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Updated: May 22, 2025
Thereafter the German front-line trenches had been "plastered" from end to end, while the trenches farther back were attended to with methodical thoroughness. The German guns had replied vigorously, but directing only a passing fire at the trenches, had devoted their efforts chiefly to the silencing of the British artillery. In this enterprise they had been remarkably unsuccessful.
A voice said plaintively, "I don't know who you are, but I wish you'd get off. I'm the adjutant." It's a queer country, that place we call "out there." You approach our front-line, as it is to-day, across anywhere from five to twenty miles of battlefields. Nothing in the way of habitation is left. Everything has been beaten into pulp by hurricanes of shell-fire.
The worst punishment is death by a firing squad or "up against the wall" as Tommy calls it. This is for desertion, cowardice, mutiny, giving information to the enemy, destroying or willfully wasting ammunition, looting, rape, robbing the dead, forcing a safeguard, striking a superior, etc. Then comes the punishment of sixty-four days in the front-line trench without relief.
The rations are unloaded at the entrance to the communication trenches and are "carried in" by men detailed for that purpose. The Quartermaster-Sergeant never goes into the front-line trench. He doesn't have to, and I have never heard of one volunteering to do so. The Company Sergeant-Major sorts the rations, and sends them in. When it is possible, he gets tea and stew.
Had he something new? He passed on the method to the French and gave the Germans the benefit of its results. Observers seated in the baskets of observation balloons, aeroplanes circling low in risk of anti-aircraft fire, men sitting in tree-tops and others in front-line trenches spotting the fall of shells were the eyes for the science he was working out on his map.
Billy and his regiment, which had been mustered up to strength, passed over the top within four hundred yards of me to the right. On my left, my older brother, Gordon, who was supporting a trench mortar battery in the front-line trench, was working away within 500 yards of me. I was not aware of the presence of either until a comparison of notes later on apprised me of their presence.
For a front-line trench and an attack started by the enemy, the S.O.S. signal is passed from the trench, either through the telephonist in the trenches, or by means of colored star shells.
He was militant from morning till night in his crusade against cigarettes. Some of his friends thought he was a fanatic. He even lost friends because of his uncompromising antagonism to the cigarette. But the last time I heard of him he was in a front-line dugout. This was near Château-Thierry. The boys were coming and going from that awful fight. Men would come in one day and be dead the next.
It was in another French salon that we waited for the man who controlled the British armies in the field those armies which we now knew in some intimacy, whom we had seen in the front-line trenches and rest-camps and billets, hearing their point of view, knowing their suffering and their patience, and their impatience and their deadly hatred of G. H. Q.
If you should be fortunate or unfortunate enough, as the case might be to be squatting in a front-line trench this fine morning and looking through a periscope, you wouldn't see much. Just over the top, not more than twenty feet away, would be your barbed-wire entanglements, a thick network of wire stretched on iron posts nearly waist high, and perhaps twelve or fifteen feet across.
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