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I left my camera under cover of a fallen tree trunk and crossed to a covered shell-hole which answered to the name of dug-out. Anyway, apart from shrapnel or a direct hit from an H.E., we were comparatively safe, being below ground level. Along the centre was a rough plank on two boxes and grouped either side were several other officers of the battery.
I think of a gallant boy lying out all night with a broken thigh in a shell-hole amid the mud and under the rain of Flanders. Kind hands come with the morning and carry him to the advanced dressing station. There is still hope. But miles of mud and broken ground lie between him and the nearest hospital. Immediate warmth and rest and nursing might have saved him. But they are unattainable.
So the gallery had to be driven carefully at a level below the danger of exposure through a shell-hole and above the depth at which the water lay.
We lunched in the hotel before the cathedral, where each shell-hole has an ordinary white label stuck beside it with the date. The landlord remarked: "If you sit here long enough, and have the good luck to be in some safe part of the building, you may be able to go and stick a label by a hole yourself." After lunch we went out to the Château Polignac.
"What matters a shell-hole through my walls and my torn roof!" said a Lorraine farmer. "Work will make my house whole. But nothing could ever have made my heart and soul whole while the Germans remained. I saw them go, monsieur; they left us ruins, but France is ours!"
Without a moment's hesitation, Nigg hurled a Mills grenade straight through the loophole, and then with one wild screech of "Come away, boys!" took a flying leap over the parapet and landed in his own trench, in the arms of Corporal Mucklewame. As already noted, it is difficult, when lying curled up in a circular shell-hole in the dark, to maintain a true sense of direction.
I am wondering whether you can be the same Tom Slade who was in the Motorcycle Corps in France? If so, perhaps you will remember the soldier who spent the night with you in a shell-hole near Epernay. Do you remember showing me the Gold Cross and saying that you had won it while a scout in America? I think you said you had been in some Jersey Troop.
Every careen of the ambulance over cobble and into shell-hole was a thrust into his hurt. We had to carry him all the way from the Nieuport cellar to Zuydcoote Hospital, ten miles. The driver was one more of the American young men who have gone over into France to pay back a little of what we owe her.
"I think he's in a house over there ... might be a target for you ... bullets have been coming from that way every now and again for two days.... I'll show you, if you like, sir." The major and the colonel crept out on top of the bank, and made for a shell-hole forty yards in front. I followed them.
"Every Boche gun for miles round seemed to be pulverising that awful bit," "Buller," who had gone forward to observe, told me afterwards. "My two telephonists hid behind a brick wall that received two direct hits, and I lay for a quarter of an hour in a shell-hole without daring to move.
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