There comes into my head as a picture at the other extreme of this
series, a memory of certain trenches I visited on my last day in
France. They were trenches on an offensive front; they were not those
architectural triumphs, those homes from home, that grow to perfection
upon the less active sections of the great line. They had been first
made by men who had run rapidly forward with spade and rifle, stooping
as they ran, who had dropped into the craters of big shells, who had
organised these chiefly at night and dug the steep ditches sideways to
join up into continuous trenches. Now they were pushing forward saps
into No Man's Land, linking them across, and so continually creeping
nearer to the enemy and a practicable jumping-off place for an attack.
(It has been made since; the village at which I peeped was in our hands
a week later.) These trenches were dug into a sort of yellowish sandy
clay; the dug-outs were mere holes in the earth that fell in upon the
clumsy; hardly any timber had been got up the line; a storm might flood
them at any time a couple of feet deep and begin to wash the sides.
Overnight they had been "strafed" and there had been a number of
casualties; there were smashed rifles about and a smashed-up machine gun
emplacement, and the men were dog-tired and many of them sleeping like
logs, half buried in clay.
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