombing-practice with live bombs was only to take place under the battalion bombing officer, company commanders were made entirely responsible for the training both of their bombers and Lewis-gunners. It made an almost immediate difference in the handiness and suppleness of the teams, and woke up inter-company competition. The teams, it may have been pointed out, were surprisingly keen and intelligent. One officer, finding a nucleus of ex-taxi drivers among his drafts, treated the Lewis-gun as a simple internal-combustion engine, which simile they caught on to at once and conveyed it in their own words and gestures to their slower comrades. On the 12th December, the Battalion was paraded while the C.O. presented the ribbon of the D.C.M. to Lance-Corporal Quinn for gallantry in Chalk-Pit Wood at the battle of Loos, that now seemed to all of them a century distant. On the 14th they moved to a more southerly sector to take over from the Welsh Guards, and to pick up a company of the 13th R.W. Fusiliers; one platoon being attached to each company for instruction, and the Fusiliers B.H.Q. messing with their own. There is no record what the Welshmen thought of their instructors or they of them, except the fragment of a tale of trench-fatigues during which, to the deep disgust of the Irish, who are not loudly vocal by temperament, “the little fellas sang like canary-birds.” Their new lines, reached across mud, from Pont du Hem, were the old, well-known, and not so badly looked-after stretch from North Moated Grange Street to Erith Street at the lower end of the endless Tilleloy Road which faced south-easterly towards the Aubers Ridge, then held by the enemy. The relief was finished without demonstrations beyond a few shrapnel launched at one of the posts, Fort Erith. On the 15th 2nd Lieutenant Brew went out with a patrol to investigate some mine-craters in front of the German firing-line and found them empty, but woke up an enemy machine-gun in the background. Other patrols reported like slackness, but when they tried to take advantage of it, they met the same gun awake, and came home upon their bellies. The ground being so flat, however, the German machines could not get well down to their work of shaving the landscape, and fifteen inches will clear a prostrate man if he lies close. A snipers’ team had been organised, and the deep peace of that age may be seen from the fact that, at the end of a quiet day, the only claim put in was for “one victim who was passing a gap between two mine-craters.”