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Rifles blazed down into bomb-proofs, cracked steadily over the heads of comrades who piled up sandbags to block communication trenches; grenade-bombs rained down through the smoke into trenches, blowing bloody gaps in huddling masses of struggling Teutons until they flattened back against the parados and lifted arms and gun-butts stammering out, "Comrades!
Week by week, and month after month, the Canadian battalions had moved up into the salient, had done their "tours," building up their obliterated parapets, digging out their choked-up water-courses, revetting their crumbling trenches, and rebuilding their flimsy dugouts, and then returning to their reserve lines, always leaving behind them in hastily dug graves over the parados of their trenches, or in the little improvised cemeteries by Hooge, or Maple Copse or Hill 60, a few more of their comrades, and ever sending down the line their maimed and broken to be refitted for war or discharged again to civilian life.
The first had a bloody bandage round his head; he has been wounded by a piece of shrapnel, but is not bad enough to get away. We stayed there a few minutes and then went into Dead End, the front line trench. These trenches are very pretty the parapet and parados covered with grass and flowers. In fact they seem to have become natural features in the geography of the district.
Parados, and when he came out on the roof very soon and angry, they slipped round the chimney-stacks and through the trap-door, and left him up on the roof in the snow, and shut the trap-door and hasped it. And then the nurse caught them and Richard was sent to bed. But he did not go. There was no sleep in that house that night. Sleepiness filled it like a thick fog.
One party worked along Jones Street towards the right, some moving in the trench, some along the parados. They destroyed the left post in Jones Street, but were eventually checked by Lance-Corpl. Cooke with his Lewis Gun team, which, reflecting the coolness of its commander, kept up a steady rifle fire when the gun jammed.
"I wish as 'ow we was a bit closer to the devils so that they couldn't shell us. I'd like to get me 'and round some blighter's ugly neck, too." A second later a trench-mortar bomb came hurtling down through the air, and fell on the parados near the two men.
We used a very good substitute, one of the simplest kind, a piece of broken pocket mirror placed on the end of a split stick, and set at an angle on top of the parados. During the two hours of sentry duty we had nothing to do other than to keep watch and keep awake. The latter was by far the more difficult business at night. "'Ere, sergeant!"
Oh, my wound? well, it was just when I was getting over the parados to move back to billets that the brute got me. Funny, wasn't it? Hullo! here's a swell! My hat! it's General Torr! Nelly looked up bewildered to see a group of officers enter the room, headed by a magnificent soldier, with light brown hair, handsome features, and a broad be-ribboned chest.
In front of us the 166th and 165th Brigades were dashing across no man's land, sweeping into the enemy trenches, the barrage creeping before them. I stood on the parados of Liverpool Trench and watched with amazement. It was a dramatic scene such as no artist could paint.
We got to work at once shying the sandbags over from the old front of the trench to the parados. Our guns had never stopped all the time; they were now plastering the third line trenches. And almost at once the German shells began dropping into us. Of course they had the range to an inch.
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