Battlefield ditches

Usage examples of trenches.

At the front I was concerned day after day with the winning of trenches and the storming of villages whose names meant as little in the Middle West as a bitter fight for good government in a Western city meant to the men at the front.

British to the methodical occupation of quiet trenches while their allies were sent to the sacrifice, had its effect for a time on the outside public and even on the French, but did not disturb the equanimity of the British staff in the course of its preparations or of the French staff, which knew well enough that when the time came the British Army would not be fastidious about paying the red cost of victory.

Australians with their dollar and a half a day, buying out the shops of a village when they were not in the trenches, were astounding to the natives though not in the least to themselves.

As holding the line required little fighting, the industrious Germans under the stiff bonds of discipline had plenty of time for sinking deep dugouts and connecting galleries under their first line and for elaborating their communication trenches and second line, until what had once been peaceful farming land now consisted of irregular welts of white chalk crossing fields without hedges or fences, whose sweep had been broken only by an occasional group of farm buildings of a large proprietor, a plot of woods, or the village communities where the farmers lived and went to and from their farms which were demarked to the eye only by the crop lines.

Little flashes played among big flashes and flashes laid over flashes shingle fashion in a riot of lurid competition, while along the line of the German trenches at some places lay a haze of shimmering flame from the rapid fire of the trench mortars.

And under the German trenches at several points were vast charges of explosives which had been patiently borne under ground through arduously made tunnels.

Men rushed the trenches which they were to take and hold later, and by their brief visit learned whether or not the barbed wire had been properly cut to give the great charge a clear pathway and whether or not the German trenches were properly mashed.

Up near the trenches at dusk, in the last billet before the assembly for attack, company officers were recalling the essentials of instructions to a line standing at ease at one side of the street while caissons of shells had the right of way.

Yes, one had the system in the large and the small, by the army, the corps, the division, the brigade, the battalion, and the man, the individual infantryman who was to suffer that hazard of marching in the open toward the trenches which not guns, or motor trucks, or trench-mortar shells could take, but only he could take and hold.

There was no visible sign that a wave of men twenty-five miles long, reaching from Gommecourt to Soyecourt, wherever the trenches ran across fields, through villages and along slopes to the banks of the Somme and beyond, had left their parapets.

The spectator going here and there could hear accounts at one headquarters of battalions that were beyond the first-line trenches and at another of battalions whose survivors were back in their own trenches.

Those shell-threshed parapets of the first-line German trenches which appeared to represent complete destruction had not filled in all the doorways of dugouts which big shells had failed to reach.

Surviving officers with objectives burned in their brains led the surviving men past the first-line trenches if the directions required this.

That is, the units turned back toward their own trenches under direction.

Where from Thiepval to Gommecourt the men who had expected to be organizing new trenches were back in their old ones and the gunners who had hoped to move their guns forward were in the same positions and all the plans for supplying an army in advance were still on paper, to the southward anticipation had become realization and the system devised to carry on after success was being applied.