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Updated: June 27, 2025
When one did so there was only one thing to do to throw oneself violently down in the mud of the trench bottom, and wait, heart in mouth, for the crash of the explosion. The Artillery, on being appealed to, pounded the front German trench for an hour, but made no impression on the trench-mortar.
E.W. Styles who was attached to the 149th Trench-Mortar Battery was unhappily killed during the German offensive; a great friend whom I shall always miss. My bombing orderly, L.-C. Fairclough, was also killed during the same operations. When I joined the 7th N.F. they were stationed at St. Jean in Alnwick Camp. And here the battalion said good-bye to the Brigade.
So primitive were the arrangements, even at this date, that we were only taught how to improvise grenades out of old jam tins, and how to fire them out of iron pipes as trench-mortar bombs. The West Spring Thrower had not arrived, but I saw a trench catapult in action; and some dummy Stokes bombs were fired off for us to see.
"Is your officer here?" "He's down below, sir." The man drew to one side, and the Sapper passed up a narrow deep trench and went "down below" to the trench-mortar emplacement, a cave hewn out of the ground much on the principle of an ordinary dug-out. But there were certain great differences; for half the roof had been removed, and through the hole thus formed streamed in the early morning sun.
A big minnenwerfer came into play next, and because it could throw a murderous-sized bomb from far behind the German trench it was too much for the British trench-mortar to tackle. An Artillery Observing Officer spent a perilous hour or two amongst the shrapnel and snipers' bullets on top of the sandbagged wall, until he had located the minnenwerfer.
Such great importance is attached to the trench mortars by the Italians that they have formed them into a distinct arm of the service, entirely independent of the artillery, the officers of the trench-mortar batteries, who are drawn from the cavalry, being trained at a special school.
This went on all morning, and whilst the shoot lasted they came over in a perfect stream. After a quieter afternoon a regular trench battle opened out at night, rifle grenades and bombs being freely exchanged, and a number of trench-mortar bombs 'sausages and rum jars' coming over from the enemy's trenches. Eventually our heavy guns opened out with lively retaliation and the enemy quietened down.
To graduate in one of those schools you must get a fortnight's leave from your trenches or your battery, at the end of which time you return to do a little post-graduate work of a very practical kind with the aid of a machine-gun or a trench-mortar.
I tumbled after the colonel into the square hole that constituted the "O.P." it had been a Boche trench-mortar emplacement. The sweat dripped down my face as I removed my tin hat; my hair was wet and tangled. Johns, a subaltern of D Battery, was in the pit with a couple of telephonists. He was giving firing instructions to the battery.
The V.C., as the general said, is never given to a man who has not deserved it. "Pongo" Simpson was sitting before a brazier fire boiling some tea for his captain, when the warning click sounded from the German trenches. Instinctively he clapped the cover on the canteen and dived for shelter, while the great, black trench-mortar bomb came twisting and turning down through the air.
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