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Updated: June 26, 2025
Mud oozed from the sandbags, through the wire netting, and between the wooden supports which held the walls in place. It was just as bad over in the German trenches. General Mud laid siege to both armies. The field of battle where he gathered his gay knights was a slough. His tug of war was strife against landslides, rheumatism, pneumonia, and frozen feet.
Unseen hands had repaired the damage by pushing up dozens of bricks and sandbags, and before the game could be opened again, unseen rifles were rolling off in their dozens and tearing the crests of our outworks. In that storm of brick-chips, split sandbags and dented nickel, you could not move or reply. That is the Italian gun.
Then you learn that if you travel upon the ex-German railway towards Tsing-tao, you are ordered to show your passport as if you were entering a foreign country. You are then prepared to learn from eye-witnesses that when Japan made its Twenty-one Demands upon China, machine guns were actually in position at strategic points throughout Shantung, with trenches dug and sandbags placed.
We held this line till the night of the 24th, when we went forward to relieve the 3rd Brigade and consolidate the ground won by them. Each man carried two days' rations, a shovel, an extra bandolier of cartridges, and twelve sandbags, in addition to his ordinary fighting equipment.
Bullets are flicking the tops of the sandbags on the parapet in hundreds, whilst white streaks are shooting up with a swish into the sky and burst into bright radiating blobs of light the star shell at its best. A curious thing, this "wind up." We never knew when it would come on. It is caused entirely by nerves.
Here and there they were not dug at all, but were purely shelters, against a railway embankment, of planks or sandbags, and reinforced by rails from the deserted track behind which they were hidden. For this corner of Belgium had been saved by turning it into a shallow lake. By opening the gates in the dikes the Allies had let in the sea and placed a flood in front of the advancing enemy.
Interpreter: "Then what were you doing?" Scotty: "Well, it was like this; I was only in the trenches twice, the first time our Corporal put me on a fatigue party and I was carrying up sandbags and rations." Interpreter: "Is that all you did?" Scotty: "Yes, Sir." Interpreter: "Then what were you working at the second time you were in the lines? you were surely put in a sap this time."
"They were all as cool under heavy shell fire as if they had been rowing on the Grand Canal." Our Infantry held their preliminary positions here for two days, in spite of considerable Austrian bombardment and counter-attacks. British aeroplanes flew over the island and dropped rations in sandbags.
The windows had the shutters closed, and were sandbagged up three parts their height, the need for this being evident from the clean, round bullet-holes in the shutters above the sandbags, and the ragged tears and holes in the upper part of the opposite wall.
At the end of each there is a momentary glare over the sandbags, and the bang as of an exploding rocket. That is German shrapnel, bursting in the air and projecting its pellets in a cone like a shot-gun. A little to the south of us there is a much more formidable crash, always recurring several times in the minute.
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