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Updated: September 19, 2025
He was sitting on a sandbag swearing like Hades, and trying to disperse the clouds of flies which were settling upon him. He looked up as I approached, then suddenly burst into a peal of laughter. I stood still and grinned, not daring to open my mouth to laugh for fear of losing my cigarettes. Then I dropped my tripod and leaned against the trench side to rest.
"That is what the inhuman brute called the place when he lowered us into it. We are to stay here till I sign papers that will give him possession of my property, and till till Edith consents to marry him!" He flung the words out into the stillness, and for a few minutes no one spoke. The horror of the situation had the same effect upon me as a blow from a sandbag.
It was on the same basis as the sandbag which stops a cannon ball that would go through an iron plate. Steadily the boys kept on, pushing the barrels before them. They did not go on hands and knees, for then they would be exposed to the enemy bullets. It was a caterpillar motion, drawing their bodies along the ground, and was a tremendous tax on their muscles, for they could get no purchase.
A dull, crushing blow descended on the top of my skull, and I became oblivious of all things. My return to consciousness was accompanied by tremendous pains in my head, whereby, from previous experience, I knew that a sandbag had been used against me by some one in the shop, presumably by the immobile shopman.
"You must have had the nightmare," said the conductor, politely, trying not to smile as the angry face, under its towel turban, glared out at him. "Nightmare!" blazed the irate old lady. "I'm no fool. Don't you suppose that I know when I'm hit? I tell you somebody was trying to sandbag me. I thought a Saratoga trunk had fallen in on me.
Luckily he went first, the camera butting up against him. He told us afterwards he thought he was really going to the lower regions. I dived under a sandbag emplacement, when the grenades went off with a splitting crash, and after allowing a few seconds for the pieces to drop, looked out. A tragic sight met my gaze.
Farquharson had been killed by a cannon ball; two civilians had been badly wounded; several of the children had succumbed; Amy Hunter had been killed by a shell that passed through the sandbag protection of the grating that gave light to the room in the basement used as a sick ward. The other ladies were all utterly worn out with exhaustion, sleeplessness, and anxiety.
When I disappeared inside he dismissed his own and then took the course of dismissing my cab, which he could easily do by paying the man his fare and sending him off. A cabman would accept that dismissal without suspicion. He then waited for me in the fog and followed me until he got me into a quiet part of the road, where he first attempted to sandbag and then to shoot me."
A dug-out, supplied with electric light and with an entrance of remarkable sandbag construction, had been tunnelled out beneath the courtyard. This was being used for operations. In front of the archway and in the road stood two "padrés" directing the continuous flow of stretchers and walking wounded.
From the darkness behind them a German flare soared up and burst, throwing up bushes and shattered buildings, sandbag parapets, broken tree-stumps, sticks and stones in luminous-edged silhouette. A machine-gun burst into a stutter of fire, the reports sounding faint at first and louder and louder as the muzzle swept round in its arc.
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