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Each platoon spent 24 hours in the line with a platoon either of the Essex Regt., King's Own or Lancashire Fusiliers, who were holding the sector from "Plugstreet" to Le Touquet Station. It was a quiet sector except for rifle fire at night, and it was very bad luck that during our first few hours in trenches we lost 2nd Lieut. G. Aked, who was killed by a stray bullet in the front line.
"Plugstreet" was an easy place to approach since the woods prevented observation and motor cars could get right up into the woods itself.
Annoying, but I suppose one can't expect Generals to tell you where they are going to stand. We reached Neuve Eglise in time, and went into our old billets. We all thought our fate was "back into those old Plugstreet trenches again," but mirabile dictu it was not to be so. The second day in billets I received a message from the Colonel to proceed to his headquarter farm.
These were, as a rule, converted into redoubts or "strong-points," and defended by both infantry and machine guns. To the northward, within the German lines, was the town of Wytschaete, while we had Mont Kemmel, a prominent hill which gave our artillery good observation all the way from Ypres to "Plugstreet."
Here the men are supposed to prefer their comfortable trenches to their billets, though when they "come out" they are cheered by the Follies and the Fancies. On this section of the line is the notorious Plugstreet Wood, that show-place to which all distinguished but valuable visitors are taken. Other corps have sighed for the gentle delights of this section of the line....
You remember how the two ridges used to look down into our lines at Wipers and Plugstreet? And now we're on top of both of them! Some of our friends out there the friends who are not coming back would have liked to know about that, Bobby. I wish they could, somehow." "Perhaps they do," said Bobby simply. It was close on midnight.
A few days later, as I happened to be passing through poor, shattered Plugstreet Wood, I came across a clearance 'midst the trees. Two rows of long, brown mounds of earth, each surmounted by a rough, simple wooden cross, was all that was inside the clearing. I stopped, and looked, and thought then went away.
Weird noises occasionally floated through the trees; the faint "crack" of a rifle, or the rumble of limber wheels. A distant light flickered momentarily in the air, cutting out in bold relief the ruins of the shattered chateau on our left. On we went through this scene of dark and humid desolation, past the occasional mounds of former habitations, on into the trenches before Plugstreet Wood.
The Battalion, for the most part, relieved itself as at Plugstreet, but had no fixed dwelling-place, sometimes extending as far to the right as Trench Bugeaud, half way up the north slope of the hill of Serre, where the ground was littered with the debris and decomposing bodies of the June fighting, sometimes as far to the left as Trench Morand, about 300 yards north of where the Bucquoy road crossed the trenches.
Hither, mud-splashed, ragged, hollow-cheeked, came our battalion they call us the Seventh Hairy Jocks nowadays after four months' continuous employment in the firing-line. Ypres was a household word to them; Plugstreet was familiar ground; Givenchy they knew intimately; Loos was their wash-pot or rather, a collection of wash-pots, for in winter all the shell-craters are full to overflowing.
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