are big brown hairy ones. They tumble out of the sun-dried cracks in the possy walls. The sun warms them I suppose. It is beastly. ... We have just had “dinner.” My new mate was sick and couldn’t eat. I tried to, and would have but for the flies. I had biscuits and a tin of jam. But immediately I opened the tin the flies rushed the jam. They buzzed like swarming bees. They swarmed that jam, all fighting amongst themselves. I wrapped my overcoat over the tin and gouged out the flies, then spread the biscuit, held my hand over it, and drew the biscuit out of the coat. But a lot of the flies flew into my month and beat about inside. Finally I threw the tin over the parapet. I nearly howled with rage. ... I feel so sulky I could chew everything to pieces. Of all the bastards of places this is the greatest bastard in the world. And a dead man’s boot in the firing-possy has been dripping grease on my overcoat and the coat will stink forever.
...This is the most infernally uncomfortable line of trenches we have ever been in, which is saying some for the regiment. We are in “reliefs” now, “resting” about fifty yards back of the firing-trench. For a couple of hours, to rest our nerves, they say. There are forty-eight of us in this particular spot, just an eighteen-inch-wide trench with iron overhead supports sandbagged as protection against bombs. We are supposed to be “sleeping,” preparatory to our next watch. Sleeping! Hell and Tommy! Maggots are crawling down the trench; it stinks like an unburied graveyard; it is dark; the air is stagnant; some of the new hands are violently sick from watching us trying to eat. We are so crowded that I can hardly write in the diary even. My mates look like shadow men crouching expectantly in hell. Bombs are crashing outside, and—the night has come! If they hadn’t been silly enough to tell us to sleep if we could I don’t suppose we would have minded. The roof of this dashed possy is intermixed with dead men who were chucked up on the parapet to give the living a chance from the bullets while the trench was being dug. What ho, for the Glories of War!
9
September—Evening—First Watch. We are back the firing-possies. The gloaming has brought the mortar-bombs flying about. They explode with a rending crash. The bullets are much more plentiful. It will soon be too dark, and we will be too busy for me to write in diary. No bombs have yet fallen in this particular portion of the trench; I dashed near pray they won’t. The Turks are only a few yards away.
...A few days later—I’m in a hospital-ship again, let me see if I can remember things and write them just they happened. With the last rays of the sun, I was staring through the periscope for any sign of the living among the bodies. There are little khaki heaps of bodies, then twos and threes here and there lying among the Turks. Some are only rotting khaki without either shape or form. The boots last the longest. Within a few yards of my periscope lay a tale telling how furiously both sides died. The Australian’s bayonet is sticking, rusty and black, six inches through the Turk’s back. One hand is gripping the Turk’s throat, while even now you can see the Turk’s teeth fastened through what was the boy’s wrist. The Turk’s bayonet is jammed through the boy’s stomach and one hand is clenched, claw-like, across the Australian’s face. I wonder will they fight if there is an after world.
Well, the dark came, bringing a vicious increase of rifle-fire. The top layer of our possy was only one sandbag thick. The bullets ripped into this, and the sand began to flow out. As the top layer of bags subsided we had to crouch lower, otherwise our heads would have been blown off. Then came one continuous screech of bullets, a piercing chorus, ceaseless throughout the night. Then the roar of bombs in earnest, exploding in front of our trench, around us, behind us, with a blinding flash and roar! and clouds of earth and smoke, and the stench of burning cloth. Soon my mate and I had to smash two apertures through our parapet so that we could peer through and shoot the shadowy bombing men. What hell was let loose outside and all around us! A bomb blew half our possy parapet in and as I was flung back my smoke-filled eyes caught a glimpse of stars far in the sky—I wished I was up there. My new mate was frightened, so he crouched down with both our overcoats folded ready to throw over any bomb that should be thrown into the trench behind us. I tried to throw the burst sandbags together as part shelter against that screaming rain, but there came a series of shattering roars that blew the whole trench parapet to hell. It started from up the right and came crashing along, bang-crash, bang—crash, bang—crash right down the line, all mixed with leaping balls of flame, it was .75 shells—they razed our parapet to the ground and blew into the air burst sandbags and baulks of timber and bits of dead men that came flying down plop, whack, plop into the trench.
