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 grass across
what two days ago was No Man's Land into the old German defences. The
grass 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 grass, 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 space 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 shells 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 shell, and two
unexploded bombs like huge ancient cannon balls, 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 shell 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 shell-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 space with as much
ingenuity as the berths in an emigrant ship. 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 passage 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.