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Updated: May 17, 2025
Then they plunged down into the trench, while the Germans rushed down the long stairs into the underground chamber and fled through the lower openings of their long gallery northward towards safety. Not until the Canadian officers led us into one of those German chambers did we understand the black tragedy. The room was shell-proof. The soft yellow clay was shored up by rough boards.
The bad ground continued for about a mile, and then the advance reached Headquarters, behind the eighth trench of the great system of trenches. It was an old farmhouse which the Germans had made over with reinforced concrete, lining it within and without, until the walls were six feet thick and almost shell-proof, like a pill-box. The Colonel sent his orderly to enquire about A Company.
While doing so a shell came screaming by. We knew then that the Germans had seen our light. We immediately rushed to a shell-proof shelter in the sand. I had barely reached it when a shell exploded close by the car, half destroying the body of it. That was the only one that came anywhere near.
Preliminary to the attack our field-guns opened fire with shrapnel, which scattered over the German trenches their formidable earthworks with deep, shell-proof dugouts like the glitter of confetti, and had no more effect than that before the infantry made a rush for the enemy's line and were mown down by machine-gun fire the Germans were very strong in machine-guns, and we were very weak in the usual way of those early days.
Stretcher-bearers this way, for God's sake!" The voices sounded as weak and futile as the squeaking of rats in a thunderstorm. When the bombardment began, all off-duty men were ordered into the deepest of the shell-proof dugouts, where they were really quite safe. But those English lads were not cowards. Orders or no orders, they came out to the rescue of their comrades.
He was sitting in the hospital at a table, with a black bottle and a tumbler near his right hand. The place was quite dark, having been built up all around with boxes of sand, to render it shell-proof. Being thirsty, and not noticing what he did, he mechanically picked up the bottle, poured some of the liquid into the glass, and drank it down.
They can not understand why their wonderful" he corrected himself swiftly "why their gun did not get you. It would have been a terrible disappointment if they had brought you down and discovered that you were not sheeted in some new patent shell-proof steel."
An officer calls attention to a shell-proof shelter with the civic pride of a member of a chamber of commerce pointing out the new Union Station. "Not even a high explosive" the kind that bursts on impact after penetration "could get into that!" he says. "We make them for generals and colonels and others who have precious heads on their shoulders."
You knew the flagship by the admirals' barges astern, as you know the location of an army headquarters by its motor-cars. It seemed in the centre of the fleet at anchor, if that is a nautical expression. Where its place would be in action is one of those secrets as important to the enemy as the location of a general's shell-proof shelter in Flanders.
Advantage of this had been taken by the German engineers who must have planned and supervised the work. Many of the shell-proof dugouts were fifteen and even twenty feet below the surface of the ground. Entrance to these was made in the front wall of the trench on a level with the floor. Stairways just large enough to permit the passage of a man's body led down to them.
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