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Updated: June 17, 2025
Fifty yards from the enemy's wire was a collection of shell-holes, relics of a burst of misdirected energy on the part of a six-inch battery. Here the raiders disposed themselves, and waited for the signal.
To avoid landing down wind and down-hill, the pilot banked to the right before he flattened out. The bus pancaked gently to earth, ran over the bracken, and stopped two yards from a group of shell-holes. Not a wire was broken. The propeller had been scored by the bracken, but the landing was responsible for no other damage.
But though those bullets pecked constantly at the small parties or at stragglers of the night's attack hopping back from advanced shell-holes, the little procession with the flag passed through unharmed. If the sniper saw it he must have turned his rifle for the moment somewhere else. We made our way back, when we went, across a hill-side literally flayed of all its covering.
They would not go down into the communication-trench or shell-holes because they thought it would be too rough on me, and so carried me over the exposed ground; and when they got me to the dressing-station they said: "You will come back to us, sir, won't you?" I said: "Yes, boys, you bet I will!" And you may bet that I shall, as soon as ever I am passed as fit again.
Until that is done the people have to live in cellars, in shell-holes, in verminous dug-outs like beasts of prey or savages. Their position is far more deplorable than that of Indians, for they once knew the comforts of civilisation. For instance, I visited a farmer who before the war was a millionaire in French money.
In the morasses of the Haanebeek flats, in the slimy support lines at Zonnebeke, in the tortured uplands about Flesquieres, and in many other odd places I kept worrying at my private conundrum. At night I would lie awake thinking of it, and many a toss I took into shell-holes and many a time I stepped off the duckboards, because my eyes were on a different landscape.
During the Battle of the Somme it was found that the enemy often left his actual trenches and came forward into shell-holes in No-Man's-Land so as to escape the fire of our artillery. To counter this manoeuvre the 'creeping barrage' was devised.
The reliefs could only be made at night lest they should be discovered by British airmen and British gunners, and even if these German soldiers had trench maps the guidance was but little good when many trenches had been smashed in and only shell-craters could be found. "In the front line of Flers," wrote one of these Germans, "the men were only occupying shell-holes.
Obtaining permission from the officer, they took their places beside the driver of the ambulance, and were soon on their way. It was already growing dark, but, although the surface of the stone pave was frequently broken with shell-holes, the ambulance, dodging round the holes, rushed without pause along at a high rate of speed. "You don't use your lights?" asked Barry.
A special dugout had been prepared as a bomb store near the Chalk Quarry at Bazentin-le-Petit, but almost at the last moment the R.A.M.C. commandeered the place for their forward dressing-station. So the boxes of grenades had to lie in the open in large shell-holes, covered with German greatcoats, mackintosh sheets, or anything else we could get hold of.
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