Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 21, 2025
Directly in front of the English trenches were the first-line Turkish trenches, in some places not more than fifteen or twenty feet away, so close, indeed, that when there was fighting they must have fought with revolvers, hand-grenades, shovels, anything they could lay their hands on. At the moment it was quiet but for the constant Crack... crack-crack! of snipers.
By noon it became apparent that the sacrifice of lives was becoming too great to warrant the Allies trying to hold their first-line trenches much longer, and that they must give them up, at least until they could re-mobilize their forces for a counter-attack.
Each time the enemy charged it was never to return. While they wasted their energies attempting to put the tanks out of commission, British infantry mowed them down with, rifle fire. At length these attempts were given up. The Germans, after an hour's desperate fighting, deserted their first-line trenches, and sought the shelter of the second; from these they were driven to the third.
"Plenty of time yet," explains Captain Blaikie to his subalterns, in reply to Bobby Little's expressions of impatience. "It's this way. We start by 'isolating' a section of the enemy's line, and pound it with artillery for about forty-eight hours. Then the guns knock off, and the people in front rush the German first-line trenches.
In the night of July 25, 1917, a ferocious attack was made on the French lines on a front of about two miles from La Bovelle Farm to a point east of Hurtebise. In the face of a murderous fire from the French artillery that wrought havoc in the advancing masses the Germans pressed on and succeeded in occupying portions of French first-line trenches south of Ailles.
We heard the melancholy song of the ricochets and spent bullets as they whirled in a wide arc, high over our heads, and occasionally the less pleasing phtt! phtt! of those speeding straight from the muzzle of a German rifle. We breathed more freely when we entered the communication trench in the center of a little thicket, a mile or more back of the first-line trenches.
Every day of slow preparation brings nearer the day when the Germans will not be in France. That is certain. An immense expectancy hangs over the land, enchanting it. We leave the first-line trench, with regret. But we have been in it! In the quarters of the Commandant, a farm-house at the back end of the village, champagne was served, admirable champagne.
At one point north of the Ancre a "tank" was useful in clearing the German first-line trench, and at another point south of the river one pushed forward and got ahead of the British infantry into a position strongly held by the Germans who swarmed around it and tried to blow it up with bombs.
You find these great, lumbering affairs, half steamroller, half donkey-engine, in the courtyards of old castles, schools, and great private houses close by the front. The first-line trenches, in a position at all contested, are very apt still to preserve the hurried arrangement of their first plan, which is sometimes hardly any plan at all.
All of the country through which we drove was, in a way, the "front" beginning with the staff head-quarters and going on up through wagon-trains, reserves, horse camps, ammunition-stations, and so on, to the first-line trenches themselves. Sweeping up through this long front on a fine autumn morning is to see the very glitter and bloom of war.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking