16.—Concrete dug-out south of the railway bridge at Dixmude (left bank).
These two shelters mark out the portion of the Belgian front which suffered the most by German bombardment with trench-mortars shells and bombs.
During the dreadful days of May 1916, our first line, facing Dixmude was subjected to awful firing; the embankment of the Yser, behind which our men were sheltered, was overthrown, the shelters broken down, the relief posts destroyed. All the work of the trenches which had taken eighteen months of patient toil to erect was annihilated in a few days and transformed into a horrible chaos. Hundreds of brave soldiers were torn to pieces by the bursting of German trench mortar shells, the effects of which were so terrible that in falling they dug craters of 10 meters diameter, thus smashing up the strongest shelters, and crushing and burying under the ruins all those who had taken refuge there. After the storm calmed down (and it was only calmed when our mortars arrived, affording us then the opportunity to juggle with those of the adversary), the Belgian soldiers with their habitual tenacity, undertook to rebuild their defensive works. Night and day, they worked patiently and obstinately on, and in the face of the enemy which was watching them from the opposite side of the bank, managed ruins out of the ruins that were accumulated there, to erect new lines of defence, stronger and better established than the first. They were composed, besides firing parapets for infantrymen, of numerous shelters for snipers and machine-gunners, rest and waiting shelters, relief posts, fighting battle posts for unit commanders, etc.... Earth, wood, iron, concrete, all were put together and used to constitute a formidable entrenched line, which was held till the end of the war.
From amongst these numerous shelters, two have been preserved: the first at the South of the Bridge-rail of Dixmude, is situated in the centre of the bend formed by the Yser in front of the town. The second was used as a fighting post for the commander of the company entrusted to defend the portion of the embankment, situated in front of the Handzaeme Canal. That particular point was specially momentous and to be watched, because it meant there to forbid the inroad in our lines of the Germans troops, which, under the cover of the Handzaeme canal banks, could, mounted on little boats berthed at Dixmude, try a landing on the West bank of the river Yser.