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Updated: May 7, 2025
The first W.A.A.C.s came out to France about this time, and I watched them with interest through my periscope. I heard that a sand-bagged dug-out had also been made for us in camp, and tin hats handed out; a wise precaution in view of the bricks and shrapnel that rattled about when we went out during air raids. I never saw the dug-out of course.
Rumour had it, Heaven knows how, that the armoured train that had been sent up from the Cape with two light guns of superseded pattern a generous contribution towards the collection of obsolete engines now bristling from the sand-bagged ramparts had been seized by a commando, with the officer and the men in charge.
The big cobbled square; the brooding, silent churches, the single military policeman standing near his sand-bagged sentry-box and in the distance the rumble of a wagon going past the station such was Poperinghe as Vane saw it that evening. A city of ghosts deserted and empty, and as the old grey mare walked sedately through the square. Vane felt that he understood the dead airman's smile.
It never let up from the Hook to the Farallones; and the last man was dropped not sixteen hours ago. Packet rats our men were, and as tough a crowd as ever sand-bagged a man's head in; but they looked sick enough when the captain started in with his fancy shooting." "O, he's done up," observed the other. "He won't go to sea no more." "You make me tired," retorted his superior.
Half a mile further out lay a marvellous trench, the work of forgotten heroes, since transferred to France, a straight line of carefully sand-bagged fire bays and traverses which it would have taken a small army to hold, running as if laid down with a ruler across the desert without either support line or communication trenches.
"My grandmother's ducks!" exclaimed Nick. "Nervous shock! Well, this makes me worse. Why, man, I've been sand-bagged." The colonel shook his head. "The power of the unseen forces," he began; but Nick interrupted him. "Look here, Colonel Richmond!" he said, "if you had the sensation behind your ear that I've got, you wouldn't talk about mysterious powers of darkness.
The senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. The two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. Mr. Cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom I recognized as the big boatman from Asquith, familiarly known as Captain Jay. He owned the Scimitar and several smaller boats. The captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between Mr.
"Sand-bagged! . . . Look out, Petrie! . . . He has us at last! . . . Oh, Heavens!" . . . He struggled on to his knees, clutching at my hand. "All right, old man," I said. "We are both alive! So let's be thankful." A moment's silence, a groan, then: "Petrie, I have dragged you into this. God forgive me " "Dry up, Smith," I said slowly. "I'm not a child.
But it blew with a most insistent note on the dumpy mound where they have rebuilt the ridiculous, glorious village that gave birth to deeds worthy of the Age Heroic, about whose sand-bagged defences nightly patrolled a Sentinel who never slept.
Even to the inexperience of W. K. the sand-bagged earthworks built about Gueldersdorp, the barricades of trek-waggons and railway-trucks blocking up the roads debouching on the veld, the extending lines of trenches, the watchdog forts, the sentinelled pickets, the noiseless, continually moving patrols, all the various parts of the marvellous machinery of defence, controlled by one master-hand upon the levers, would count for nothing against that overwhelming onrush of armed thousands, that flood of men dammed up above the town, and waiting the signal to roll down and overwhelm her, and Cripps! what a chance to make a glorious, heroic splash in Greta's sight!
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