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Updated: May 6, 2025
Right out of rifle-range, away on the open veldt on the north, I saw a party of Boers, with a white horse and a vehicle. Then I knew. But how had they managed to hit off so well the right spot to go to to enfilade our trench before they even knew where we were? Pompom pompompom again, and the little steel devils ploughed their way into the middle of us in our shell-trap, mangling seven men.
The new line extended from the French position west of the Ypres-Langemarck Road and proceeded through "shell-trap" farm to the Haanebeek and the eastern part of the Frezenberg ridge where it turned south, covering Bellewaarde Lake and Hooge and bent around Hill 60. This resulted in leaving to the Germans the Veldhoek, Bosche, and Polygon Woods, and Fortuin and Zonnebeke.
At one spot I just missed a shell-trap. A few minutes after I had left, some of the Manchesters, together with a body of the D. Cyclists who were stationed three miles or so out of St Waast, were attacked by a body of Jaegers, who appeared on a hill opposite. Foolishly they disclosed their position by opening rifle fire.
In fact the supports moving up had actually abandoned the use of the approach trenches and were hurrying across the open for the most part. Macgillivray, reluctant at first to abandon the cover of the trench, was driven at last to doing so by a fact forced upon him at every step that the place was a regular shell-trap.
They made fixed targets of crossroads and points our men were bound to pass, so that to our men those places became sinister with remembered horror and present fear: Dead Horse Corner and Dead Cow Farm, and the farm beyond Plug Street; Dead Dog Farm and the Moated Grange on the way to St.-Eloi; Stinking Farm and Suicide Corner and Shell-trap Barn, out by Ypres.
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