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Updated: May 31, 2025
As at Gommecourt, it had a good natural glacis up to the front line, which was deep, strong, and well wired. Behind the front line was a wired second line, and behind that, the rising spur on which the village stood, commanding both with machine-gun emplacements. Fricourt was not captured by storm, but swiftly isolated and forced to surrender. It held out not quite two days.
One forgets that these things have already saved the lives of many hundreds of our soldiers and smashed and defeated thousands of Germans. Said one soldier to me: "In the old attacks you used to see the British dead lying outside the machine-gun emplacements like birds outside a butt with a good shot inside. Now, these things walk through."
Part of the ground about the Grassier was inundated, due to the waterway near by having broken its banks, and this, in conjunction with the great number of machine-gun emplacements on the elevation, made it a particularly difficult position for attack.
The mounds were turfed and so inconspicuous that in times of peace sheep grazed over them. In Brialmont's original plan each fort was to be connected by infantry trenches with sunken emplacements for light artillery, but this important part of his design was relegated to the dangerous hour of a threatening enemy. This work was undertaken too late before the onsweep of the Germans.
In the grounds of another country place were discovered concrete emplacements for the use of the German siege-guns. Thus the German residents repaid the hospitality of their adopted city. When the war-cloud burst every German was promptly expelled from Antwerp.
The town, the empty railway station, the hospital, the network of shelter trenches, connecting earth-works, redans, redoubts, forts, and emplacements; the straight line of railway-ruled across the plain to the horizon these make the view. Hardly anything is moving except the white flag on the hospital and the colours on the forts.
The cylinders had to be in position in specially chosen emplacements in the front line within certain time limits. The "carrying in" could not be spread over an indefinite period and usually took from two to six nights, according to the magnitude of the attack and the local difficulties. Naturally, all the work occurred in the dark.
The top of the ridge swarmed with men, and to the rear of the gorge guns were massed in emplacements to sweep every foot of the passage. It seemed madness to even think of forcing such a pass. A thousand men in the shelters of that fastness could beat back myriads, and it was known that Joe Johnston had at least 50,000 behind the Ridge.
These pill-boxes were machine gun emplacements made of concrete, and our heavy shells had no effect on them. Our only chance of getting them was to blow them up with a mine. When I went in, there was still quite a distance to go, for the wood lay behind the second line of German trenches.
For years before the war began the Austrian engineers were at work strengthening a place that already possessed superlative strength. The whole face of the plateau was honeycombed with trenches and tunnels and dugouts and gun emplacements which were blasted and drilled out of the solid rock with machinery similar to that used in driving the Simplon and the St. Gothard tunnels.
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