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Updated: September 27, 2025
Behind me, above my head, wild flowers and long wild grasses drooped over the raw edge of the parados, and a few stalks of ripening wheat trailed there or stood out against the sky an opaque, uncertain sky which had been so calmly blue, but which was now sickening with that whitish pallor which presages a storm.
He climbed in leisurely fashion upon the parados; and standing there, with all his six-foot-three in full view, issued his orders. "Face this way, boys! Keep your eyes on that group of buildings just behind the empty trench, in below the Fosse. You'll get some target practice presently. Don't go and forget that you are the straightest-shooting platoon in the Company.
The back of the trench is protected by a ridge of earth commonly known as a parados. My servant, whose vocabulary was limited, called it a paradox, and was not very wide of the mark. Somewhere behind the trenches at varying distances are the batteries. The gunners affect orchards and copses as affording good cover for their guns, and if none are to be found they improvise them.
Whatever held the men at last gave way as they fought madly with one another in their efforts to escape this dread creature that from their infancy had filled them with terror, and again they were retreating. Some clambered over the parados and some even over the parapet preferring the dangers of No Man's Land to this other soul-searing menace.
I stepped to the back of the trench where the shell was imbedded in the parados and examined the spot. "I guess it is there for keeps," I said, and returned to work. In a few minutes one or two of the boys complained of thirst, and I volunteered to get water.
For shelter the men had small recesses like dog kennels in the parapet or parados; these were usually roofed by a sheet of corrugated iron and were very small, uncomfortable, and infested with rats. There were not sufficient shelters to accommodate all the men, and the surplus had to sleep as best they could on the firing platform with only greatcoats as coverings.
And when at last they reached the trench, those farthest on the left of the advancing Britishers heard a machine gun sputter suddenly before them and saw a huge lion leap over the German parados with the body of a screaming Hun soldier between his jaws and vanish into the shadows of the night, while squatting upon a traverse to their left was Tarzan of the Apes with a machine gun before him with which he was raking the length of the German trenches.
I was standing up at the time, and it rather took me by surprise. It just cleared the parados. In fact, it kicked a lot of gravel into the back of my neck." "Most people get it in the neck here, sooner or later," remarked Captain Blaikie sententiously. "Personally, I don't much mind being killed, but I do bar being buried alive. That is why I dislike Minnie so." He rose, and stretched himself.
What he had got through were the Turkish support trenches, not their firing-line. That was still before him. He didn't despair, for the rebound from panic had made him extra courageous. He crawled forward, an inch at a time, taking no sort of risk, and presently found himself looking at the parados of a trench. Then he lay quiet to think out the next step.
Dickinson had a party on my right. The work was: repair of parapet and parados knocked in by recent shelling. While we were at it the Germans sent over trench-mortars, a kind of shell which rises to a great height, looking like a burning snake, and then descends and pierces right into the earth, exploding underneath and sending the earth above it in all directions.
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