THE AMPHIBIANS--FED UP, BUT DETERMINED
--THE GUN PARAPET
So you see, life in our cottage was quite interesting and adventurous in
its way. At night our existence was just the same as before; all the
normal work of trench life. Making improvements to our trenches led to
endless work with sandbags, planks, dug-outs, etc. My particular job was
mostly improving machine-gun positions, or selecting new sites and
carrying out removals,
"BRUCE BAIRNSFATHER.
MACHINE GUNS REMOVED AT SHORTEST NOTICE.
ATTACKS QUOTED FOR."
And so the long dark dreary nights went on. The men garrisoning the
little cracked-up village lived mostly in cellars. Often on my rounds,
during a rainy, windy, mournful night, I would look into a cellar and
see a congested mass of men playing cards by the light of a candle stuck
on a tin lid. A favourite form of illumination I came across was a lamp
made out of an empty tobacco tin, rifle oil for the illuminant, and a
bit of a shirt for a wick!
People who read all these yarns of mine, and who have known the war in
later days, will say, "Ah, how very different it was then to now." In my
last experiences in the war I have watched the enormous changes creeping
in. They began about July, 1915. My experiences since that date were
very interesting; but I found that much of the romance had left the
trenches. The old days, from the beginning to July, 1915, were all so
delightfully precarious and primitive. Amateurish trenches and rough and
ready life, which to my mind gave this war what it sadly needs--a touch
of romance.
Way back there, in about January, 1915, our soldiers had a perfectly
unique test of human endurance against appalling climatic conditions.
They lived in a vast bog, without being able to utilize modern
contrivances for making the tight against adverse conditions anything
like an equal contest. And yet I wouldn't have missed that time for
anything, and I'm sure they wouldn't either.
Those who have not actually had to experience it, or have not had the
opportunity to see what our men "stuck out" in those days, will never
fully grasp the reality.
One night a company commander came to me in the village and told me he
had got a bit of trench under his control which was altogether
impossible to hold, and he wanted me to come along with him to look at
it, and see if I could do anything in the way of holding the position by
machine guns. His idea was that possibly a gun might be fixed in such a
place behind so as to cover the frontage occupied by this trench. I came
along with him to have a look and see what could be done. He and I went
up the rain-soaked village street and out on to the field beyond. It was
as dark as pitch, and about 11 p.m. Occasional shots cracked out of the
darkness ahead from the German trenches, and I remember one in
particular that woke us up a bit. A kind of derelict road-roller stood
at one side of the field, and as we passed this, walking pretty close
together, a bullet whizzed between us. I don't know which head it was
nearest to, but it was quite near enough for both of us. We went on
across the field for about two hundred yards, out towards a pile of
ruins which had once been a barn, and which stood between our lines and
the Germans.
Near this lay the trench which he had been telling me about. It was
quite the worst I have ever seen. A number of men were in it, standing
and leaning, silently enduring the following conditions. It was quite
dark. The enemy was about two hundred yards away, or rather less. It was
raining, and the trench contained over three feet of water. The men,
therefore, were standing up to the waist in water. The front parapet was
nothing but a rough earth mound which, owing to the water about, was
practically non-existent. Their rifles lay on the saturated mound in
front. They were all wet through and through, with a great deal of their
equipment below the water at the bottom of the trench. There they were,
taking it all as a necessary part of the great game; not a grumble nor a
comment.
The company commander and I at once set about scheming out an
alternative plan. Some little distance back we found a cellar which had
once been below a house. Now there was no house, so by standing in the
cellar one got a view along the ground and level with it. This was the
very place for a machine gun. So we decided on fixing one there and
making a sort of roof over a portion of the cellar for the gunners to
live in. After about a couple of hours' work we completed this
arrangement, and then removed the men, who, it was arranged, should
leave the trenches that night and go back to our billets for a rest,
till the next time up. We weren't quite content with the total safety of
our one gun in that cellar, so we started off on a further idea.
Our trenches bulged out in a bit of a salient to the right of the rotten
trench, and we decided to mount another gun at a certain projection in
our lines so as to enfilade the land across which the other gun would
fire.
On inspecting the projected site we found it was necessary to make
rather an abnormally high parapet to stand the gun on. No sandbags to
spare, of course, so the question was, "What shall we make a parapet
of?"
We plodded off back to the village and groped around the ruins for
something solid and high enough to carry the gun. After about an hour's
climbing about amongst debris in the dark, and hauling ourselves up into
remnants of attics, etc., we came upon a sewing machine. It was one of
that sort that's stuck on a wooden table with a treadle arrangement
underneath. We saw an idea at a glance. Pull off the sewing machine, and
use the table. It was nearly high enough, and with just three or four
sandbags we felt certain it would do. We performed the necessary
surgical operation on the machine, and taking it in turns, padded off
down to the front line trench. We had a bit of a job with that table.
The parapet was a jumbled assortment of sandbags, clay, and old bricks
from the neighbouring barn: but we finally got a good sound parapet
made, and in about another hour's time had fixed a machine gun, with
plenty of ammunition, in a very unattractive position from the Boche
point of view. We all now felt better, and I'm certain that the men who
held that trench felt better too. But I am equally certain that they
would have stayed there _ad lib_ even if we hadn't thought of and
carried out an alternative arrangement. A few more nights of rain,
danger and discomfort, then the time would come for us to be relieved,
and those same men would be back at billets, laughing, talking and
smoking, buoyant as ever.