Part 5 (2/2)

This morning we went to the same view point. The firing had gone well beyond Fricourt Wood. They were German sh.e.l.ls which were now falling on the smoking site of La Boiselle.

On the white bank there still lay twelve dark figures.

CHAPTER XIII

THE DUG-OUTS OF FRICOURT

_France, July 3rd._

Yesterday from the opposite slope of a gentle valley we watched Fricourt village taken. This morning we walked down through the long gra.s.s across what two days ago was No Man's Land into the old German defences. The gra.s.s has been uncut for two years on these slopes, and that is why there springs from them such a growth of flowers as I have rarely seen.

I think it was once a wheat field that we were walking through. It is a garden of poppies, cornflowers, and mustard flower now.

Half-way down the slope we noticed that we were crossing a line which seemed to have been strangely ruled through the wheat field. It was covered with gra.s.s, but there was a line of baby apple trees on each side of it. It took one some seconds to realise that it was a road.

We jumped across trench after trench of our own. At the bottom of the valley we stepped over a trench which had a wire entanglement in front of it. It was the old British front line. The s.p.a.ce in front of it had been No Man's Land.

Some of our men were still lying where shrapnel or rifle fire had caught them. By them ran another old road up the valley. Beyond the road the railway trucks were still standing as they have stood for two years in what once was Fricourt siding. The foundations of Fricourt village stood up a little beyond, against the dark shades of Fricourt Wood.

Immediately before us, in front of this battered white ash heap, were the remains of the rusted wire which had once been the maze in front of the German line.

We found fragments of that wire in the bottom of the trenches themselves; lengths of it were lying among the shattered buildings behind the lines. The British sh.e.l.ls and bombs must have tossed it about as you would toss hay with a rake. In the tumbled ruins behind the lines you simply stepped from one crater into another. Into many of those craters you could have placed a fair-sized room. One big sh.e.l.l, and two unexploded bombs like huge ancient cannon b.a.l.l.s, lay there on a shelf covered with rubbish.

Through this rubbish heap were scattered odd fragments of farming machinery--here an old wagon wheel--there a ploughshare or a portion of a harrow--in another place some old iron press of which I do not know the use. The rest of the village was like a deserted brick-field, or the remains of some ancient mining camp--I do not think there were three fragments of wall over 10 feet high left. And in and out of this debris wandered the German front line. We jumped down into those trenches where some sh.e.l.l had broken them in. They were deep and narrow, such as we had in Gallipoli. Back from them led narrow, deep, winding communication trenches which, curiously enough, in parts where we saw them, seemed to have no supports to their walls such as all the trenches in the wet country farther north must have. Here and there some sh.e.l.l-burst had broken or shaken them in.

As we made our way along the front line we found, every few yards or so, a low, squared, timbered opening below the parapet. A dozen wooden steps led down and forwards into some dark interior far below.

We clambered down into the first of these chambers. It was exactly as its occupants had left it. On the floor amongst some tumbled blankets and odd pieces of clothing, socks for the most part, was scattered a stock of German grenades, each like a grey jampot with a short handle.

The blankets had come from a series of bunks which almost filled up the whole dark chamber. These bunks were made roughly of wood, in pairs one over another, packed into every corner of the narrow s.p.a.ce with as much ingenuity as the berths in an emigrant s.h.i.+p. There were, I think, six of them in that first chamber. Inlet into the wall, at the end of one set of bunks, was a wooden box doing service for a cupboard. In it were a penny novel, and three or four bottles of a German table water. At least one of these was still full. So the garrison of Fricourt was not as hard put to it for supplies as some of the German prisoners with whom I spoke the day before. They had told me that for three or four days no water could be brought to them up their communication trenches owing to the British bombardment.

I expect that the garrison of Fricourt had been almost entirely in those dug-outs during the bombardment. The chambers seemed to have more than one entrance in some cases, and one suspects they also led into one another underground. A subterranean pa.s.sage led forward beneath the parapet to a door opening into No Man's Land--you could see the daylight at the end of it.

The fire trench was battered in places out of recognition. But here and there we came across a bay of it which the bombardment had left more or less untouched. There were slings of cartridges still hanging against the wall of the trench. There were the two steel plates through which they had peered out into No Man's Land, the slits in them half covered by the flap so as just to give a man room to peep through them. There was the machine-gun platform, with a long, empty belt still lying on it.

There was the periscope standing on its spike, which had been stuck into the trench wall. It looked out straight across No Man's Land, but both mirrors were gone.

As we picked our way through the brick heaps there came towards us a British soldier with fixed bayonet, and an elderly bareheaded man. The elderly man's hair was cut short, and was grizzly. He had not shaved for three days. He was stout, but his face had a curious grey tinge shot through the natural complexion. His lips were tightly compressed. He looked about him firmly enough, but with that open-eyed gaze of a wild animal which seemed to lack all comprehension. It was the face of a man almost witless. He wore the uniform of a German captain.

He was one of the men who had been through that bombardment.

CHAPTER XIV

THE RAID

_France, July 9th._

During the first week of the battle of the Somme the Anzac troops far to the north, near Armentieres, raided the German trenches about a dozen times. Here is a sample of these raids.

We were late. For some reason we had decided to watch this one from the firing-line. We had stayed too long at Brigade Headquarters getting the details of the night's plan. Just as we hurried out of the end of the communication trench into the dark jumble of the low sandbag constructions which formed this part of the firing-line, there came two bangs from the southward as if someone had hit an iron s.h.i.+p's tank with a big drumstick. It was our preparatory bombardment which had begun.

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