It was under my chin. The
skyline, the last skyline before the British could look down on Bapaume,
showed a mangy wood and a ruined village, crouching under repeated
gobbings of British shrapnel. "They've got a battery just there, and
we're making it uncomfortable." No Man's Land itself is a weedy space
broken up by shell craters, with very little barbed wire in front of us
and very little in front of the Germans. "They've got snipers in most of
the craters, and you see them at twilight hopping about from one to the
other." We have very little wire because we don't mean to stay for very
long in this trench, but the Germans have very little wire because they
have not been able to get it up yet. They never will get it up now....
I had been led to believe that No Man's Land was littered with the
unburied dead, but I saw nothing of the sort at this place. There had
been no German counter attack since our men came up here. But at one
point as we went along the trench there was a dull stench. "Germans, I
think," said my guide, though I did not see how he could tell.
He looked at his watch and remarked reluctantly, "If you start at once,
you may just do it."
I wanted to catch the Boulogne boat. It was then just past one in
the afternoon. We met the stew as we returned along the communication
trench, and it smelt very good indeed.
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