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Updated: May 24, 2025
The Battery Commander took the telephone himself and sent the telephonist to help the guns; and when a bursting shell tore out one side of the sandbags of the dug-out the Battery Commander rescued himself and the instrument from the wreckage, mended the broken wire, and sat in the open, alternately listening at the receiver and yelling exhortation and advice to the gunners through the Sergeant-Major's megaphone.
A few days later my Major told me that I was to be ready at 3:30 next morning to accompany him up front to register the guns. In registering guns you take a telephonist and linesmen with you. They lay in a line from the battery to any point you may select as the best from which to observe the enemy's country. This point may be two miles or more in advance of your battery.
Immediately upon receipt of this signal by our S.O.S. sentry or the telephonist at the battery, we get the order "S.O.S. stand to the battery," and in the space of four seconds from the time we receive that order, our first shell must be exploded in the German lines under pain of the severest penalty.
By my side sat a telephonist in communication with the Battery Command Post, some four hundred yards away to the left, beyond the Left Section. My only other apparatus was a megaphone, a notebook and pencil, and a pipe. Occasionally I would go and stand by one of the guns, to check the gun-laying and to see that the guns were recoiling and coming up again without undue violence.
But when you speak to her, she never seems to understand, and her eyes well, they haunt one. Your business on these occasions is to get as close to the Germans as you can, without being seen, and you take a telephonist with you to send back word to the guns, and, by Jove, we do get close sometimes! 'Well, dear old Pam, there's my engineer coming across the fields, and I must shut up.
At the same moment there came from the rear the quick thudding reports of the British guns, the rush of their shells overhead, and the sharp crash of their shells over the German parapets. 'All fired, sir, called the telephonist. 'Battery fire one second, the Observing Officer shouted without turning his head from his watch over the parapet.
'Tell the Battery, Germans advancing heavy attack on our front! he panted to the telephonist, jumped across to his corner, and heaved himself up into place. The dust had cleared now, so that he could see. And what he could see made him catch his breath. An almost solid line of Germans were clear of their trenches and pushing rapidly across the open on the weak centre.
A few days after, we were notified we were going to drive forward another stage, and I went to the trench with the telephonist party for the purpose of making our communication as clear as possible; I was detailed especially to assist the Captain in this work. The attack was launched at daybreak, with a ten-minute bombardment preceding, and then our fellows were up and over.
Then we had another look at the animal in its trench a little nearer this time than before, and quieter on account of the mist. Pick up the chain anywhere you please, you shall find the same observation-post, table, map, observer, and telephonist; the same always-hidden, always-ready guns; and same vexed foreshore of trenches, smoking and shaking from Switzerland to the sea.
Here I was detailed as observer, my duty being to get into the front-line trench and from the most advantageous nook that I could find, try to discover whatever I could about the movement of the enemy, communicate my knowledge to the telephonist who would in turn send it to headquarters.
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