Between the Lines

Produced by Al Haines
McCLELLAND, GOODCHILD, & STEWART, LTD.
1916
for whose helpful criticism and advice, kindly consideration and unfailing courtesy to an unknown writer, a sufficiency of grateful appreciation can never be expressed by
This book, all of which has been written at the Front within sound of the German guns and for the most part within shell and rifle range, is an attempt to tell something of the manner of struggle that has gone on for months between the lines along the Western Front, and more especially of what lies behind and goes to the making of those curt and vague terms in the war communiqués. I think that our people at Home will be glad to know more, and ought to know more, of what these bald phrases may actually signify, when, in the other sense, we read 'between the lines.'
Of the people at Home—whom we at the Front have relied upon and looked to more than they may know—many have helped us in heaping measure of deed and thought and thoughtfulness, while others may perhaps have failed somewhat in their full duty, because, as we have been told and re-told to the point of weariness, they 'have not understood' and 'do not realise' and 'were never told.'
If this book brings anything of interest and pleasure to the first, and of understanding to the second, it will very fully have served its double purpose.
'SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE' Sept. 15, 1915.
' Near Blank, on the Dash-Dot front, a section of advanced trench changed hands several times, finally remaining in our possession. '
For perhaps the twentieth time in half an hour the look-out man in the advanced trench raised his head cautiously over the parapet and peered out into the darkness. A drizzling rain made it almost impossible to see beyond a few yards ahead, but then the German trench was not more than fifty yards off and the space between was criss-crossed and interlaced and a-bristle with the tangle of barb-wire defences erected by both sides. For the twentieth time the look-out peered and twisted his head sideways to listen, and for the twentieth time he was just lowering his head beneath the sheltering parapet when he stopped and stiffened into rigidity. There was no sound apart from the sharp cracks of the rifles near at hand and running diminuendo along the trenches into a rising and falling stutter of reports, the frequent whine and whistle of the more distant bullets, and the quick hiss and 'zipp' of the nearer ones, all sounds so constant and normal that the look-out paid no heed to them, put them, as it were, out of the focus of his hearing, and strained to catch the fainter but far more significant sound of a footstep squelching in the mud, the 'snip' of a wire-cutter at work, the low 'tang' of a jarred wire.