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Updated: May 1, 2025
But there was a different kind of concert next day, and the music was played by trench-mortars, Mills bombs, rifle-grenades, and other instruments of death in possession of the Guards. There were cries of agony and terror from the German trenches, and young officers of the Guards told the story as an amusing anecdote, with loud laughter.
They had been lieutenants, captains, and majors in the air force, or infantry battalions, or tanks, or trench-mortars, and they had drawn good pay, which was their pocket-money. Now they were at a loose end, hating the idea of office-work, but ready to knuckle down to any kind of decent job with some prospect ahead. What kind of job? What knowledge had they of use in civil life? None.
He spoke with tragedy in his eyes and voice, seeing the vision of all that youth of France which even then, in March of '16, had been offered up in vast sacrifice to the greedy devils of war. Rain was slashing down now, beating a tattoo on the steel helmets of a body of French soldiers who stood shivering by the ruined walls while trench-mortars were making a tumult in the neighborhood.
Everywhere I found new workshops already filled with workers, a large proportion of them women, already turning out a mass of shell which would have seemed incredible to soldiers and civilians alike during the first months of the war; while the tale of howitzers, trench-mortars, machine-guns, and the rest, was running up week by week, in the vast extensions already added to the other works.
They looked grave, almost sullen, staring at us as they passed, with brooding eyes. "The German trench-mortars are very evil," said the captain. We poked about the ruins, raising our heads cautiously above sand-bags to look at the German lines cut into the lower slopes of Vimy, and thrust out by communication trenches to the edge of the village in which we walked.
Recently the farm was shelled and the Berks Colonel, then in occupation, quitted it in favour of a two-storied house called Carvin. In the domed cellar of Baquerolle Farm an old-fashioned building looking out across a wide midden to numerous cowsheds and outhouses were usually the headquarters of C or D Companies and the Trench-Mortars. This farm was freely shelled.
Shells and aeroplane bombs made the wood dangerous as well as cold. On the 10th a further tour in the front line commenced This time trenches north-east of Villers Plouich were held. Wiring was strenuously carried out, but save for activity by trench-mortars the enemy lay quiet.
Obviously the wider your trench the greater your exposure to the effects of shell-fire, and if we go on introducing trench-mortars, and gas-pumps, and gas-extinguishers, to say nothing of a great store of bombs, as pleasing in variety and as startling in their effects as Christmas crackers, our trenches will soon be as full of furniture as a Welsh miner's parlour.
Employers favored girl labor, found it efficient and, on the whole, cheap. Young soldiers who had been very skilled with machine-guns, trench-mortars, hand-grenades, found that they were classed with the ranks of unskilled labor in civil life. That was not good enough. They had fought for their country. They had served England. Now they wanted good jobs with short hours and good wages.
All the time they were under the fire of high-explosive shells and had to pass through a zone or 'barrage' of shrapnel built across their path for just this special purpose of destroying supports and supplies. Our own artillery were playing exactly the same game behind the enemy lines, but in these lines were ample stores of cartridges and grenades, bombs, and trench-mortars.
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