THE DUG-OUT
Here's an odd coincidence. The second sentence in your letter that reached me last night (with our rations of candles and coke) says: "Do tell me just what a dug-out is like." You are always asking me what something or other is "like," which forces upon me the sad conclusion that my letters are not in the least descriptive. But, "Do not shoot the pianist: he is doing his best," and if I had the pen of a readier writer you may be sure I'd use it. Yet the odd thing is, with regard to this particular command for information, I have the pen of a readier writer. You know Taffy Morgan—Billy—of our Company? Well, it seems he's quite a bit of a writer, and occasionally sends things home to his father who, is trying to keep a consecutive narrative of the doings of the Battalion. Now last night, within an hour of getting your letter, I read a thing Taffy showed me that he was sending home, all about a Company Headquarters dug-out in the line: much more decent than my scribbles. So I've asked him to let me copy some of it, and here it is pat, in answer to your question:
"'Dug-out' is the only word for it. I don't know who did the christening, but it is, like so many words and phrases adopted without question by Tommy at the front, the one proper, exact, and adequate name for the places we inhabit in the trenches. The particular dug-out I have in mind is a Company Headquarters, situated, like a good many others, in a loop trench, perhaps seventy to a hundred yards long, which curves round at a distance of twenty or thirty yards in rear of the fire-trench. The average depth of this little back-water of a trench is, say, seven feet. It was made by the French before we took over, and is very wide at the top. It has no made parapet, but is just a gaping ditch, its ragged, receding top edges eight or ten feet apart, the lower part, in which one walks, being two to three feet wide. The bottom of this ditch is duck-walked: that is to say, it has wooden gratings six feet long and eighteen inches wide laid along it. Each length of duck-walk is supported at either end by a trestle driven deep down into the mud.
"Here and there at a bend in the trench there will be a gap of several inches between duck-walks. Again one finds a place where one or two slats have been broken. These are cheerless pitfalls on a dark night, in which it is easy to sink one leg in mud or water over the knee. In places a duck-walk has canted over by losing its bearings on the trestle at one corner, giving the whole a treacherous list to one side or the other, simple enough to negotiate by day, but unpleasant for anyone hurrying along at night. Still, the trench is 'ducked' and, so far, luxurious, and a vast improvement on the sort of trench (common over the way among the Boches, I believe) in which men lose their boots, and have to be dug out themselves.
"It happens that my picture of this Company Headquarters dug-out is a three o'clock in the morning picture: moonless, and the deadest hour of the night, when Brother Boche is pretty generally silent, save for a mechanical sort of dropping rifle fire: a fire which one knows somehow, from its sound, means nothing, unless perhaps it means a certain number of German sentries sleepily proving to themselves that they are awake. In the same desultory fashion, Boche, nearly two hundred yards away across the wire entanglements and the centre strip of No Man's Land, sends up a flare of parachute light every few minutes, which, for half a minute, fills our black ditch with a queer, ghostly sort of radiance, making its dank and jagged sides to gleam again, and drawing curses from anyone feeling his way along it, even as motor lights in a country lane at home make a pedestrian curse on a dark night.
"As one gropes along this ditch one comes to narrow gaps here and there in the side farthest from the enemy. These lead to all kinds of odd necessary places: the homes of signallers, runners, and others, refuse pits, bomb and trench stores, and so on. Presently a thin streak of light shows like a white string in the blackness. This is one of the gaps, about four feet high and eighteen inches wide. A dripping waterproof sheet hangs as a curtain over this gap: the white string is the light from within escaping down one side of the sheet. Lift the sheet to one side, take two steps down and forward—the sheet dripping on your neck the while—and you are in the Company Headquarters dug-out: a hole dug out of the back of the ditch, its floor two feet below the level of the duck-boards outside, its internal dimensions ten feet by eight by six.
"At the back of this little cave, facing you as you enter—and unless you go warily you are apt to enter with a rush, landing on the earthen floor in a sitting position, what with the wet slime on your gum boots and the steps—are two bunks, one above the other, each two feet wide and made of wire netting stretched on rough stakes fastened to stout poles and covered more or less by a few empty sand-bags. One of these is the bunk of the O.C. Company, used alternatively by one of his subalterns. In the other, a Platoon Commander lies now asleep, one gum-booted leg, mud-caked well above the knee, dangling over the front edge, a goatskin coat over his shoulders, his cap jammed hard down over his eyes to shut out the light of the candle which, stayed firmly to the newspaper tablecloth by a small island of its own grease, burns as cheerily as it can in this rather draughty spot, sheltered a little from the entrance by a screen consisting of a few tins half full of condensed milk, butter, sugar, and the like. The officer in the bunk is sleeping as though dead, and the candle-light catching the mud-flecked stubble on his chin suggests that his turn in the trenches should be at least half over. Another few days should bring him to billets and shaving water."