“Fairly Well”
While I am writing this letter I am cooking the dinner, boiling a piece of bacon we managed to get and potatoes. I have been elected cook on our car. I expect you will say it is just like me to be among the grub. Anyway, we are getting plenty of it now. We get our day’s rations every morning—one rasher of bacon, one tin of bully beef, one pot of jam (between five), a piece of cheese, so much tea and sugar, and so much bread, when we can get it; if we have not bread we get biscuits. We get plenty of potatoes out of the fields, and sometimes make what we call bully-beef stew. It is very nice, and consists of bully beef, potatoes, carrots, and onions—all boiled together. Sometimes we get fresh meat, so you see we are living fairly well: Pte. Calvert, Army Service Corps.
Rained on
We struck our tents this afternoon and then the rain came down. It is eight o’clock now and the rain is still steadily driving down. I suppose you imagine that you can picture the discomfort, but I bet you can’t. As a help, however, I will give you a few details. We have had to erect the tent in the pouring rain, which means that the floor-boards are soaked, and each one has to find a little dry oasis for himself, and there aren’t many dry places left when nine fellows have to be crowded in. Now the tent-cloth is soaked through and little streams of water are trickling across the floor, while miniature cascades are dancing merrily down the walls: Lance-Corpl. J. W. James, Royal Fusiliers.
Quagmires and “Mug Racks”
A German device that is new to me is the making of quagmires in front of the trenches, usually by digging extra trenches a few hundred feet from the real ones, throwing in the loose clay, and then flooding them so that you get a ditch of liquid mud. One day a French infantry detachment was advancing finely against the German position until they stumbled into one of these bogs, and just as they were stuck fast they were treated to a hail of fire. Barbed-wire entanglements are ten times worse than what we found in South Africa. Usually they are hidden away in the long grass, and you don’t see them until they catch you in the legs and bring you down. However, we’re getting up to the dodge. Now we call the wires “mug racks,” because it’s only the “mugs” who get caught in them: A Private of a Scots Regiment.
Cave-dwellers
We are like brigands at large in a cave, but one thing spoils it—that is, these blooming shells. The guns are only from six to eighteen hundred yards off, but we cannot see them on account of their being like ours, so cleverly concealed, and our aeroplanes cannot find them, although if they go over it is ten to one they are heavily fired at, but with them being so high it is impossible to see anything. We, the machine gunners, are rather lucky, as we draw our rations from the cooker where they are at present in the village, and then take them to our house that we have, and where the corporal in charge of the limber stays. He acts as cook, and we have bully stews, marrows, walnuts, turnips, and different things, and plenty of potatoes: Pte. H. Tesseyman, Coldstream Guards.
Contour Maps
It is my opinion, although, of course, I have no authority for it, that the German artillery have been supplied with contour maps of the route to Paris, with the ranges marked from hill to hill. Directly they reached an incline and faced us on another they let fly right on top of us straight away. They certainly had not time to find the range by the ordinary methods. I was wounded by a bullet from a shrapnel. It is very poor stuff, and very ineffective. The bullet that hit me ought ordinarily to have gone right through my hand. I lay for about an hour and a half on some corn, with the shrapnel bursting over me all the time. The bullets were absolutely spent, and when they dropped on my clothes they only singed them; others I stopped with my hands as they fell: Quartermaster-Sergt. Hinton, 17th Batt. Royal Field Artillery.