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Updated: June 14, 2025
They told me to go back to the support-trenches for tea; about three hundred yards, and the communication-trench that I had to travel down was as unhealthy as any place I have ever been in. I was told the reason the enemy had its range so accurately was that it was of their own building.
After about five miles of this, on stepping through a hedge we suddenly found ourselves in a communication-trench. This trench was not very deep, and a tall man's head would project over the top. It was surprising how many of us thought we were six-footers and acquired a stoop, lest the tops of our hats show.
We have lost lots of people because we have been so slow—we have lost them, you and I, but we are learning sense in these days, and the Y.M.C.A. has come to the help of the Churches, to be the communication-trench between the Churches and the people. It is doing magnificent work. As I write these lines I think of one dear boy, a young sergeant, a Public-School boy. I had watched him grow up.
You are always nervous the first time in a new trench, as you do not know the danger-spots and are not even quite sure in which direction the enemy lies, for the communication-trench zigzags so. However, you generally acquire a bravado which you do not feel, for you see the old residents walking unconcernedly about, and you dare not let them see your nervousness.
They would not go down into the communication-trench or shell-holes because they thought it would be too rough on me, and so carried me over the exposed ground; and when they got me to the dressing-station they said: "You will come back to us, sir, won't you?" I said: "Yes, boys, you bet I will!" And you may bet that I shall, as soon as ever I am passed as fit again.
My guides naturally took me up a communication-trench, named "Fleet Street," where one was always up to one's knees in water and sometimes over them. They brought me back, however, by Drury Lane, which was a somewhat drier street, also appropriate to The Spectator.
He sees again the listening post where he spent the night, in advance of all his comrades. He sees again the narrow doorway bordered by sandbags through which he came out at dawn to breathe the cold air and look at the sky from the bottom of the communication-trench. All was quiet, and the early summer morning was sweet even in the depths of the trench.
Gaps were torn in the communication-trench behind us, and shells were falling so thick when we turned into the trench that we soon saw we had not chosen a favorable time to "talk dispositions" with the battalion in the line.
Not only the passage of time produces this effect; the telephone-wire running along miles of communication-trench, the elaborateness of the fighting trenches, the established routine and regularity of existence all these also contribute to it. But the air of permanency is fallacious. The Germans are in France.
It killed six of the boys, all my friends, and buried me under the dirt that fell from the parapet back of me. I had sense and strength enough to dig myself out. When I got out I was kind of dazed. The captain told me to go back to the rear. I started back through the communication-trench and got lost. The next thing I knew I was wandering around in the darkness shakin' like a leaf."
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