Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 25, 2025
All the ground below two knolls of earth called Hill 35 and Hill 37, which were defended by German pill-boxes called Pond Farm and Gallipoli, Beck House and Borry Farm, became an Irish shambles.
Our men lost double that, and more than double, but kept their courage, though in some cases they lost their hope. The 55th Division of Lancashire men, in their attacks on a line of pill-boxes called Plum Farm, Schuler Farm, and Square Farm, below the Gravenstafel Spur, lost 3,840 men in casualties out of 6,049. Those were not uncommon losses. They were usual losses. But so is mine.
These expectations were disappointed. The German positions no longer consisted of continuous trench lines, which could be reduced to shapeless masses of earth. An organisation of great depth had taken their place. Machine gun nests and pill-boxes scattered about were almost indistinguishable from the sea of mud in which they were placed, and defied accurate aerial reconnaissance.
The mud, the nibbling tactics passed down from above, inadequate co-operation by the divisions fighting side by side with us, and the failure of our artillery to hit the pill-boxes which we had hoped could be put out of action by our heavy shells, further combined to paralyse efforts which, had they been directed to more easy tasks, would now, as often, have earned for the Division the highest military success.
To this day pills are made behind its tall prescription desk pills rolled out on its own pill-tile, divided with a spatula, rolled with the finger and thumb, dusted with calcined magnesia and delivered in little round pasteboard pill-boxes.
For four miles east of Ypres there was no green space and hardly a yard of ground without its shell-hole. Positions where the enemy held out consisted in groups of concrete 'pill-boxes, which had been made from Belgian gravel and cement in partial anticipation of this result of the artillery war.
The force and disposition of the defending troops in shell holes, in their concrete 'pill-boxes, in their flanking trenches all have been ascertained. They will be blasted out by our artillery.
The jelly glasses stood inverted, and were inhabited; so were the preserve jars and pickle jars; and so were the pill-boxes, which evidently contained star boarders, for they were pierced with "breathing holes," and one of them, standing upon its side like a little wheel, now and then moved in a faint, ghostly manner as if about to start rolling on its own account whereupon Herbert glanced up and addressed it sternly, though somewhat inconsistently: "You shut up!"
Water stood everywhere, the trenches were blotted out, the pill-boxes themselves were flooded. The shelling was incessant, and no sleep was possible that night. On the night of the 6th-7th the 1st/4th Oxfords were relieved, and 24 hours were spent on either side of St. Julien through which runs the Steenbeck, foulest of streams.
These lines were too often held up by pill-boxes, against which the creeping barrage was ineffectual, and once delay which had not been calculated on occurred, the creeping barrage was proved doubly useless, for it had outdistanced the speed of the advance.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking