There was hardly any artillery fire, but the German snipers were very clever in that region and it meant death to show a head. I had one periscope shot out of my hands which will show what their snipers can do.
After three days in, we were taken out for a rest and billeted in a school house in Fleurbaix.
The next time we went to the front line, my platoon was ordered to man a redoubt behind the front trench. The idea of a redoubt is in case the enemy breaks through the front line the men manning it can pour enfilade fire into the enemy while they are passing in their advance to the second line of trenches.
This particular redoubt was a circular sandbagged construction large enough to allow sixty men to fire through the loopholes, and had two lines of entanglements round it with one narrow path through them to enable us to get in or out. This pathway could easily be blocked by a mass of wire called a "Chevaux de Frize," which was kept in the redoubt, and which could be placed in position when we had all entered.
Food which would last a platoon for ten days and a barrel of water was always kept in stock and was only allowed to be used in case the garrison was besieged. Things being quiet at this time, we had permission to use a cottage, which was only a few yards away, to sleep in at nights.
On the second day we remained in the cottage for part of the time, but as we had lit a fire to cook the dinner on, the Germans must have seen smoke coming out of the chimney, and soon got our range with one of their 77MM. field guns. The second shell hit the roof of the cottage, bursting, the shrapnel bullets were scattered in the next room to where I was.
The platoon lieutenant was in the room when the shell burst, and was talking to a sergeant and a corporal; the corporal was hit in thirty-one places down his left side, and was in a terrible mess. The lieutenant was wounded in the arm and the sergeant in the leg. The rest of us picking them up, rushed to the redoubt, another shell hitting the cottage just after we left. This taught us a lesson, and for the next few days we stayed under cover.
We were moved to the Ypres front in April to relieve a French division, marching twenty-two miles from Estaires to Abeele in one day, with full marching order, including 150 rounds of ammunition. The battalion rested at Abeele for a few days and then we marched through Poperinghe and the town of Ypres up to the front line.
At last we were in the dreaded Ypres salient, the worst sector of the front, and on which the Germans had sacrificed thousands of men in an effort to gain Ypres and the roads to the Channel ports. As the French came down one side of the road, we went up the other into the front line, at the part we were on, the trenches cut across the Polccapelle Paschendale Road, where the British Seventh Division cut the Prussian Guards to pieces the previous October.
The next morning we could see hundreds of dead Germans lying beyond our entanglements who had been dead five months, and as there was a light mist which would easily hide us, the German trenches being 800 yards away, a few of us crawled through the wire and went to have a look at them.