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Updated: May 22, 2025
Before leaving for this assignment I went along the front-line trench saying good-bye to my mates and lording it over them, telling them that I had clicked a cushy job behind the lines, and how sorry I felt that they had to stay in the front line and argue out the war with Fritz.
The members of Parliament went away enormously impressed, but they had not enjoyed themselves nearly as well as the Worcesters, who had fought a sham battle not in the front-line trenches, but in the support trenches two miles back! They laughed for a week afterward. "This war has produced two great dugouts," said Lord Kitchener on a visit to the convent. "Me and Baker-Carr."
The whole of the 1917 class had joined the depots in March and May of this year, receiving a three months' training before being transferred to the field-recruit depots in June and July. About the middle of July the first large drafts joined their units and made their appearance at the front, and soon after the beginning of our offensive at least half this class was in the front-line regiments.
In view of the offence, the above punishment was very light, in that failing to pass the word down a trench may mean the loss of many lives, and the spoiling of some important enterprise in No Man's Land. Our tour in the front-line trench lasted four days, and then we were relieved by the Brigade.
We shared a dugout with the Lewis gunners, at "stand to" we would mount our gun on the parapet and go on watch beside it until "stand down" in the morning, then the gun would be dismounted and again placed in readiness on the fire step. We did eight days in the front-line trench without anything unusual happening outside of the ordinary trench routine.
We had been told that a hundred surgical cases were in the hospital, mostly shrapnel wounds, and that every available doctor and nurse was working night and day. We had seen, under one snow-covered canvas, six boys who had been killed by one shell early that morning boys that the night before we had talked with down in a front-line hut boys who had been killed in their billet in one room.
It is said that the Arab officers present handed in a joint protest to the Minister of War, asking for the Professor's dismissal, and that Enver Bey's answer was to have them all sent to the front-line trenches. Certainly the Turkish Nationalists have not concealed their attitude towards the Arabs since the War began.
From two to three days each were spent in front-line posts on the Amiens-Bethune, Albert-Peronne, Bapaume-Soissons, St. Mihiel, and back of the Argonne sectors. Often, the party was the first civilian group to enter a town evacuated only a week before, and all the horrible evidence of bloody warfare was fresh and plain.
Got themselves the fat jobs at the rear, work in hospitals... anything but to stay out in the front-line trenches with us poor rats of working-people! Isn't that so? 'No, it's not so! In my company there are as many bourgeois as labouring men. "The first man never paid the least attention to these brief denials of everything he was saying.
He reached the forward fire trench at last and halted there to recover his breath. The battered trench was filled with the men who had been moved up in support, and there were many wounded amongst them. He busied himself for half an hour amongst them, and then prepared to move on across the open to what had been the enemy's front-line trench.
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