The way to Monchy from the Altenburg Redoubt cost, all told, a profusion of blood. It followed the further slope of a slight depression that lay 500 metres perhaps behind our front line. The enemy, who no doubt was aware from aeroplane photographs that the track was much used, made it his business to comb it out with machine-gun fire at short intervals or to sling plenty of shrapnel at it. Although there was a trench running beside it, and though there were strict orders to use this trench, everybody made a practice of going along in the open with the usual indifference of the old soldier to the risk of a bullet. As a rule it was all right, but one of two victims were claimed daily, and this with time mounted up to a good number. Besides this, the builders of the Altenburg Redoubt had placed the latrine in the very lowest spot of the valley, where the stray bullets from every quarter of the compass appeared to forgather, so that one was often compelled to fly for the open clasping a newspaper in one hand and one’s clothing in the other. Nevertheless, this indispensable institution was left undisturbed in its perilous position, a speaking example of the general indifference to danger.
January, too, was a month of unremitting labour. Each platoon, with shovels, buckets, and pumps, first removed the mud from the immediate neighbourhood of their dugout, and then, when they had solid ground under their feet, proceeded to establish communications with the sections on either side. In Adinfer wood, where our artillery was situated, forestry detachments were employed in stripping young trees of their branches and splitting them in long sections. The walls of the trench were sloped off and entirely revetted with this material. Numerous culverts and sump pits and gullies were constructed, till by degrees the conditions of life were bearable again.
On the 28th January 1916 a man in my platoon got a body wound from a splinter of a bullet that was shattered to bits against his loophole plate. On the 30th another got a bullet in the thigh. On the 1st February, the day of our relief, the communication trenches were being heavily shelled. A shrapnel shell fell just at the feet of Fusilier Junge, my onetime cleaner of the 6th Company. It did not explode, but flared up and he had to be carried away with severe burns.
About the same time a N.C.O. of the 6th Company, whom I knew well and whose brother had been killed a few days before, was fatally injured by a toffee-apple which he had picked up. He had unscrewed the fuse, and observing that the powder was smouldering he put the end of his cigarette into the opening. Of course, the toffee-apple exploded and wounded him in over fifty places. In ways like this we were continually suffering losses through the carelessness that comes from constantly having to do with explosives. Lieutenant Pook was an uncomfortable neighbour for this reason. He inhabited a lonely dugout in a tangle of trenches behind the left flank, and there he had shepherded together a number of enormous duds. He occupied himself unscrewing their fuses and then examining them. I always gave this uncomfortable dwelling a wide berth whenever I had to pass by it.
On the night of the 3rd February we had arrived in Douchy once more after a fatiguing spell in the line. Next morning I was sitting in my billet on the Emmichs Platz in the mood appropriate to the first day of rest, comfortably drinking coffee, when suddenly a monster of a shell, the herald of a heavy bombardment, exploded at my very door and blew the window into the room. With three bounds I was in the cellar, whither the other occupants of the house had also betaken themselves with astonishing speed, and there we presented a lamentable picture. As the cellar was half above ground and separated from the garden only by a thin wall, we all crowded into the short, cramped neck of a shaft. My sheepdog crept whimpering between our tightly-packed bodies with an animal’s instinctive desire for the darkest corner. Far away in the distance one heard the heavy reports at regular intervals, followed within a few seconds by the whistling howl of the heavy lumps of metal hurtling through the air and ending in crash after crash as they exploded all round our little house. Each time an unpleasant rush of air came through the cellar window, clods of earth and splinters rattled on the tiled roof, and in the stalls the terrified horses snorted and reared up. The dog whimpered, and a fat bandsman, as each shell came whistling over, cried aloud as though he was going to have a tooth pulled out.
At last the weather cleared and we could emerge again into the open air. The devastated village street was as lively as a disturbed ant-heap. My quarters had a sorry appearance. Close to the cellar wall the earth was torn up in several places, fruit trees were snapped off, and
