"TRENCH NIGHTMARE"
Often in the long, long hours of the midnight during that period I
brooded over the situation. Frequently the wheels of my thought would
turn swiftly, and cause me to reflect upon that life in the terrible
trenches; in those uncanny and frightful sewers, dug in the ground, cut
there in No Man's Land, and, it sometimes seemed, in no God's land,
where the guns bark, and the red fire leaps, and the shrapnel hisses,
and the howitzers rip and snort in the daytime, and where glassy-eyed
rats and vermin sneak and glide, spying upon the fatigued soldier in the
night time, ready to finish up the work which the explosive may not
quite have ended.
Out there, in those animal burrows, surrounded by mud and blood and
bacterial mold, where, week after week, the poor, plucky poilus existed,
it could not be called living, and month after month remained in the
weird, grim business of killing their unseen opponents by machinery.
I can picture them now lying upon that bank of dirt, some two feet high
and eighteen inches wide--the fire step, they call it--which runs along
the front side of the trench, six feet in the ground and three or four
feet wide, with nothing overhead, or nothing but branches of trees
covered with dust and mud.
As I write I can see the entire spectacle: How those men stuck out their
rifles through the openings left for them and, at the given signal,
fired, never knowing whether they hit and killed their objects.
But those bullets went home, all right.
The list of wounded on either side, at the end of the week or the end of
the month, told more tragically than any individual report could tell
that those bullets went home. And day after day, and week after week,
every three minutes, or every four minutes, those men raised their
smoking, reeking tubes of death, and let fly the fatal messengers.
And night after night they had to lie upon that bench bed of dirt and
indulge in disturbed sleep, or else gaze out upon that knotted, gnarled
mass of barbed-wire entanglements in front of the trenches, as it
glistened in the moonlight; that barrier, which, unlike the barbed wire
that civilized man--and civilized beast--is accustomed to, has barbs
upon it, not one but four inches in length, to rend and tear and catch
the flesh of man, and hold him wriggling, writhing and squirming as he
tries to charge the enemy, just long enough to give that enemy the
chance, from his hiding place over yonder under the ground, to shoot him
full of bullet holes.
God, what a nightmare it is! And when an assault was ordered and they
charged down the alleyways between the sections of barbed-wire
entanglement, they found themselves confronted by storms of bullets from
those wicked machine guns, each one of which speaks at a rate of 450 to
3,000 times per minute.
In order to have even a gambler's chance of capturing the enemy's
trench, therefore, sometimes it became necessary to abandon the open
alleyways and charge right across and "over the top" of those awful
masses of barbed wire. This was almost certain death for those of the
first ranks. Other lines of men following close upon the first might
also be mowed down as well, as they were caught upon the wire, but after
a while all the wire is covered up, and all the space is filled between
the top of it, waist high, and the earth, with soldiers' bodies, a
veritable foundation of human flesh, upon which the following waves of
men usually rushed over successfully without becoming entangled.
If fortune was with them, they had some possibility of taking the trench
of the enemy.
If they did, what next?
The enemy, or what was left of him, retreated through communicating
trenches to others in the rear, of which there are many, planted a stick
of dynamite after him, to blow up his retreat, and found himself, in a
few moments, a hundred yards back, and intrenched just as solidly as he
was before. Perhaps even more solidly, because he had now the men who
escaped from the front line trench in addition to the same number in the
second line, which now became the first.
Such is war today.
And, because of this method of warfare, the death list is a hundredfold
more frightful, and so along that battle line in France, three hundred
and fifty miles in length, the weekly toll of human life staggers all
conception. The contemplation of it saddens the soul. Nothing but the
vision of Liberty and Right triumphant can ever compensate for the
slaughtered loved ones.
The piles of dead and wounded men, bleeding, groaning masses of human
pulp, rotting flesh and decaying bones, carry disease and fever to
ambulance rescue workers and all. These are the black silhouettes which
go to make up that grim and gloomy picture, that nightmare of the
trenches. These, of course, are the things one sees in his dark and
somber moments. But it is not all like this.