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The constant pup, pup, of German machine guns and an occasional rattle of rifle firing gave me the impression of a huge audience applauding the work of the batteries. Our eighteen-pounders were destroying the German barbed wire, while the heavier stuff was demolishing their trenches and bashing in dugouts or funk-holes. Then Fritz got busy.
It saved many head wounds, but did not save body wounds, and every day the casualty lists grew longer in the routine of a warfare in which there was "Nothing to report." Our men were never dry. They were wet in their trenches and wet in their dugouts.
They were not so interested in any exhibition of courage as in an encounter which had the element of sport. Each narrator invariably returned to the subject of soda water. The outstanding novelty of the charge to these men was the quantity of soda water in bottles which they had found in the German dugouts.
While men in the lines lived in dugouts and marched down communicating trenches thigh-high, after rainy weather, in mud and water, and suffered the beastliness of the primitive earth-men, those who were out of the trenches, turn and turn about, came back to leafy villages and drilled in fields all golden with buttercups, and were not too uncomfortable in spite of overcrowding in dirty barns.
There were mascots for luck, at the doorways of their dugouts a woman's face carved in chalk, the name of a girl written in pebbles, a portrait of the King in a frame of withered wild flowers. A company of our New Army boys had respected a memento of French troops who were once in this section of trenches.
On the morning of September 22, 1915, the French accelerated their long-sustained bombardment of the German positions with intense fury, continuing day and night without a break until the 25th. The direct object of this preparatory cannonade was to destroy the wire entanglements, bury the defenders in their dugouts, raze the trenches, smash the embrasures, and stop up the alleys of communication.
You see, you are "all in" after a night in the open, and all you want to do is to sleep, so you crawl into the nearest dugout and lie down; now, the rum just keeps the blood circulating and the body warm while you are sleeping, so that when you waken you have not caught the chill that otherwise yon would have done, for those dugouts of ours were anything but cozy and comfortable.
A series of big dugouts, of houses and caves with walls of sandbags, back of the first British line near Carnoy was a focus of communication trenches and the magnet to the men hastening from bullet-swept, shell-swept spaces to security. The hot breath of the firing-line had scorched them and cast them out and they came together in congestion at this clearing station like a crowd at a gate.
Its dwellings stretch away from the tents of "Caesar's Camp," where the Roman Julius lauded in 55 B. C., on the southern shores of Britain, to the far north, in the new naval institute at Invergordon, erected for the sailors of the Grand Fleet at a cost of more than $20,000. They range from the battered dugouts at the front in France to the Shakespeare hut in London, costing more than $30,000.
There was reassurance in the proximity of such good dugouts when habitable to a correspondent if shells began to fall, as well as protection for the British in reserve. Some whence came foul odors were closed by the British as the simplest form of burial for the dead within who had waited for bombs to be thrown before surrendering.
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