CHAPTER X
THE BREAKING IN
"We take the old road we have taken for years;
For you cannot cut corners in war, it appears."
The truth of this old maxim was impressed on us by the roundabout route we took to reach the field only a few hundred yards away where the remainder of the battalion lay.
Actually about two companies strong, they looked a mere handful as they lay huddled close to the hedges in the shallowest of shelter pits scratched in the soil with the field entrenching tool.
The draft was immediately ordered to "dig in," as the plane we had been watching a few minutes before had dropped its signal directly over this position.
We lost no time in digging more of these shallow pits, that reminded one rather gruesomely of graves, and had barely scraped them deep enough to roll into before a hail of small high-explosive shell fell all around us.
For half an hour the whoop and crash of falling and bursting shells kept us alternately ducking our heads and raising them again to see "where that one went," for curiosity is many times a stronger impulse than fear.
Curious things happened. A tree was cut in half by a shell, and the plumed top, falling clear of the stump, planted itself like a dart in the ground a few feet away.
A pack horse suddenly bolted across the open field with a slight cut on one flank, and half a dozen men made wild grasp at its bridle before one succeeded in recapturing the brute. And here and there groups of men finding their corner of the field a bit too "hot" for comfort would just as suddenly bolt across to another part and start feverishly digging in anew.