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"Come on!" exclaimed Joe, starting down the slope that led across the bullet-scarred and shell-pitted ground. "Where are you going?" asked Charles Anderson. "Across No Man's Land," answered Joe grimly. "I'm going to see if we can get back those stolen army films. If they were ours, I wouldn't be so anxious about them. But they belong to Uncle Sam.
The day rolled by smoothly enough. Except for the fresh graves and a certain number of unburied dead the small-pox appearance of the shell-pitted ground about might have been thought to have been of ancient origin; so filled with water were the shell holes and so large had they grown as a result of the constant sloughing in of their sodden banks.
The greatest secrecy was observed, and nobody but the guides knew our destination, and we followed them in silence up the shell-pitted road and across the pontoon bridge that spanned the Yser Canal. Various dark forms hobbled past, their baggy trousers showing them to be Algerians.
I said farewell all around, and wished good luck to that brave battery, so cunningly hidden away in its pit. There was a great deal of cheery shouting and waving of hands as we went off. And in two minutes the battery was out of sight even though we knew exactly where it was! We made our way slowly back, through the lengthening shadows, over the shell-pitted ground.
"Enormous masses of ammunition, the like of which no mortal mind before the war had conceived, were hurled against human beings who lay, eking out but a bare existence, scattered in shell-holes that were deep in slime. The terror of it surpassed even that of the shell-pitted field before Verdun. This was not life; it was agony unspeakable.
We groped about the wretched shell-pitted fields, examining the trenches we were about to take over. You would be surprised to find how difficult a simple line of trenches can seem at night if you have never seen them before. You don't seem able to get the angles, somehow, nor to grasp how the whole situation faces, or how you get from one part to another, and all that sort of thing.
In the battered and shell-pitted region to the northwest of Pozières fighting between the British and German troops continued unceasingly. A great part of it could be reached by machine guns, while German batteries at Courcelette and Grandcourt commanded the ground at close range. A network of German trenches, well planned, stretched in almost every direction.
The next day's march we regarded as our first in the advance into Germany to which we had so long looked forward. We found the great Verdun highway which had played such an important part in the defense that broke the back of the Hun to be in excellent shape and a pleasant change from the shell-pitted roads to which we had become accustomed.
"'Go on go back to your own trenches, as you are! they said. "The laddies of the Black Watch could scarcely believe their ears. There was about seventy-five yards between the two trench lines at that point, and the No Man's Land was rough going all shell-pitted as it was. By that time, too, of course, German repair parties had mended all the wire before their trenches.
In the deep dugouts small sheet-iron stoves were burning, giving out a little heat and a great deal of choking smoke. The soldiers sat around them playing cards or telling stories. But there! What I saw in that shell-pitted, snow-covered, hard-frozen amphitheatre of heroism cannot be described in these brief paragraphs.
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