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Updated: May 22, 2025
There is one thing those trenches were good cover, for we would no sooner occupy them than we would be covered up entirely. I would defy an aeroplane with the best "made in Germany" spectacles to discover whether we were men or mummies. But we had one very exciting trench-digging expedition. We dug, if you please, into an old city, and broke into tombs umpteen thousand years old.
It was not the mist and drizzle of the day before, but a stiff northern gale which blew sheets of rain in our faces and numbed our bridle hands. We took the same road, but pushed west of the trench-digging parties and got to a shallow valley with a white village among the cypresses.
His physique laughed at hardship; his practical mind adored the order and method which is essentially a part of military efficiency. His work in Egypt, far as it seems removed from modern warfare, served a good purpose when trench-digging and planning became a part of his training.
"At some points our lines have been slightly advanced and their position improved." It has to be admitted by all who know him that the average British soldier has a deep-rooted and emphatic objection to "fatigues," all trench-digging and pick-and-shovel work being included under that title.
After that had come bayonet charges against dummies, rifle-ranges and trench-digging all the industrious pretence at slaughter which prefaces the astounding actuality. We were far away from all that now; the brown figures had melted into the brownness of the hills. There might have been no war. Perhaps there wasn't. Never was there a world more grey and quiet. I grew sleepy. My head nodded.
Rains fell in torrents, making streams almost impassable and drenching the little band to the skin. The hammock was empty one night, for they had to spend the dark hours trench-digging about their tent to keep it from being washed away. They also bought supplies from settlers who, as Brother Grube observed without irony, "are glad we have to remain here so long and that it means money for them.
Still there it is, and any officer will tell you that his men look on trench-digging with distaste, have to be constantly persuaded and chivvied into doing anything like their best at it, and on the whole would apparently much rather take their chance in a shallow or poorly-constructed trench than be at the labor of making it deep and safe.
But one piece of trench-digging performed by the Tearaway Rifles must come pretty near a record for speed. When the Rifles moved in for their regular spell in the forward line, their O.C. was instructed that his battalion had to construct a section of new trench in ground in front of the forward trench.
He had only done so, of course, because the post seemed to offer certain relaxations from the austerity of company routine a little more freedom of movement, a little less trench-digging, and a minimum of supervision. He would have been thankful for a supervisor now!
They are instructed in trench-digging, in the construction of wire entanglements, "knife-rests," chevaux-de-frise, and every other form of obstruction, in revetting, in the making of fascines and gabions, in sapping and mining, in the most approved methods of dugout construction, in trench sanitation, in the location of listening-posts and how to conceal them; they are shown how to cut wire, they are drilled in trench raiding and in the most effective methods of "trench cleaning."
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