1916
THE SALIENT TO THE SOMME
Brigadier-General G. Feilding, D.S.O., as we know,
succeeded Lord Cavan in the command of the Guards
Division, and the enemy woke up to a little more regular
shelling and sniping for a few days till (January
4) the 1st Guards Brigade was unexpectedly relieved
by a fresh brigade (the 114th), and the Battalion
moved to billets in St. Floris which, as usual, were "in
a very filthy condition." There they stayed, under
strong training at bombing and Lewis gunnery, till the
12th. Thence to Merville till the 23rd, when Lieutenant
Hon. H. B. O'Brien, a specialist in these matters,
as may have been noticed before, was appointed
Brigade Bombing Officer. The bomb was to be the
dominant factor of the day's work for the next year or
so, and the number of students made the country round
billets unwholesome and varied. There is a true tale
of a bombing school on a foggy morning who, hurling
with zeal over a bank into the mist, found themselves
presently being cursed from a safe distance by a repairing
party who had been sent out to discover why
one whole system of big-gun telephone-wires was
dumb. They complained that the school had "cut it
into vermicelli."
The instruction bore fruit; for, so soon as they were back in the trenches at Ebenezer farm, which they had quitted on the 4th, bombing seems to have been forced wherever practicable. A weak, or it might be more accurate to say, a sore point had developed on the front in a crater thrown up by one of our own mines, which it was necessary to sap out to and protect by intermittent bombing. This brought retalia-
