Stories from the Trenches: Humorous and Lively Doings of Our 'Boys Over There'

by Carleton B. Case

Day before yesterday several of us started out for the posts. I carried the médecin divisionnaire and went a little before the others. In spite of the fact that the fields are being recultivated and the searness of former battles is somewhat concealed, the road to the front is rather a grim affair, and you are startled when you pass through a town deserted and demolished. There is quite a large town between this one and the front. It is uninhabited except for a few soldiers and a yellow dog that slinks about in the doorways.

I left the médecin divisionnaire at his abri, a little further along the road, a road hidden completely by strips of burlap tied to poles. The first post is in a little wood. There were two of us there, and we tossed a coin to see who would take the first call. I won and waited for an ambulance to come in from one of our three posts. These posts are along the front of the hill where the battle is taking place. They are all reached by going through and then beyond X (you remember the little destroyed town with the church which I spoke of during our first month). The first post was a smaller town than X, and is now razed completely to the ground. The second is about one-fourth of a mile to the right and the third—which can only be reached during the night and left before dawn—is a German abri, formerly a dugout of German officers. The German saucises are directly above the road, and any machine would be shelled in the daytime. The posts are close together and are reached by exposed roads.

My call came about noon. I was given an orderly, and left for the first post. From the road we could see the shells breaking on the hill and in the fields about, where the French batteries were hidden. We reached the post, backed the machine into a wide trench, which hid it from view, and then went into the dugout. It was a new iron dugout, about 30 feet long and 10 or 12 feet broad, with bunks on either side. On top were heaped bags of sand and dirt.

We read until about two o’clock, when several shells fell in the battery field a few meters behind us. Then a few shells fell in a field to the right, and in another moment we were in the midst of a bombardment. It lasted all afternoon. Two men trying to enter the dugout were hit, one in the throat and the other in the shoulder, but not badly. About six o’clock it grew so bad and so many shells fell on the roof of the dugout that we had to leave, cross through some trenches—a strange-looking procession, crouching and running along—and get into a deep cave about twenty feet under the ground, where we stayed until eight o’clock in the evening. Then the firing became intermittent, the shells hit further to the right and left, and we ran back into the dugout.

It was still light and an airplane soared above us, the noise of which is to me, for an unaccountable reason, one of the most reassuring sounds I have ever heard.

Quite jocularly he writes of supper, first having looked at his car which he found uninjured, although covered with dirt from exploding shells. Continuing, he says:

There were about eight of us, the orderly and myself, the lieutenant-doctor in charge, and three or four old brancardiers, who, when they ate their soup made more noise than the shells. After every few spoonfuls, to avoid waste, they poked their mustaches in their mouths and sucked them loudly.

During the evening the firing became steady on both sides, the French battery pouring their shells, which whistled over our dugout. We went to bed, secure in this iron cylinder, whose great ribs stood like the fleshless carcass of a beast, which to destroy would be a worthless task. A stump of a candle lay wrapped in our blankets in the bunks. It was rather comfortable, except that my bed was crossed at the top by a piece of iron just where my head lay.

All through the night there was a continuous commotion in the dugout, the brancardiers running around and talking in loud voices about things we were too sleepy to understand. We had no blessés during the night (an exceptional thing—this morning they had fifty from one post) and were relieved about half-past ten the next morning. I returned to the large town, where our cantonment had been changed to another quarter of the village.