On my last Sunday with the flivver I drove with Secretary Armstrong to our hut at Pettonville. In the forenoon we helped Secretary Reisner in the canteen. Then we closed, ate a lunch, and, loaded down with cakes, raisins, cigarettes, and tobacco, started for the trenches. As we neared the front line the Germans began shelling the woods toward which we were headed. While we did some lightning calculating, we never slackened our pace but went through to the battalion headquarters. There a sniper volunteered as guide to the trenches. We passed several company headquarters and gave out our supplies to the men as they stood in the line with their mess kits.
When we left the first-line trenches we walked or crouched through woods, where the bark of the trees toward the enemy was riddled and broken by bullets, shrapnel, and shell; then through trenches which had been abandoned but which ran far out into No Man's Land and furnished splendid avenues to our Petty Posts. No. 4 was the first, and was so exposed that only one man at a time was permitted with the guide. Secretary Armstrong went first. While we were examining the graves of German aviators who had been killed when their planes crashed to earth, a rifle bullet whistled over our heads. We had been seen by a German sniper, so we quickly crouched low behind the trench wall. I found myself right over the grave of one of the Germans, and was rewarded by finding on it a piece of German shell, grim paradox of the fortunes of war.
We continued through the trenches to P.P. No. 5. This was our nearest point in this sector to the enemy front line. It was difficult to get through because of the mud and water in the trench. In some places, because of exposure to the enemy guns, we had to crawl on our hands and knees. At the post were eight men, two at the observation post and the rest in a dugout nearby. The men at the P.P.'s are on guard forty-eight hours, and off twenty-four hours. After ten days they are relieved and go back for ten days' rest.
This special post was raided four times during that week. One report said three hundred Germans came over but the men at the post said about sixty. One attack was a surprise and they got four of our men. The other times the Germans were routed with varying losses. The P.P.'s are only observation posts and are not intended to be held in case of raid, but usually our boys were eager to give Fritz all that was coming to him, and they seldom failed no matter how largely outnumbered.
There were no signs of fear among our splendid fellows, and while it required courage to be a mile or more beyond the supporting line, lying out in No Man's Land, yet the very danger and the adventure of it made a mighty appeal to the full-blooded Yank, and there was never a lack of volunteers.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Duck-boards are sections of boardwalk laid in the bottom of the trenches to keep the soldiers up out of the mud. These sections are about ten feet long and two wide, and made by nailing cross pieces to two scantling.