In that inferno of smoke and fumes and grizzling explosives, I whiffed distinctly the mixed odour of smashed dead men, we simply crouched, partly dazed, and I kept firing and firing and firing. There was nothing else to do. Men in the possies to right and left were falling back into the trench, some screamed, others just thumped back. New men kept coming up from supports—stumbling over the bodies—groping along the trench—whispering up to us whose places they would take.
The stretcher-bearers down there had a fearful job getting the wounded away to the pitch-black tunnel places that led away back from the line. Stretchers could not be used in those narrow twistings. The Turks, expert fighters, use a sort of sheet to carry their wounded away in. Our machine-guns right amongst us were blazing their own hell to the inferno. Outside, the night was spitting flame from the Turkish rifles, their front-line so close that burning wads hissed down by our faces. Their machine-gun possies screeched in trails of flame. The Turk was fighting hard—both sides were stretched to the limit. Our bomb-throwers stood unseen, a glowing cigarette in each man’s hand—each lit fuse after fuse, throwing bomb after bomb with a sort of sighing grunt. It makes a man’s shoulder-muscles ache.
At long last the relief came stumbling in; we could not see them, we could hear them down there in the dark. At last they groped along the trench and clawed up over us, no man stepping down from the firing-possy until a new man had taken his place. We survivors of the old relief crouched down there in the trench. It was an awful feeling, waiting there, staring upward expecting hurtling bombs or mad Turks jabbing down at its any moment. At last the man behind me whispered: “File off!” I stuttered the word on, and we pressed man against man, shivering in the hope that soon we would be under some sort of cover. But in that awful slowness of moving we saw hissing sparks flying over the parapet—a choking cry, “Bomb! Bomb! Christ!” I tried to jump back but the men pressed behind were new hands and did not know what to do. Poor old King was in front of me. He jumped forward, but the men ahead crouched in the blocked trench. King was on a slight incline and as the hissing thing thudded it rolled horribly towards him. I thought the end of all things had come—I threw my overcoat over it, clenched my arms across face and stomach and pressed desperately back against the men behind. Then all was a suffocation of deathly fumes—I was on my back, quite distinctly hearing the clash of bayonets as rifles thumped across me. Then followed a strange, dull silence, ears ringing like mad. King called out: “I’m wounded, boys.” I called out, “So am I, Kingey,” and struggled up.
Poor King had an arm and leg broken, and other wounds. Two sergeants were struggling to get him away, but in that narrow network they did not know the way. I stumbled forward, but fell over a dying man. Another man had his ankle smashed, another was groaning with a smashed back, yet another man’s leg was broken. My arm was numb, I could feel warm blood trickling down my ribs. I knew it was my own blood: I felt it belonged to me. The slow rising fumes swathed the shadows of groping men, like blind things in hell. I pressed back against the trench-wall praying they would he quick getting away the wounded, and glanced fearfully upwards, expecting another bomb. What annihilation a second bull’s-eye would have been! They got poor old King and the others down a black side trench at last. Then we groped through pitch darkness into a cave-like dressing shelter, the wounded hardly moaning, just holding back their agony through clenched teeth. I was not hurt much at all. The dressing-shelter was rudely cut out in the earth. I glanced instinctively at the low roof. Thank God! It was heavily timbered and tight-packed with sandbags. I crouched down on the floor to wait my turn. The doctor was working with a tiny dull light. His A.M.C. men were all shadows; every man had his back bent. We seemed to be down in the pit: coming down the tunnel was a heavy, continuous rumbling—a sound like madmen’s voices muffled by thunder.
At last they temporarily fixed the wounded, got them on and moved off. We staggered