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Updated: June 5, 2025
Suddenly just when you were believing that this sort of trudge was going on forever, we were in the support trenches behind the firing line, and found the men we were relieving ready to come back. "And the firing line itself? Just the same sort of ditch with a parapet of sandbags, but with dug-outs, queer big holes helped out with sleepers from a nearby railway track, opening into it from behind.
This difficulty never really reached us in Gallipoli, though we might possibly have found the trenches falling in upon us in the rains of winter if we had stayed. The trenches in France are full of traces of old dug-outs and mouldering sandbags, collapsed through rain in the dim past before the timbering of all works was looked on as a necessity.
Along the firing and communication trenches parties set to work of various sorts, bailing out water from the trench bottom, putting in brushwood or brick foundations, building up and strengthening dug-outs and parapets, filling sandbags in readiness for night work and repairs on any portion damaged by shell fire.
But out of the twelve sufficient parts were found intact to make one good one, so that Fritz would get "some of his own" back in a way that he least expected; for there were thousands of rounds of ammunition found in the dug-outs beneath the gun pits. How to get into Pozières was the next problem.
From these dug-outs the Battalion returned next day to the caves at Ronville, where it was re-organised and re-equipped ready for further action. After four days' rest it again moved up, on the 21st April, this time to dug-outs in the trench system known as "The Harp," the Q.M. Stores remaining in Arras, where on the 22nd April Lieut. Lewis, acting Q.M., was killed by a shell.
Hop-poles trailed with hops or cut saplings will do very well. Usually there is a delectable garden, which is the peculiar pride of the men. Turf emplacements are constructed for the six guns, and turfed dug-outs house the telephone-operator and the gunners.
We've been there several times when the General was with us." "What General is that?" Tabs asked as they trudged along between the hedges. "The General who lent me the car," she replied. "Oh, your friend at the War Office! I suppose he's one of the dug-outs who's been there all the time." "He isn't. He rose from the ranks. He's only been at a desk job since the Armistice."
But here, as at Neuve Chapelle, we found that the enemy front line, once penetrated, brought us in front of a series of strong points bristling with machine-guns, with dug-outs of almost incredible strength, some of them twenty and thirty feet under ground and safe against anything but the heaviest of field-guns, weapons that we were lamentably short of.
From all the dug-outs heads popped out, and the first movement of surprise at seeing a woman in the trenches turned to a smile of delight, since the poilu is at all times a chivalrous gentleman. One man was telling me of the magnificent work that had been accomplished by his "compagnie." I congratulated him and told him he must be happy to be in such a company.
This disease is due to remaining for long periods in the wet and mud, to racked nerves, and, I am inclined to think, to sleeping in the foul air of the dug-outs. The chief symptom is high temperature, and the patient aches a good deal. I was sent back to a place in the neighborhood of Arras and was there a week recuperating.
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