All these come along the road from VLAM after dusk, and when things are in full swing the road is a wonderful sight—mile after mile of mixed Army vehicles tightly packed along both sides, the middle full of marching troops. Sometimes motionless, sometimes crawling cautiously on in the dark, sometimes disturbed by a shell falling and killing a few men or a mule or smashing up a lurry in its crashing burst, hour by hour the stream goes on, the very life-blood of the Infantry in the Salient.
From YPRES to the front line was at this time about two miles, first by road, then tracks, then trenches or breastworks, through wrecked and ruined country, weedgrown and desolate.
Each Battalion held a “sub-sector” of the line, Battalion Headquarters being in some group of dugouts or ruined chateau about a mile behind the front line with the reserve and support Companies somewhat nearer, and two front line Companies. In addition to the Infantry Battalions, there were posts held by machine guns, this weapon having been taken out of the hands of the infantry, trench mortar sections, and other details doing various jobs.
The country in general is rather like HUNDRED END, the soil being like the Lancashire clay, but wetter and stickier.
On the 15th we moved up to YPRES, where we were billeted in the RAMPARTS. These RAMPARTS billets merit a special description. The city is guarded on the east and south by a rampart and moat, the rampart being about 50 feet high, and of equal thickness and formed of earth taken out when the moat was dug, faced with brick on the outside and crowned with trees.
Under this mines had been made, stuffy, cramped places full of frames and props and dimly lit with electric light, generally overcrowded and always damp and rat-infested, but still places where the Battalion in Brigade reserve could lie down and sleep in comparative safety, except for the danger of gas. To the south of the MENIN GATE, an ugly gap in the ramparts through which the MENIN ROAD issued from the city and where it was never safe to linger, was one of such mines usually occupied by two Companies, to the north a similar one and the Officers’ dugouts, Battalion Headquarters being further back in the city. On the night of a relief, men would arrive in small parties in the pitch dark and stumble along the street, which was always a foot deep in mud, till they found the gas sentry, when they would disappear within the dark entry with a grunt of relief.
During the next few days working parties went up the line every night, and on the evening of the 19th we relieved the 1/4th King’s Own in the RAILWAY WOOD sector.
RAILWAY WOOD had once been, as the name implies, a wood beside the MENIN railway; when we made its acquaintance it was just a churned-up, slimy bit of rising ground, approached by a decent communication trench called WEST LANE crossing the muddy BELLEWARDEBEEK, beyond which were the breastworks and dugouts and cookhouses forming BEEK Trench, a mass of slime and rotten sandbags which it was part of our job to drain, duckboard, and rivet with corrugated iron. As nearly every trench in the Salient was in a like state, and repairs were soon spotted and strafed by the Hun, and as every available man was daily employed in repairs, et cetera, it will be seen that “Old Bill’s” opinion, that the war would only end “when the whole of Belgium had been put into sandbags,” had much to justify it.
Going up to the front line from BEEK Trench on a dark night was no picnic. You started along a narrow alley winding uphill, your hands feeling the slimy sandbag walls, your feet wary for broken duckboards; now and again a hot, stuffy smell, a void space in the wall, and the swish of pumped-up water under foot proclaimed the entrance to a mine. Gradually the sandbag walls got higher and the alley narrower, and in places you stumbled into daylight where the trench had been blown in and got covered with blue slime wallowing across the block; round corners you dived under narrow tunnels two or three feet high, finally emerging into the comparative open of the front line trench.