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We were ferried across on the usual balsa, a platform on three dugouts, running by the force of the current on a wire trolley. There was a clearing on each side with a few palms, and on the farther bank were the buildings of the telegraph station.
That night we were relieved, and utterly exhausted we stumbled our way back through the shell fire to Neuville St. Vaast. Once there, we got some hot grub from our cooks and a big drink of rum, and we turned into our dugouts, but now that the strain was over I couldn't sleep and I shook like a leaf.
The village was now a mass of rubble, but amid the ruins the Germans had fortified almost every yard of ground, there were deep and carefully prepared dugouts, cunningly concealed machine-gun emplacements, and lines of covered trenches on every hand. The British forces began the movement about midnight, delivering the assault from two sides.
An army of movement Taking over the captured space At Minden Post, a crossroads of battle German prisoners Their desire to live Their variety The ambulance line The refuse from the hopper of battle Resting in the battle line Reminiscences of the fighters A mighty crater The dugouts around Fricourt Method of taking a dugout The litter over the field.
Hours later, when our battalions had stormed their way up other trenches into a salient jutting out of the German line and beyond the boundary of the objective that had been given to them, other living men were found to be still hiding in the depths of other dugouts and could not be induced to come out.
Only here and there groups of Germans served their machine-guns to the death. Most of the living were stupefied amid their dead in the upheaved trenches, slashed woods, and deepest dugouts. I walked to the edge of the mine-craters and stared into their great gulfs, wondering how many German bodies had been engulfed there.
It is sent over in exploding shells, and sinks in a heavy invisible vapor about the sleeping men, creeping into their dugouts and trenches or enveloping them around the guns or in the shell holes. The effects do not manifest themselves for several hours. With stinging pain the man's eyes begin to close, and for a time he may go almost blind. He is then taken violently sick.
Every sector of the railroad front was made practically impregnable to infantry attack by the energetic work of "A" and "B" Company engineers and the Pioneer platoon of Headquarters Company. And the dugouts which they constructed at Verst 445 proved during the intermittent artillery shelling of January-March to be proof against the biggest H. E. the Bolo threw.
The Siegfried division holding the new German line of defense was busy during the last days of March, 1917, in building concrete emplacements, trenches, and dugouts. On April 1, 1917, the British troops were within three miles of St. Quentin, while the French threatened the place from the south.
We were grateful to be away for a short time from the devastating fire that the Huns were pouring into our front line trenches in an endeavor to check a further penetration into their lines, but we were still under shell fire. We were taken a short distance to the rear, where we were billeted in German dugouts. The day before these had been occupied by German officers.
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