[From The London Times, Dec. 18, 1914.]
An officer in the R.A.M.C. writes:
FIGURE to yourself (as Wells says, isn't it?) a country of flat plowed field, pollard willows and deep muddy ditches. Then we come along, and in military parlance "dig ourselves in." That is, with the sweat of the brows of hundreds of Tommies working by night deep narrow trenches five feet deep and at least with the earth thrown up another two and a half feet as a bank on top. These trenches are one and a half to two feet wide, and curl and twist about in a maddening manner to make them safer from shell-fire. Little caves are scooped in the walls of the trenches, where the men live about four to a hole, and slightly bigger dugouts where two officers live. All the soil is clay, stickier and greasier than one could believe possible. It's like almost solid paint, and the least rain makes the sides of the trenches slimy, and the bottom a perfect sea of mud—pulls the heels off your boots almost. One feels like Gulliver walking along a Lilliputian town all the time. The front line of trenches—the firing line—have scientific loopholes and lookout places in them for seeing and firing from, and a dropping fire goes on from both sides all day long, but is very harmless.
Dec. 3, 1914.—I was just starting for my daily constitutional "on top" when the enemy began their bombarding, nearly one and a half hours earlier than usual, so I will postpone my little walk and finish this instead. Yesterday we had one man killed and two wounded, the first casualties for over a week. The story of one of the wounded is worth telling to show you the pluck of these men. He told me he noticed some new digging going on on the side of the enemy in front of his firing post. One can see the spadefuls of earth coming up from below the ground level when new trenches are being dug. Although this was in broad daylight, our man thought he would go and see what the Germans were up to, so he hops over the side of his trench and runs forward thirty yards to a ditch and crawls along it some hundred yards or so. He then spots a large shell-hole in the field on one side of the ditch, so doubles off and gets into that and has a good look around. Not satisfied with the point of view, he sprints to a line of willows nearer still to the enemy—within 250 yards of them indeed—and proceeds to climb up one of them. While doing this he gets shot through the shoulder. He told me he thought he had ricked his arm at first, as it felt numb and useless. Meanwhile a great pal of his in the regiment, hearing that he had gone out like this, hops over the parapet and sets off to look for him, and comes up just as he gets hit. The second man upbraids the first roundly for being a fool, carries his rifle for him, and brings him back. All this is done quite in the day's work and "sub rosa," as they would get punished for leaving the trench like that in the daytime if it was spotted. The pluck of these men is perfectly extraordinary, and the placid way life goes on under the risk of being sniped or shelled any moment is, until one gets used to seeing it, quite past belief. I must say the officers set the men a magnificent example.
A young officer attached to the Yorkshire Light Infantry writes on Dec. 6:
One wonders when one sees a German face to face, is this really one of those devils who wrought such devastation—for devastation they have surely wrought. You can hardly believe it, for he seems much the same as other soldiers. I can assure you that there is none of that insensate hatred that one hears about, out here. We are out to kill, and kill we do, at any and every opportunity. But, when all is done and the battle is over, the splendid universal "soldier spirit" comes over all the men, and we cannot help thinking that Kipling must have been in the firing line when he wrote that "East is East and West is West" thing. Just to give you some idea of what I mean, the other night four German snipers were shot on our wire. The next night our men went out and brought one in who was near and getatable and buried him. They did it with just the same reverence and sadness as they do to our own dear fellows. I went to look at the grave the next morning, and one of the most uncouth-looking men in my company had placed a cross at the head of the grave, and had written on it:
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Here lies a German, We don't know his name, He died bravely fighting For his Fatherland. |
And under that, "got mit uns," (sic,) that being the highest effort of all the men at German. Not bad for a bloodthirsty Briton, eh? Really, that shows the spirit.
I don't believe there is a man living who, when first interviewing an 11-inch howitzer shell, is not pink with funk. After the first ten, one gets quite used to them, but really, they are terrible! They hit a house. You can see the great shell—a black streak—just before it strikes, then, before you hear the explosion, the whole house simply lifts up into the air, apparently quite silently; then you hear the roar, and the whole earth shakes. In the place where the house was there is a huge fountain-spout of what looks like pink fluff. It is the pulverized bricks. Then a monstrous shoot of black smoke towering up a hundred feet or more, and, finally, there is a curious willow-like formation, and then—you duck, as huge pieces of shell, and house, and earth, and haystack tumble over your head. And yet, do you know, it is really remarkable how little damage they do against earth trenches. With a whole morning's shelling, not a single man of my company was killed, although not a single shell missed what it had aimed at by more than fifty yards. That makes all the difference, that fifty yards. If you only keep your head down, you are as safe as houses; exactly, you will remark, "as safe as houses."