On an offensive front they have vertical sides of unsupported earth and occasional soakaways for rain, covered by wooden gratings, and they go on and on and on.At rare intervals they branch, and a notice board says "To Regent Street," or "To Oxford Street," or some such lie.It is all just trench.For a time you talk, but talking in single file soon palls.You cease to talk, and trudge.A great number of telephone wires come into the trench and cross and recross it.You cannot keep clear of them.Your helmet pings against them and they try to remove it.
Sometimes you have to stop and crawl under wires.Then you wonder what the trench is like in really wet weather.You hear a shell burst at no great distance.You pass two pages of /The Strand Magazine./ Perhaps thirty yards on you pass a cigarette end.After these sensational incidents the trench quiets down again and continues to wind endlessly--just a sandy, extremely narrow vertical walled trench.A giant crack.
At last you reach the front line trench.On an offensive sector it has none of the architectural interest of first line trenches at such places as Soissons or Arras.It was made a week or so ago by joining up shell craters, and if all goes well we move into the German trench along by the line of scraggy trees, at which we peep discreetly, to-morrow night.We can peep discreetly because just at present our guns are putting shrapnel over the enemy at the rate of about three shells a minute, the puffs follow each other up and down the line, and no Germans are staring out to see us.
The Germans "strafed" this trench overnight, and the men are tired and sleepy.Our guns away behind us are doing their best now to give them a rest by strafing the Germans.One or two men are in each forward sap keeping a look out; the rest sleep, a motionless sleep, in the earthy shelter pits that have been scooped out.One officer sits by a telephone under an earth-covered tarpaulin, and a weary man is doing the toilet of a machine gun.We go on to a shallow trench in which we must stoop, and which has been badly knocked about....Here we have to stop.The road to Berlin is not opened up beyond this point.
My companion on this excursion is a man I have admired for years and never met until I came out to see the war, a fellow writer.
He is a journalist let loose.Two-thirds of the junior British officers I met on this journey were really not "army men" at all.
One finds that the apparent subaltern is really a musician, or a musical critic, or an Egyptologist, or a solicitor, or a cloth manufacturer, or a writer.At the outbreak of the war my guide dyed his hair to conceal its tell-tale silver, and having been laughed to scorn by the ordinary recruiting people, enlisted in the sportsmen's battalion.He was wounded, and then the authorities discovered that he was likely to be of more use with a commission and drew him, in spite of considerable resistance, out of the firing line.To which he always returns whenever he can get a visitor to take with him as an excuse.He now stood up, fairly high and clear, explaining casually that the Germans were no longer firing, and showed me the points of interest.
I had come right up to No Man's Land at last.It was under my chin.The skyline, the last skyline before the British could look down on Bapaume, showed a mangy wood and a ruined village, crouching under repeated gobbings of British shrapnel."They've got a battery just there, and we're making it uncomfortable." No Man's Land itself is a weedy space broken up by shell craters, with very little barbed wire in front of us and very little in front of the Germans."They've got snipers in most of the craters, and you see them at twilight hopping about from one to the other." We have very little wire because we don't mean to stay for very long in this trench, but the Germans have very little wire because they have not been able to get it up yet.
They never will get it up now....
I had been led to believe that No Man's Land was littered with the unburied dead, but I saw nothing of the sort at this place.
There had been no German counter attack since our men came up here.But at one point as we went along the trench there was a dull stench."Germans, I think," said my guide, though I did not see how he could tell.
He looked at his watch and remarked reluctantly, "If you start at once, you may just do it."I wanted to catch the Boulogne boat.It was then just past one in the afternoon.We met the stew as we returned along the communication trench, and it smelt very good indeed....We hurried across the great spaces of rusty desolation upon which every now and again a German shell was bursting....
That night I was in my flat in London.I had finished reading the accumulated letters of some weeks, and I was just going comfortably to bed.
