The country round this part is very low-lying, intersected with ditches with pollarded willows growing on their banks. No sooner is a trench dug than it fills with water.... The soil is clay, and so keeps the water from draining away even if that were possible. In order to keep the men at all dry, they have to stand on planks rested on logs in the trenches, and in the less wet places bundles of straw and short fascines are put down. Pumping has been tried, but not with much success. The weather continues wet, and there does not seem to be any likelihood of a change. Consequently, we may expect some fresh discomforts daily.
They were not disappointed. New Year’s Day was marked by the flooding out of a section of forward trenches, and by experiments with a trench-mortar, from which 2nd Lieutenant Keating and some Garrison gunners threw three bombs at an enemy digging-party a couple of hundred yards away. This is the first reference to our use of trench-mortars in the young campaign. The enemy retaliated next day by bombing from their real trench-mortars, at a distance of seven hundred yards, the small farm-house where Battalion Headquarters lay. The bombs could be seen “coming at a very steep angle, but the house was only once hit.” Daylight showed the work of the Irish trench-mortar to have been so good--it had blown a gap in the German trench--that they continued it and inflicted and observed much damage.
They were relieved on the 3rd January by the King’s Royal Rifles and got to billets near Vieille Chapelle late that night. A London Gazette announced that the Distinguished Conduct Medal had been awarded No. 2535 Sergeant C. Harradine; No. 1664 Corporal C. Moran; No. 4015 Private W. Moore (since killed in action); No. 2853 Lance-Corporal W. Delaney. Also “the new decoration called the Military Cross” had been awarded to Lieutenant the Hon. H. W. Gough.
The Battalion, as a whole, had its reward for the past ten days when the Brigadier expressed his approval of the work of the Guards Brigade “and especially that of the Irish Guards.”
Cleaning and refit, classes in bomb-throwing (both by hand and from rifles) under the Engineers and an elementary machine-gun class under 2nd Lieutenant Straker, filled in the week; but the most appreciated boon at Vieille Chapelle was some huge tubs in which the men could be boiled clean. Father Gwynne held service in the roofless shell-wrecked church, long since wiped out.