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The roads were packed with traffic. Column after column of lorries came pounding along, bearing their freight of shells, trench-mortar bombs, wire, stakes, sandbags, pipes, and a thousand other articles essential for the offensive, so that great dumps of explosives and other material arose in the green wayside places. Staff cars and signallers on motor-bikes went busily on their way.
The Colonel replied with spirit that he was glad to hear all this, but in the meantime what was he to do to prevent his battalion being blown piecemeal out of their trenches? It all ended eventually in the arrival of a trench-mortar and a pile of bombs from somewhere and a very youthful and very much annoyed Artillery subaltern from somewhere else.
During this stay in the trenches the Germans stuck up a notice board with the following legend: Attention Gentlemen, and below in German, 'If you send over one more trench-mortar bomb you will get strafed in the neck. On February 3 we were relieved and A Company stayed four days in the railway cutting at Hill 60 in close support. The second day I went with Capt. Welch and Lieut.
The battalion bombers used the ground in the afternoon in charge of their own officers; and they got through another 1000 grenades. On September 2 I was able to tell the General that every man in the Brigade, including machine-gunners and trench-mortar men, had been through the course, with which he expressed himself very pleased.
One day his leg was fractured in two places by a large piece of a trench-mortar bomb, but, in spite of his pain, he refused to be taken down to the dressing station until we had hunted through his pack and found him his rosary. "If I don't take it with me," he said, "I'll get 'it again on the way down." And this is by no means an isolated example.
Packed in two cases marked RAKATEN, they were long, slender, uncanny-looking projectiles evidently intended for discharge from a trench-mortar. For the next two days and nights we laboured almost unceasingly, dog-tired and hardly able to keep awake, improving our defences.
The larger shells kept up a continuous shrieking overhead, falling on the enemy's trenches with the roar of a cataract, while every now and then a noise as of thunder sounded above all when our trench-mortar shells fell amongst the German wire, blowing it to bits, making holes like mine craters, and throwing dirt and even bits of metal into our own trenches.
We see, first, the night journey of the four infantry battalions and their machine-gun company and trench-mortar battery, from Albert to Pozières by motor-bus, then the four-mile march of the troops in darkness and rain along a duck-board track, to the trenches they were to relieve.
At night the trench-board was removed, and after careful weighting with two dud shells, a piece of rail, and the stalk of a sixty-pound trench-mortar bomb, it was placed on edge beside the hole. It was so arranged that it leaned slightly inwards, and was only kept from falling by a cord which passed in front of it and which was attached to two screw pickets one on each side.
Charlie Lowndes dispensed drinks with noble generosity. There was much laughter among us, and afterward we went upstairs and to the edge of the wood, to which a heavy, wet mist was clinging, and I saw the trench-mortar section play the devil with Kite Copse, over the way. Late in the afternoon I took my leave of a merry company in that far-flung outpost of our line, and wished them luck.
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