1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [330]
The bottom of the trench is on an average six to eight inches deep in slushy chalk the consistency of whipped cream, and in some places it is two and even three feet deep in water. After doing the round you give a look to the working-parties. Some of this is beastly work. The sandbags get water-logged and then freeze, and the bags burst, and a mass of parapet weighing three or four tons topples right over. All the debris has to be cleared, new bags have to be filled, and the broken bit has to be built up again. This is a filthy dirty job and a most tiring one – a sandbag filled with chalk is a jolly good weight. You then give a look to the sap – a trench which runs perpendicularly from our line out towards the enemy – and here one has to be rather more careful. The sap may be going to be used for a listening post, or perhaps as the starting point of a future firing trench. Of the three men in it one is at the end and acting as a sentry, the other two with their rifles and bayonets fixed alongside them are quietly and silently working, the one picking, the other shovelling the chalk up to the side. They have to take care not to throw earth up while a star shell is burning as this would give the show away. By the time this is over, two of the three hours have passed, and you can sit down on the fire-step for ten minutes or so and smoke and talk to one of the sentries. Every now and again there is the purring of a machine-gun and the sing-sing-sing-sing as the bullets fly overhead, generally searching for the transport away back behind. One more round of the sentries completes the time, but just before five when the sky is beginning to grow grey there is suddenly a loud whizz in the air, coming yards away. Then five or six ‘pip-squeaks’ come over together, a pause and then another whizzing but this time louder and slower and a bigger bang, three or four of these and then the ‘pip-squeaks’ come on again. In a quarter of an hour it is over.
At six o’clock there is a general cry of stand-to all along the line, and everyone turns out and stands-to their post as this is the danger hour. But the feature of stand to is the issue of the rum ration. By this time it is light and you can see the men’s faces and clothes and it is really a picture. Everything – faces, hands, clothes – are the same dirty-white colour, and the chalk is lying deep over everything. They have three or four days’ growth of hair on their faces and the only things which are clean are the rifles and ammunition which at all costs must be kept clean of dirt. Of course, the poor beggars are pretty fagged out and show it.
Most battalions were low in numbers. Drafts of reinforcements were arriving in dribs and drabs and there were seldom enough to bring them up to anything like full strength and replace the casualties incurred in the daily routine of holding the line. Even in quiet periods there was an average of five thousand casualties a week. Manpower was still a headache and one of the many matters on which opinion in Government circles was divided. Unlike more militaristic nations which required every young man reaching a certain age to do military service and which could call upon huge reserves of trained men in the event of war, Great Britain had always depended on her standing army of professional soldiers and also relied on willing volunteers to augment it in time of need. Now, after fifteen months of war, with greater casualties than had ever been imagined – and, as the war spread, far wider commitments