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Updated: May 4, 2025
Last night, within the space of one hour, seventy-three shells fell into this wood, and the first of them registered a direct hit upon the dug-out of which those sandbags formed part. There were eight men in that dug-out. The telephone-wires were broken in the first few minutes, and there was some delay before word could be transmitted back to Headquarters.
Others are distributed farther back, over a zone perhaps ten miles deep, crisscrossed with telephone-wires, and so arranged with assembling stations, reserves, and sub-reserves that the whole is a closely knit organism all the way up to the front.
White tendrils of fluff floated strangely in the air, and spread thousands of soft clinging threads over telephone-wires, tree-tops, and across miles of growing fields the curious output of myriads of spinning-spiders. There were quaintly restful visits to the front line.
"We've only had one wire down through shell-fire since we've been here," the signalling officer of the outgoing brigade had told me: and indeed, until March 21, the telephone-wires to batteries and "O.P.'s" remained as undisturbed as if they had skirted Devonshire fields and lanes.
Evidently the company officials had been keeping the telephone-wires busy that night; they were bringing in, not merely this train-load of guards, but automobile loads from other camps from the Northeastern down the canyon, and from Barela, in a side canyon over the mountain. Hal told this news to the meeting, which received it with howls of rage. So that was the bosses' plan!
At any rate, whether because the state of affairs is yet unsettled, or because of the invisible subtle spirit of optimism that blows through the heavily clustering telephone-wires and past the neat little modern villas and down the solidly pretentious streets, one can't help finding a tiny hope that Winnipeg, the city of buildings and the city of human beings, may yet come to something.
And already the telephone-wires had been effectively cut. All the approaching Legionaries wore rucksacks, and all were in their respective uniforms, though every man still wore a long coat that concealed it. A few groups of two appeared, bearing rather heavy burdens.
The daisies and almond-blossoms which adorn that forsaken ground would be mirrored in the shining silver coins; thistles would stretch out protecting thorns over them, and the wind would find a ringing sounding-board when it played on the thatched roof of the cow-barns and on telephone-wires.
It was perhaps half a mile to the communication trench and it took us half an hour of the hardest walking I have ever had to reach it. It had walls of slippery clay and a corduroyed bottom, but the corduroy was hidden beneath the mud left by thousands of feet. Telephone-wires, differentiated by tags of colored tape, ran down the sides.
The others in the ward are like phantoms. When I say to-morrow, "How is the boy?" what will they say? The sun on the cobwebs lights them as it lights the telephone-wires above. The cocks scream from every garden. To-day the sky is like a pale egg-shell, and aeroplanes from the two aerodromes are droning round the hill. I think from time to time, "Is he alive?" Can one grow used to death?
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