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And everywhere along its length I noticed the bodies of our dead built into it to replace sandbags while others lay on the parados at the rear. It was not nice. The faces of men we had known and had called comrade looked at us now in ghastly disarray from odd sections of both walls. Already they were taking a brick-like shape from the weight of the filled bags on top of them.
The sight of the tips of the glittering bayonets was too much for their courage. Their fire ceased; they turned and scurried over the parados, followed by bullets from the Haussas and met by bullets from their German task-masters, who had taken the precaution of stiffening their native levies with a lead ration should they show signs of weakening.
Our revetting material was matting on wooden frames, and these had to be anchored back to stakes driven in deep down, six feet clear of the parapet or parados, so that to produce a trench you had to take out six feet of sand extra on either side, hammer in your stakes and attach your anchoring wires to the matting and then fill in the whole again.
I saw this lot submerged in the spout of smoke and dust but did not see how many if any were hit, as the sound of a machine gun drew my attention across the dead grass of the old No Man's Land to the German I should say the former German first-line trench where an Englishman had his machine gun on the parados and was sweeping the field across to the German second-line trench.
Behind these posts was a semi-continuous support line, and half a mile farther back a continuous main line, fairly well complete as to wire and parapet, but hardly anything in the way of parados, so there was plenty of work for everyone. Battalion H.Q. were at Carvin Farm.
Other young Scottish officers came up and shook hands, and said: "Jolly weather, isn't it? What do you think of our little show?" Not one of them gave a glance at the line of dead men over there, behind their parados. They told me some of the funny things that had happened lately in the battalion, some grim jokes by tough Jocks. They had a fine crowd of men. You couldn't beat them.
The parapet was piled high with bags of sand through which loop-holes had been cunningly contrived for the French sentries who must watch through the night for signs of Hun activity. Over the rear wall of the trench was another built-up wall of sand-bags. This parados, as it was called, is intended to give protection against shrapnel, which often burst just after passing over a trench.
I was standing on a slight elevation at the back, or parados, of the trench, so that I was raised a bit above my audience, and I had a fine view of that deadly thing, wandering about, spitting fire and metal parts. It traveled so that the men could dodge it, but it was throwing oft slugs that you could neither see nor dodge, and it was a poor place to be!
Then-comrades have carefully placed them out of the passage-way.... There they are poor sentinels, whom we leave behind us, in a line on the parados, in their blood-stained uniforms solemn and terrible guardians of this fragment of French soil, which still in death they seem to be holding against the enemy." But the enemy advances inexorably, and within the fort the dead and dying multiply.
"Wounded men, including their commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Boyle, lay everywhere about the trench and parados, but they were too weak to attack this short piece of trench, although it was rendering their position quite untenable. "One of our platoons successfully attacked this trench, while another under Mr.
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