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Damme, how their gunners will gun! Oblige me by thinking of four hundred guns, pumping val-u-able shells into an empty house. "The exquisite humour of it brought us down screaming with laughter in a tangle on the slag-heap. A searchlight broke out from the back of the Hun trenches and began searching our lines.
On the same night southeast of Souchez German trenches were penetrated and twenty-one prisoners and some guns were taken. Several dugouts containing Germans were bombed and an enemy shaft was destroyed. While the British continued to make slight gains and to harass the enemy, the French were engaged in minor operations no less successful.
Here are ancient fortresses, barrows, and sepulchral mounds, earthworks, dykes, and trenches, roadways of the Roman and the Briton, and the great British stronghold, guarding the southern entrance to the plain, which became the Old Sarum of later times.
I have seen a man of indubitable Christian conviction come down from the cold clam of the trenches in mid-winter and take up a religious book which ordinarily would have excited him and say "Ah! yes, there is all that." I could almost see the surface which war had hardened over him.
An enemy aeroplane was coming! The gangs scattered like water-bugs when a stone is thrown into the water. They ran for the hill, dropped into trenches; to the beach and threw themselves flat on the sand; into the water all, as they ran, looking up over their shoulders to where, far overhead, whirred steadily nearer that tiny, terrible hawk.
The government had created a world of parasites and placemen housed in enormous hotels, where they were engaged at large salaries upon mysterious unproductive labors which seemed to have no result in front-line trenches.
Through all this distressful time the Queen and the Prince-Consort manifested the deepest sympathy for, as well as pride in, the English soldiers. They had an intense pity for the poor men in the trenches, badly clad and half starved, grand, patient, ill-used, uncomplaining fellows! "My heart bleeds to think of it," wrote the Prince, of the army administration.
The trenches had been so dug with such a regard for the slopes of the ground that in some places a triple line of fire was secured. Rows of trenches, a broadish river, fresh rows of trenches, fortified houses, and a good artillery well worked and well placed, it was a serious task which lay in front of the gallant little army. The whole position covered between four and five miles.
The front line is protected by five or six series of barbed wire, with heavy front line trenches, studded with redoubts, machine-gun positions, and underground shelters twenty feet deep, while the reserve positions extend in many places from half a mile to a mile in series behind the first line, studded with communication trenches, shelters, and bomb-proofs.
My diary of July 15 carries on: "In the evening I went on a working party with Allen. It was a case of extending the trench in Pagoda Wood another fifty yards. We set to work at 10 a.m. Our guns were bombarding the enemy trenches most of the time, but there were not many shells coming from the enemy. A few fell some hundred to two hundred yards away during the night.
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