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Updated: May 2, 2025
At the Douve, however, I discovered a way of getting round this which I will describe later. On this first night, not being very familiar with the neighbourhood, I found it difficult to ignore the weird noises which floated in through the sack-covered hole. There is something very eerie and strange about echoing rifle shots in the silence of the night.
One very soon sailed up, nice and white, into the inky sky, and I saw how we were placed with regard to the Germans, the hill and Messines. We were quite near a little stream, a tributary of the Douve, in fact it ran along the front of our trenches.
Recently, however, the powers that be had been sending more than one officer away at a time; consequently my turn was rapidly approaching. We came away back to billets in the usual way after our first dose of the Douve, and all wallowed off to our various billeting quarters. I was hot and strong on the leave idea now.
But on the left, abutting our old position near the Douve Farm, we had rather an easy time of it, there being little shelling and the trenches nearly two hundred yards apart. In fact our greatest activity was at night and at dawn, conditions at the latter time being well expressed in an anonymous sonnet we found pinned up in a dug-out entitled "Stand To":
The prisoners taken in the Petite Douve affair had boasted of the preparations they were making for a gas attack on a scale hitherto unknown, and on the Sunday before Christmas the enemy made another attempt to gain the Ypres salient by this means.
We made a long and exhaustive examination that night, both of the existing machine-gun emplacements and of the entire ground, with a view to changing our positions. It was a long time before I finally left the trenches and started off across the desolate expanse to the Douve farm, and I was dead beat when I arrived there. On getting into the big room I found the Colonel, who had just come in.
I think some one told me why, but I can't remember. Whether it was the baths had been shelled, or whether the lunatics objected, it is impossible for me to say; but there's the fact, anyway. "Na Pu" baths at Bailleul. The Douve trenches claimed our battalion for a long time. We went in and out with monotonous regularity, and I went on with my usual work with machine guns.
To relieve the monotony of this sort of thing the Canadian Corps organised a series of night raids on the German trenches. The first, and most brilliant, of these was conducted by the 5th and 7th Battalions of the 2nd Brigade on a barricade or forward trench that had been constructed by the enemy near our old position opposite the Petite Douve Farm.
I made for the Douve, and soon got along as far as the row of farms. I explored all these, and a shocking sight they were. All charred and ruined, and the skeleton remains slowly decomposing away into the unwholesome ground about them. I went inside several of the dismantled rooms. Nearly all contained old and battered bits of soldiers' equipment, empty tins, and remnants of Belgian property.
And the whole distance to Valognes was near fifty miles. It was then mine uncle's wish that we should rest again at his house, and prepare to approach Duke William with due state on the morrow; and this, though I was unwilling to delay, I was forced to agree to. So before evening we came in sight of St. Sauveur, a high and fair castle, round whose walls the Douve makes a circuit.
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