You must picture the trenches as deep, rather narrow gangways, which are much more like street excavations than anything else one can imagine. Some are dug down in the soil, but many of them are only a foot or two in the ground, the parapet being built up with sandbags, as in many parts of our line, especially in Flanders, the water lies too close to the surface to allow of deep digging. The bottom of the trench has a wooden flooring composed of “grids,” as they are called, footways made of short pieces of wood nailed laterally on planks placed edgeways.
A deep broad step is cut in the parapet and boarded over. It looks like a deep window-seat. This is the “fire-stand,” where the look-out men are posted at the loopholes to fire at the enemy. In most parts of the line there is but little rifle-fire by day, save for sniping, as neither side can expose its men by daylight, even for a momentary shot, without grave risk.
Round and about the fire-stand the whole life of the soldier in the trenches centres. While his comrade takes his turn of duty at the parapet he sleeps on the fire-stand, or cooks his food over fires, or cleans his rifle, or writes a letter home. Shelters, that the men call “funk-holes”—long holes scraped out of the side of the trench and holding two or three men—give him a dry place to sleep in and protection from the rain. But should the funk-holes be full in rainy weather, the soldier has his waterproof sheet, issued with his equipment, and thus covered he will not hesitate to lie down and sleep in the wet.
What with traverses and communication trenches and outposts, what with second and third lines and support trenches, the firing-line is such a winding maze that it is utterly impossible to get a comprehensive view of it as a whole. A walk round the trenches of a single company, which will take you a good half-hour, leaves you with a confused mass of impressions: of rather grimy figures, looking very business-like with their bandoliers strapped crosswise over their overcoats, their rifles by their sides, standing at the parapet; of men in all stages of undress, cooking, eating, washing, writing, in the narrow trench; of faces seen white against the dark background of a dug-out, strained to a telephone which wails fretfully with a puny whine like the toot of a child’s trumpet; of officers in shirt-sleeves and trench boots going their rounds or writing reports amid thousands of flies in a shelter....
You walk up a trench and down a trench, you see the angular outline of machine-guns under their canvas covers in their emplacements, you are shown case upon case of ammunition, bombs, and grenades, large and small, and rocket-like cartridges which are flare-lights.
It is so unutterably strange to find all this life, this vast preparation and organization, going forward in the open country where, but a twelvemonth back, the peasants were gathering the harvest, to know that it was going forward before you came, and will go forward after you have left. With such feelings of bewilderment, I fancy, must the traveller, in the early days of gold-mining, have come upon the mining-camps that sprang up in a day in the midst of barren wastes, and stood, in incredulous amazement, watching the ceaseless activity of a great host of humans returned to the era of the troglodyte.
Neither by day nor by night are the trenches restful. Seldom a day or a night goes by without the “whoosh” of a shell or the clumsy rush of a trench-mortar bomb. The hollow reports of the rifles never cease. Scarcely an afternoon passes, should the weather not be misty, but the firmament quakes with the rapid reverberations of the anti-aircraft guns. “Pom-pom-pom-pom-pom” is their note, sharp and unmistakable, as they throw circles of snow-white smoke-puffs about the aeroplanes soaring high in the sky.
The firing-line by night is restless as a storm-tossed sea. One dark and starless night in June I climbed a commanding height which afforded a wonderful view of a great part of our line. A thin crescent of yellow moon hung low on the skyline. A cold east wind rustled through the trees. Far below me in the plain a never-ceasing spout of brilliant green-white star-shells marked the winding course of the British and German lines.
It was an unforgettable picture. For one brief moment a desolate ridge, broken with the jagged silhouette of ruined houses, stood out hard and clear before my eyes, and then was blotted out as a flare fell earthward and died. The ragged outline of a shattered belfry was revealed for a fraction of time, black and sinister as a Doré glimpse of Hell, and then melted away into the surrounding darkness. The soft soughing of the wind in the trees was mingled with an incessant dull thrumming from the plain. Now it rose in a swelling burst of sound, from the right, from the left, from the centre, of the darkness at my feet; now it died away into single blows that echoed noisily in their isolation.
Sometimes the spout of star-shells ran dry, and for a minute or two all the plain lay swathed in its pall of darkness. Then silently, swiftly, a flare would wing its way aloft, and once more unbare the plain of death to view.