Yet, as things went in the Salient, it was, like their reserve camp, “not too uncomfortable.” Though there was only one workable communication-trench (The Haymarket) to their line, and that a bad one, the main St. Jean road could be used after dark at reasonable risks. No work was possible by daylight, but, except for general and indiscriminate shelling, they lived quietly, even when, as happened on the first night (March 23), No. 1 Company and Headquarters were solemnly misguided down the Menin road in the dark _over_ Hell Fire Corner to within a few hundred yards of Hooge and returned “without even being fired at.” The regimental transport, too, managed to come up as far as Potijze with supplies, on three of the four nights of the Battalion’s first tour, and had no casualties, “though the woods were regularly shelled.” This was an extraordinary stroke of luck for the Battalion since other transports had suffered severely.
The outstanding wonder that any one in the Salient should be alive at all, is not referred to in the Diary. Men who watched the shape of that cape of death, raken by incessant aeroplanes and cross-cut by gun-fire that fell equally from the flanks and, as it seemed, the very rear, sometimes speculated, as did the French in the livelier hells of Verdun, how long solid earth itself could hold out against the upheavals of the attack. Flesh and blood could endure--that was their business--but the ground on which they stood did not abide. As one man said: “It ’ud flee away in lumps under the sole of your foot, till there was no rest anywhere.”
Their first four days’ tour saw three men killed in the line by a single whizz-bang in a dug-out; one wounded, and an officer, Lieutenant R. J. P. Rodakowski, slightly hit by a piece of shrapnel. They buried their dead by night at Potijze. Reliefs were the real difficulty; for the line and the roads were continuously shelled, and at any moment in the dusk they might find their only sound communication-trench impassable. They watched it go up from end to end, one dreadful night on the 29th of March, when they were in support and the Grenadiers in the line, and the King’s Company was wiped out almost to a man. It was a prelude to an attack that never arrived--a suddenly launched, suddenly arrested, wantonness of destruction. Coming, going, standing, or sitting still gave no minute of guaranteed safety. A party returning from home-leave were caught by a single shell in the streets of Ypres on April 2. Sergeant-Major Kirk and a private were killed, and an N.C.O. and three men were wounded. Men dropped, too, almost in the hour when they took their leave. They worked up the line of nights, half the shift at a time repairing damage, and the remainder standing by for attacks.