"Rolling on in a broad wave of shouting, angry men, they never winced from the fire until they swept up to the bank of the river. Northern Inniskillings and Southern men of Connaught, orange and green, Protestant and Catholic, Celt and Saxon, their only rivalry now was who could shed his blood most freely for the common cause. How hateful those provincial politics and narrow sectarian creeds which can hold such men apart!" On July 1 the Ulster Division won immortal renown on the Somme. It was now the turn of the Irish Brigade to uphold the martial fame of the race on the same stricken field. They were done with trench raids for a while, and in for very big fighting. CHAPTER XI STORMING OF GUILLAMONT BY THE IRISH BRIGADE RAISING THE GREEN FLAG IN THE CENTRE OF THE VILLAGE At the end of August the Irish Brigade was ordered to the Somme. The civil authorities of the district, headed by the mayor and cure, called upon General Hickie to express their appreciation of the good conduct and religious devotion of his troops. The General was a proud man that day. Nothing pleased him more than praise of his soldiers. In return, they gloried in him. As an example of his fatherly solicitude for them, he had established a divisional laundry under the care of the nuns, in which 25,000 shirts a week and 5000 pairs of socks per day are washed for them, and every day's rations sent to the men in the trenches was accompanied by a dry pair of socks. The result was that "trench feet"--feet benumbed with the cold and the wet--were almost unknown in the Division. He also provided for a thousand baths a day being given to his men in a specially constructed bath-house.