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I can repeat from memory that pre-trench speech of his. "Boys," the captain's voice was solemnity itself. "Boys, to-night we are going into the front line trenches. We are going in with soldiers of the regular Imperial Army. We are going in with seasoned troops. We are going in alongside men who have fought out here for weeks. We've got to be very careful, boys."
These small shells were fired from light field-guns that had been brought up to the trenches, and were in consequence so close that the shell arrived and burst almost simultaneously with the report of the gun. Shells fired at the ordinary ranges announce their coming by a prolonged whirr, allowing a certain amount of time to get under cover before the burst comes.
"The usual work. Only the usual work," the officer explained. "Sometimes it is here. Sometimes above or below us. I have been here since May." A little sunshine flooded the stricken landscape and made its chemical yellow look more foul. A detachment of men moved out on a road which ran toward the French trenches, and then vanished at the foot of a little rise.
The lightning flashed, the thunder roared, and the rain came down in torrents, compelling us to make trenches round our huts. Even when doing this, we were nearly wet to the skin. Our fires also were almost extinguished, though we contrived to keep them in by heaping up fresh fuel every few minutes.
Breakfast comes at nine in the morning. I was invited to help eat the chicken and to spend the night. Now, the general commanding the brigade who accompanied me to the trenches had been hit twice. So had the colonel, a man about forty. From forty, ages among the regimental officers dropped into the twenties.
The guns were to cover the various attacks, and if possible gain a position from which the trenches might be enfiladed. This, simply stated, was the work which lay before the British army. In the bright clear morning sunshine, under a cloudless blue sky, they advanced with high hopes to the assault.
They filed away up the dusty, sun-scorched sap, through narrow communication trenches, bringing forth disgusted curses from the dwellers therein, whose cooking and living arrangements were suspended during their passage; and settled finally in an advanced sap leading out towards the enemy lines. It was deep and narrow and had no conveniences either for comfort or fighting.
The Austrian attacking force and the Montenegrin center had come in contact long before the king had made his other moves, but there was no doubt in Nicholas' mind that his sturdy mountaineers could hold their trenches against larger numbers of the enemy. One, two, three times the Austrians charged the trenches in the Montenegrin center. Three times they were driven back with terrible losses.
The flag that greets his eye and the music that beats upon his ear, the personal contact of his fellows upon the march and in the trenches, the medals and monuments that embody a nation's applause and gratitude all these things, with however high an admixture of spiritual elements, are still fundamentally "of the earth, earthy."
The Turk was extremely active in No Man's Land, and while our last encounter had made him appreciate he was not going to have it all his own way in his midnight strolls, and while he apparently agreed to keep some 800 yards from our line, still beyond that point he considered the land was his preserve, and there he kept every night large floating patrols and maintained a garrison in the old British trenches, and he was most determined that we should not visit him.
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