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Updated: June 26, 2025
What signs of the coming storm! Hardly a minute passes as we speed along without its significant sight; horse-lines, Army Service depots bursting with stores, a great dump of sandbags another of ammunition. And as I look out at the piles of shells, I think of the most recent figures furnished me by the Ministry of Munitions.
Around the ruined walls of the houses barbed wire was strongly wound and the street was mined in a number of places. The houses on the two flanks were heavily fortified with sandbags, while numerous machine guns with steel shields were set up in positions where they could command all the approaches.
A hundred and fifty yards of green grass, with the skeleton that was once some old hay wagon up-ended in the middle of it, and sky-blue water showing through the grass blades in the depressions; a brown mud wall straggling along the other side of the green more or less parallel to your breastwork, with white sandbags crowning it like an irregular coping; the inevitable stumpy stakes and masses of rusted barbed wire in front.
At no point was it more than waist high and in some places only knee high. We swarmed into what was left of the trench and after the Heinies. There must have been forty of them, and it didn't take them long to find out that we were only a dozen. Then they came back at us. We got into a crooked bit of traverse that was in relatively good shape and threw up a barricade of sandbags.
Here one of the Divisional Field Co. R.E. had prepared for us excellent H.Q. in the side of the Quarry. The offices were well down in the side of the Quarry, the mess room was a large shelter covered with sandbags a little higher up. We were fairly crowded that night, for a large number of 'liaison' officers arrived for duty next day.
Took his map, made a dot on it, and as he was wont, wrote "dig here," and the next night we dug. There were twenty in the party, myself included. Armed with picks, shovels, and empty sandbags we arrived at the "ideal spot" and started digging. The moon was very bright, but we did not care as we were well out of sight of the German lines.
The men went forward shouting and cheering, unafraid to look death in the face, afraid only to turn back with their faces from the sandbags where the smoke drifted, and from whence the hail of bullets rained.
Yes, the British gunners were shooting well, too. Other periscopic glimpses proved it. Through the periscope we learned also that the two lines of sandbags of German and British trenches were drawing nearer together. Another wounded man was brought by.
But as soon, as the dark came on the men would crawl into the trenches, stick their rifles between the sandbags and get ready for work. It seemed to be always raining. They said that when it wasn't actually raining it was either clearing off or just getting ready to rain again. Twenty minutes in the trenches and a man was all over mud, wet, cold, slippery mud.
Dorn, with the aid of a handful of communist credentials that seemed to flow endlessly from the pockets of the Baron, passed the Palais guard a hundred silent men squatting behind a hastily erected barricade of sandbags. Within he stumbled upon von Stinnes. The Baron drew him into a large empty chamber. "We must be careful," he whispered. His voice buzzed with an elation.
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