On the 3rd April, after an untouched turn of duty, eight men were wounded by blind fire during the relief.
At Poperinghe, on April 4, they were billeted in the Convent which supplied them with variety entertainments, cinemas, band concerts, and performing troupes, all liable at any moment to be dispersed by the enemy’s artillery or ’planes and therefore doubly precious. The Battalion had its share of professional honour, too, in a matter of ceremonial. As regards the outside world the Brigade of Guards is one; as regards the various battalions of it, there are allowable internal differences of opinion. Consequently when a Russian General, late Chief of the Staff to the Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia, visited Poperinghe, and the 1st Battalion of the Irish Guards--out of five Guards Battalions within reach--was chosen as the one for him to inspect, life smiled upon them, and they rose to the occasion. Hear the words of an observer, experienced, if not altogether disinterested: “The day (April 5) was lovely, and our fellows, in spite of their months of trench-work, did magnificently. The wonderful precision of their drill excited the admiration even of officers belonging to some of the other regiments. The Huns missed a grand opportunity.”
The Huns had their revenge a few days later when the Battalion’s billets and Headquarters at Poperinghe were suddenly, on April 11, shelled just as the Battalion was going into line at Ypres. The thing began almost with a jest. The Regimental Chaplain was taking confessions, as is usual before going up, in Poperinghe Church, when the building rocked to bursts of big stuff obviously drawing nearer. He turned to open the confessional-slide, and smelt gas--chlorine beyond doubt. While he groped wildly for his gas-helmet in the dusk, the penitent reassured him: “It’s all right, Father. I’ve been to Divisional Gas School to-day. That smell’s off my clothes.” Relieved, the Padre went on with his duties to an accompaniment of glass falling from the windows, and when he came out, found the porch filled with a small crowd who reported: “Lots of men hit in an ambulance down the road.” Thither ran the Padre to meet a man crazy with terror whom a shell-burst had flung across the street, half-stripped and blackened from head to foot. He was given Absolution, became all of a sudden vehemently sick, and dropped into stupor. Next, on a stretcher, an Irish Guardsman crushed by a fallen wall, reported for the moment as “not serious.” As the priest turned to go, for more wounded men were being borne up through the dusk, the lad was retaken by a violent hæmorrhage. Supreme Unction at once was his need. Captain Woodhouse, R.A.M.C., the regimental doctor, appeared out of the darkness, wounded in the arm and shoulder, his uniform nearly ripped off him and very busy. He had been attending a wounded man in a house near headquarters when a shell burst at the door, mortally wounded the patient, killed one stretcher-bearer outright and seriously wounded two others. The Padre, dodging shells _en route_, dived into the cellars of the house where he was billeted for the Sacred Elements, went back to the wayside dressing-station, found a man of the Buffs, unconscious, but evidently a Catholic (for he carried a scapular sewed in his tunic), anointed him, and--the visitation having passed like a thunder-storm--trudged into Ypres unworried by anything worse than casual machine-gun fire, and set himself to find some sufficiently large sound cellar for Battalion Mass next morning. The Battalion followed a little later and went underground in Ypres--Headquarters and a company in the Carmelite Convent, two companies in the solid brick and earth ramparts that endure to this day, and one in the cellars of the Rue de Malines.