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Updated: May 8, 2025
The whole countryside presented a living target. All the way they shouted "Schwein" and taunted us in both languages. Every shell-hole, farmhouse, hut, dugout and old trench on the three-mile stretch between the Front and Polygon Wood contributed its quota. The regiment had evacuated Polygon Wood on the night of the third.
Tom opened the letter and read aloud: DEAR TOM: When I save a fellow's life I claim the right to call him by his first name, even if I've never seen him. If anybody ever tells me again that the world is a big place, I'll tell them it's about the size of a shell-hole, no bigger, and that's small enough, as you and I know. All I can say is, "Well, well!" And you're the same Thomas Slade!
"I followed the Captain with me eye, gentlemen, and I'm blessed if he didn't walk straight across the open and over the support trench. Then he drops into a bit of a shell-hole and I lost sight of him. Well, I waited and waited and no sign of th' orficer. The rocket goes up and our lads begin to come back with half a dozen Huns runnin' in front of them with their hands up.
Away to one side, against the skyline, one had a momentary glimpse of three or four Australians going along, bent low, making for some advanced position. It must be some stray bullet meant for them. Then another bullet hissed. So out on that brown hill-side, in some unrecognisable shell-hole trench, the enemy must still have been holding on.
For four miles east of Ypres there was no green space and hardly a yard of ground without its shell-hole. Positions where the enemy held out consisted in groups of concrete 'pill-boxes, which had been made from Belgian gravel and cement in partial anticipation of this result of the artillery war.
Stealthily creeping away from their advanced positions, and leaving these dull-grey lines of German dead stretched out before them a ghastly indication of their prowess the troops fell back in clusters, clambering from shell-hole to shell-hole, creeping behind any cover which was to be discovered, and making the utmost use of the darkness.
I fell into a shallow shell-hole, which was just the size to take me in, and as I lay there, the possibility of capture first came to me. Up to that time I had never thought of it as a possible contingency; but now, as I lay wounded, the grave likelihood came home to me. I scrambled to my feet, resolved to take any chances rather than be captured.
His men were alive all right, and not only alive but keeping on hard at work at the end of the tunnel. When the collapse came they had gone back to where their roof lay across the bottom of a shell-hole, pulled a plank out, and gone back to work.
Stranded tanks have an appearance of Brobdingnagian helplessness. They are fair targets for revenge by a concentration of German artillery fire; yet when half hidden in a gigantic shell-hole which they could not navigate they are a small target and, their tint melting into the earth, are hard to locate.
I took the end of the ball of string in my hand, so as to be able to signal back, and from a shell-hole just a few yards away I asked the man who he was and to tell me the names of some of his officers. As he seemed to know the names of all the officers I crawled into the hole alongside him, though I was still suspicious, and signalled back to my companion to go and get a stretcher.
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