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Another daylight raid was successfully carried out by the Canadian troops northeast of Cité Calonne on the same morning. The Canadians succeeded in penetrating German trenches on a front of 700 yards and pushed forward to a depth of 300 yards, or as far as the enemy's second line. The German dugouts were completely wrecked. The British report stated that heavy losses were inflicted on the enemy.
Secure in their dugouts from bombardment, the first that the Germans, in their systematized confidence that the enemy would not try for a second objective that day, knew of the presence of the Canadians was when the attackers were at the door and a St. Lawrence River incisiveness was calling on the occupants to come out as they were prisoners which proves the advantage of being quick.
The next week, thanks to a sudden boom, the box-car gave place to a board depot, with other pine structures springing up all about, and to long lines of white stakes that marked the avenues, streets, and alleys of a future city. Now it consisted of half a hundred houses and stores surrounded by as many shanties and dugouts. The streets were gay with color.
A sonorous wind flowed through the open tower, eddying among the bells a strong, keen night wind blowing from the north. The airman walked to the south parapet and looked down. Below him in the starlight, like an indistinct map spread out, lay the Nivelle redoubt and the trench with its gabions, its sand bags, its timbers, its dugouts.
Huts were established in partially destroyed buildings or houses or stores that had been vacated by their owners, and on the extreme front canteens were established in dugouts and cellars and the entire district was under bombardment from the German guns as well as from the airplane bombs. The Salvation Army had no place there that was not under bombardment continually.
Every night the shattered villages were raked and torn above them. Such dugouts could only be left at night or when the firing ceased. The two men who operated these lived a nerve-racking existence. Of course, all pies and doughnuts for these places had to be prepared far to the rear, and no fire could be built as near to the front as this. It was no easy task to bring the supplies back and forth.
The two were connected by many passageways, the chief difference between them being that the fire trench was the business district, while the traveling trench was primarily residential. Along the latter were built most of the dugouts, lavatories, and trench kitchens. The sleeping quarters for the men were not very elaborate.
We go on past Battalion Headquarters, and past the dugouts and shelters of various people having business with History, past stores of bombs and the many other ingredients with which history is made, past men coming down who are very hard to pass, for the width of two men and two packs is the width of a communication trench and sometimes an inch over; past two men carrying a flying pig slung on a pole between them; by many turnings; and Windmill Avenue brings you at last to Company Headquarters in a dugout that Hindenburg made with his German thoroughness.
The eighteen Massawomekes were not bound; they stepped from the dugouts as firmly as if they were going to a feast instead of to torture. They were of the Iroquois nation; and Pocahontas, who had heard many stories of this race, always at enmity with her own, noticed certain differences in the way they were tattooed and in the shape of their headdresses.
In the upper waters apparently they are entirely unaccustomed to the report of firearms, and if not actually hit will lie still while shot after shot is fired. The largest I ever killed and measured was thirteen feet and four inches in length; but this was much smaller than many which I shot from dugouts and canoes too far away from shore to tow them in.
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