The Front affords plenty of occasions for humour if a man
has only learnt to laugh at himself. I had been sent forward to report
at a battalion headquarters as liaison officer for an attack. The
headquarters were in a captured dug-out somewhere under a ruined
house. Just as I got there and was searching among the fallen walls
for an entrance, the Hun barrage came down. It was like the
Yellowstone Park when all the geysers are angry at the same
time. Roofs, beams, chips of stone commenced to fly in every
direction. In the middle of the hubbub a small dump of bombs was
struck by a shell and started to explode behind me. The blast of the
explosion caught me up and hurled me down fifteen stairs of the
dug-out I had been trying to discover. I landed on all fours in a
place full of darkness; a door banged behind me. I don't know how long
I lay there. Something was squirming under me. A voice said
plaintively, "I don't know who you are, but I wish you'd get off. I'm
the adjutant."
It's a queer country, that place we call "out there." You approach our
front-line, as it is to-day, across anywhere from five to twenty miles
of battlefields. Nothing in the way of habitation is left. Everything
has been beaten into pulp by hurricanes of shell-fire. First you come
to a metropolis of horse-lines, which makes you think that a mammoth
circus has arrived. Then you come to plank roads and little light
railways, running out like veins across the mud.
Pages:
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107