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Updated: June 23, 2025
An explosive had struck a vital spot. For the most part, however, the shells fell from the armored sides like drops of water from a roof. German troops lined the second-line defenses and poured a hail of bullets into the advancing British. It was no use. The British refused to be stopped. Straight to the trenches the tanks led the way, and nosed into them.
Verdun has other excellent hospitals for the care of the severely wounded who cannot be sent farther from the front. Among them St. Nicolas, in a big airy building on the Meuse, is an example of a great French Military Hospital at its best; but I visited few others, for the main object of my journey was to get to some of the second-line ambulances beyond the town.
Perhaps a dozen of these monsters, pressing close together, now made a concerted attack on the second-line German trenches. Down went barbed-wire entanglements directly in front of the trenches. There was a loud crash as the tanks pushed their noses into the trench itself, and threw out rocks, boards, and earth in shattered fragments. The troops poured into the trenches behind them.
As it was, the German offensive in Belgium and France left the defence of Prussia to the chances of an Austrian offensive against Lublin, a containing army of some 200,000 first-line and 300,000 second-line troops, and the delays in Russian mobilization. Two of these proved to be broken reeds.
The second-line German fortifications, if not as elaborate, were even better situated than the first; not on the crest of the Ridge, of course, where they would be easily swept by artillery blasts, but where the latest experience demonstrated that they could make the most of the commanding high ground with the least exposure.
The trouble with you is that when you eat your cake you still have it in layers of fat. If you want to get rid of the layers you'll have to cut out the cake, or most of it, anyway. Must I make you a diagram, or is this plain enough for your understanding?" It was abundantly. But I still had one more bright little idea waiting in the second-line trenches. I called up the reserves. "Ahem!" I said.
I seemed detached from all idea of danger, and the desolated German trench area might have been a side-show at a fair. We swept by No Man's Land at a height of 600 feet, crossed the French first- and second-line trenches, and, after passing a small ridge, prepared to settle on an uneven plateau covered by high bracken.
You may fancy if he was grateful for the chance I was giving him; for of course he couldn't have seen his people in any other way. Our permits, as you know, don't as a rule let us into the firing-line: we only take supplies to second-line ambulances, and carry back the badly wounded in need of delicate operations.
These London Territorials were second-line men, men recruited from volunteers in the early days of the war, when the County of London Territorial battalions went across to France to take a part on a front hard pressed by German legions.
There are no women nurses in these second-line ambulances, but all the army doctors we saw seemed intelligent, and anxious to do the best they could for their men in conditions of unusual hardship. The principal obstacle in their way is the over-crowded state of the villages.
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