I have been given a special job by the general to enfilade a wood over the Mound. I have my section now in the second-line trenches waiting till it is dark before making a move. We have to make a machine-gun emplacement in a piece of ground which is decidedly unhealthy to visit during daylight. I have been there in daylight, but I had to creep out of it. On the map it is called a farm, but the highest wall is only three feet six inches high.
Arrived home about two o'clock this morning. We crawled to the place we have to take up, and I put some men filling sandbags in the ruins and others even digging a dugout. The enemy had “the wind up” and were using a great number of star shells. When one goes up we all “freeze,” remain motionless, or lie still. They send them up to see across their front, and if they locate a working [pg 115] party, then they start playing a tune with their machine guns. Bullets and shells whistled through the trees all the time. They seemed to come from all directions. The men didn't like it at all. I wasn't altogether comfortable myself, but an officer must keep going. I walked about and joked and laughed with them. The range-taker said, “Some of us are getting the didley-i-dums, Sir.” I don't know what that is, but I had a feeling that I had them too.
Of course, to start with, everybody thinks every single shell and bullet is coming straight for him. Then you find out how much space there is around you. One man came to tell me that two men were firing at him with his own rifle from the ruins of the alleged farmhouse, ten yards away from the dugout we are making. Just then a field mouse squeaked, and he jumped up in the air and said, “There's another.” I told the men to fill sandbags from the ruins; they all crowded behind this three-foot-six wall for protection; they dug up a French [pg 116] needle bayonet—that was all right, but they afterwards dug up a rifle and I noticed a suspicious smell, so I moved them.
We came home very tired. We are attacking Hooge, a counter-attack, to take back trenches lost in the liquid fire attack—you will hear what we did from the papers, probably in three months' time.
I'm writing this in a new home, this time a splinter-proof dugout. The Huns are again strafing us—last shell burst fifty yards away a few minutes ago. Several times since I started writing I have had to shake off the dust and debris thrown by shell bursts on to these pages. I was again sniped at with shrapnel this morning on my machine while reconnoitering the roads—they all missed, but they're not nice. I'm filthy, alive, and covered with huge mosquito bites; you get sort of used to the incessant din in time. Even the forty-two centimeter shells, which make a row like freight trains with loose couplings going through the air, are not so terrible now.
Through a hole in my dugout I can see the Huns' shells Kulturing a chateau. It was once a very beautiful place with a moat, bridges, and splendid gardens. Now it's useless except that the timber and the furniture come in useful for our dugouts and the making of “duck walks,” the grated walks which line the bottom of the trenches.
Last night I was sitting in the Medical Officer's dugout when a man I knew came in. He was an officer in the Second Gordons. “I feel pretty bad, doc.” He explained his symptoms. “Trench fever; you go down the line.” “No, fix me up for tonight and maybe I won't need anything else.” He didn't! All that is left of him is being buried now, less than a hundred yards from where I write this.