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Updated: June 21, 2025
He could go no further without being seen. Between him and the German gun lay the cobbled surface of the street, offering no cover whatsoever except one mighty shell-crater, situated midway between Angus and the gun, and full to the brim with rainwater. A single peep over the wall gave him his bearings. The gun was too far away to be reached by a grenade, even when thrown by Angus M'Lachlan.
Fire on them! Let go! And prepare, if they come closer, to meet them with the bayonet." The shout went along that shattered trench-line, and men stood on what was left of the firebank, or leaned their pieces on the edge of a shell-crater or some pit into which they had crawled for shelter, and, turning the muzzles on the enemy, blazed into their masses.
The men reported that their battalions had been cut to pieces. Some of their regiments had lost three-quarters of their strength. They described the frightful effect of the British artillery the smashed trenches, the shell-crater, the horror. It was not good for the morale of men who were just going up there to take their turn.
General Dubois told me that, only a few days before my visit to Verdun, one of his staff-officers, returning alone and afoot from an errand to Vaux, had fallen into a shell-crater and had drowned in the mud. Indeed, the whole terrain is pitted with shell-holes as is pitted the face of a man who has had the small-pox.
Where the dead lay told exactly the breadth of its sweep through which the charge had unfalteringly passed; and this was only a first objective. As you could see, the charge had gone on to its second with slight loss. A young officer after being wounded had crawled into a shell-crater, drawn his rubber sheet over him and so had died peacefully, the clot of his life's blood on the earth beside him.
As he does so, a chance star-shell bursts squarely over him, and comes sizzling officiously down almost on to his back. His head drops like a stone into the bush, but not before the ghostly magnesium flare has shown him what he came out to see a deep shell-crater. The crater is full of Germans.
Sometimes they skirt a wood or hedge, sometimes they keep under the lee of an embankment, sometimes they proceed across the open, with the stealthy caution of persons playing musical chairs, ready to sit down in the nearest shell-crater the moment the music in the form of a visitation of "whizz-bangs" strikes up. It is difficult to say which kind of weather is least favourable to this enterprise.
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