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Updated: July 5, 2025
Acting upon his company commander's orders the subaltern took charge of the task of clearing out the dug-outs, while the remaining platoons of "A" and "B" Companies re-formed, and hastened to the support of their comrades who were still hotly engaged.
He stayed awhile to talk to several men who were sitting in their dug-outs pumping the water out before they could enter. His words seemed to make the men work with redoubled vigour. Then he passed on. Along this section, at the back of the dug-outs, were innumerable white crosses, leaning at all angles, in the mud. They were the last resting-place of our dead heroes.
Its last mouthfuls we finished in darkness; and, having nothing further to do, determined to go to bed in our little dug-outs on the hillside. Standing in the blue darkness outside these narrow dwelling-places, like lepers among our tombs, we wished each other good-night and a good sleep. Then we crawled into our graves. Wrapping my knees in my British warm, I disposed myself to rest.
And throughout it all men on both sides were shooting, shouting, shrieking, fighting, falling, while others, trapped in their dug-outs, either surrendered or fought desperately on until they fell wounded or lifeless before superior numbers.
In the course of this visit, I had the good luck to go into the former German trenches at Notre Dame de Lorette, and also to see some of the German first-line trenches and dug-outs on the Somme at Fricourt, and Albert and its hanging statue. But although this was exciting, it was eclipsed by a visit to Ypres, which I was able to induce my friend, R , to manage for me.
To reach the fire-trenches is easy enough; the difficulty is to find your way out of them. The main line of fire-trenches has a kind of loop-line behind it with innumerable junctions and small depôts in the shape of dug-outs, and at first sight the subaltern's plan of the estate was as bewildering as a signalman's map of Clapham Junction.
We had taken over a bank and some shallow, aged dug-outs, occupied the night before by our C Battery; and as there was a chill in the air that foretold rain, and banks of sombre clouds were lining up in the western sky, we unloaded our carts and set to work getting our belongings under cover while it was still light.
Huge rounds of barbed wire which had been brought, and never used, were stacked by the roadside, and there were long lines of trench-furniture the enemy had had to abandon in flight, or leave in dug-outs: rough tables, chairs, rusty cooking-stoves, pots, pans, petrol tins, and broken dishes: even lamps, torn books, and a few particularly ugly blue vases for flowers.
The villages of this wide battle region are not ruined; they are obliterated. It is just possible to trace the roads in them, because the roads have been cleared and repaired for the passing of the guns and ammunition. Fricourt is a tangle of German dug-outs. One dug-out in particular there promises to become a show place.
And then the Graybacks swarmed up out of shelters and dug-outs, literally in hundreds, and held up their hands, whining "Mercy, kamarad." We took prisoners by platoons. Blofeld grabbed me and turned over a gang of thirty to me. We searched them rapidly, cut their suspenders and belts, and I started to the rear with them. They seemed glad to go. So was I.
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