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Trap-doors in the wooden floors and "funk-holes" down below showed how he feared our night-bombers. Jagged holes in the semicircular iron roofing proved the wisdom of his precautions. By half-past eight a German 5·9 was planking shells over the camp, near enough for flying fragments to rattle against the roof and walls of the huts. Fifty rounds were fired in twenty minutes.
And it sticks alike to the just and the unjust; while the world looks on and sneers; and over the water, the men look on and die." George Smallwood was pushing back his chair. "Come on, you fellows. The Cuthberts will advance from their funk-holes." . . . He led the way towards the door, and Vane rose. "Don't pay any attention to what I've been saying, Jimmy." The lawyer was strolling beside him.
At half-past two on the morning of 9th February, night was rent by the sudden glare of a search-light from Bulwaan, and soon came the scream of shells hurtling over the town. It was the Boer pæan of victory, and it sent the people hurrying to their underground refuges, to which the unco' guid had given the name of "funk-holes," but did no damage. Its purport was half-divined by the defenders.
At 7 o'clock the battalion fell in to move up to the front line and dig some trenches. Hardly were we formed up when another violent shelling started, and we hurried back to the cover of our funk-holes. Again the shelling was singularly ineffective, due, probably, to the fact that the enemy was using high explosive and not shrapnel.
The airmen disappeared in a southerly direction, still fighting until the sharp cracks of the guns droned away in the distance. In a few minutes I came in full view of one of our strong points in the shape of a disused quarry. Around the inner lip our Tommies had made a series of funk-holes, which looked quite picturesque in the bright sunlight.
Whilst sitting in these funk-holes, as we used to call them at Ladysmith, General Gouraud ran the gauntlet and made also a slow and dignified entry. He was coming back with me to Imbros. As it was getting late we hardened our hearts to walk across the open country between Headquarters and the beach, where every twenty seconds or so a big fellow was raising Cain.
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.
The Huns scurried to their funk-holes and craters, their hiding-places, and their trenches like so many rabbits. Still the Tank advanced, pausing now and then, astride a particularly wide crater, and sweeping the surrounding pit-scarred ground with its machine-guns. Up popped a German head. Zip went a bullet; and down went the head for the last time.
We would not allow our men to use these deep dugouts as nothing so conduces to bad morale. Once men get deep down out of range of the shells they are very, very reluctant to leave their "funk-holes."
Many of them were six feet wide and from twenty to thirty feet long, and quite palaces compared to the wretched little "funk-holes" to which we had been accustomed. They were roofed with logs a foot or more in diameter placed close together and one on top of the other in tiers of three, with a covering of earth three or four feet thick.
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