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A man has to be hardened to shell-fire before he is of any value as a fighter, and these deep dugouts take men out of reach of most of the shells, and when they come in the open again they have to be hardened anew.
Red slugs crawled up the sides of the trenches, and queer beetles with dangerous-looking horns wriggled along dry ledges and invaded the dugouts in search of the vermin which infested them. "Rats are the worst plague," said a colonel, coming out of the battalion headquarters, where he had a hole large enough for a bed and table.
Long and narrow dugouts, as light and swift as the string-test gigs of civilisation, paddled or poled, were gliding with extraordinary speed down the channel near the bank. Riding then a little way, we dismounted under a magnificent banyan tree, one of the finest specimens, I should think, in the world. Ponies and men were dwarfed into Lilliputians under the amazing canopy of its branches.
In each traverse two of the older men had been put on guard with their heads sticking over the top, and with their eyes trying to pierce the blackness in "No Man's Land." In this trench there were only two dugouts, and these were used by Lewis and Vickers, machine gunners, so it was the fire step for ours. Pretty soon it started to rain. We put on our "macks," but they were not much protection.
All through the devastated region one walked with an uncanny feeling of an evil spirit left behind by masses of men whose bodies had gone away. It exuded from scraps of old clothing, it was in the stench of the dugouts and in the ruins they had made. In some few villages there were living people left behind, some hundreds in Nesle and Roye, and, all told, some thousands.
None of us can forget the horrors of the night." Heavy rain fell and the dugouts became wet and filthy. "Our sleeping-places were full of water. We had to try and bail out the trenches with cooking-dishes. I lay down in the water with G-. We were to have worked on dugouts, but not a soul could do any more. Only a few sections got coffee. Mine got nothing at all.
They are mighty angry but I don't care for their anger now, for by sinking their praus I have made them as harmless as a flock of lambs. They needn't starve on their sandbank because they have two or three dugouts hauled up on the sand and they may ferry themselves and their women to the mainland whenever they like. I fancy I have acted as a seaman and as a seaman I intend to go on acting.
"W'y it would mean that this girl o' mine, that's fit for to be wal, you know Josie would hev to leave this home we've built that she's built here, an' go out where there hain't nobody to be seen from week's end to week's end but cowboys, an' once in a while one o' the greasy women o' the dugouts.
So Hill 70 was quiet, except for spasms of machine-gun fire from the redoubt on the German side of the slope and the bombing of German dugouts, or the bayoneting of single men routed out from holes in the earth. One of our men came face to face with four Germans, two of whom were armed with rifles and two with bombs.
To take poplar was our backwoods expression for embarking in a canoe, the dugouts being fashioned from the great poplar trees. I did not reflect then, as I have since and often, how great was the knowledge and resource Tom practised that day. In company ill at ease, in the forest he became silent and masterful an unerring woodsman, capable of meeting the Indian on his own footing.
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