Also that the Supreme Command had decided it was useless to break through anywhere on a narrower front than twenty kilometres. And on this good hearing the year ’15 ended for the 2nd Battalion of the Irish Guards; the War, owing to the lack of men and material which should have been trained and prepared beforehand, having just two years, ten months, and eleven days more to run. [Illustration: _SECOND BATTALION_ _Actions & Billets._ _Emery Walker Ltd. del. et sc._] PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY EMERY WALKER LTD., LONDON 1916 SALIENT AND THE SOMME The mild and rainy weather loosed floods on all the low-lying fields round Laventie. The 2nd Guards Brigade relieved the 3rd in the Laventie sector, and the 2nd Battalion Irish Guards marched seven miles in wind and wet from La Gorgue, of the battered little church, to its old ground and old routine—first at the north end of Laventie where it took over Dead End, Picantin, and Laventie East posts, from the 4th Grenadiers; and, on the evening of the 3rd January, into the well-kept trenches beyond Red House. They relieved the 1st Coldstream here, and their leading company, in column of route behind Red House, lost six men on the road from a savage, well-timed burst of H.E. One man had an extraordinary double escape. A fragment of shell first hit his ammunition which exploded, leaving him, for some absurd reason, unhurt. Even as he was trying to find out what had happened, a big shell dove directly under his feet, and, as he said, if it had burst “they wouldn’t have found the nails to my boots.” But it plumped harmlessly in the muddy ground. The same kind Providence looked after the orderly-room kitten. Her faithful orderly was carrying the little lady up to war on rats, when two blind shells pitched, one on each side of him. An unexpected diversion turned up in the front line in the shape of a cinema operator who unlimbered his camera on the parapet behind the sand-bags and took pictures of our guns shelling enemy wire a hundred yards ahead. Then he demanded “scenes in the trenches,” which were supplied him, with all the Irish sense of drama, but, as local opinion thought, a little too much “arranged.” Notably one picture of a soldier tending a grave. An officer correspondent writes grimly, “We have quite enough work digging graves to mind about tending them.” The film duly appeared in the halls and revues, sometimes before the eyes of those who would never again behold in life one particular face there.