As already mentioned, the front line described a semi-circle around the village, connected to it by an array of communication trenches. It was divided in two, Monchy South and Monchy West. These in turn were formed up into six company sections, from A to F. The bulge in the front afforded the British a good opportunity for flanking fire, the skilful use of which occasioned us heavy losses. They deployed a gun hidden immediately behind their own lines that sent out little shrapnels, which seemed to be fired and to reach us practically simultaneously. Out of the blue a hail of lead balls would flash down over the length of a trench, as often as not taking a sentry with it.
Next, let us take a quick turn through the trenches as they were at that time, to familiarize the reader with some of the recurring terminology.
To reach the front line, the firing trench, we take one of the many ‘saps’, or communication trenches, whose job it is to afford the troops some protection on their way to battle stations. These, often very long, trenches are broadly perpendicular to the front, but, to make it less easy to rake them with fire, they most often follow a zigzag or curving course. After a quarter of an hour’s march, we enter the second trench, the support trench, which is parallel to the firing trench, and serves as a further line of defence should that be taken.
The firing trench is wholly unlike those frail constructions that were dug in the early days of the war. Nor is it just a simple ditch either, but it is dug to a depth of ten or twenty feet. The defenders move around as on the bottom of a mine gallery; to observe the ground in front of the position, or to fire out, they climb a set of steps or a wide wooden ladder to the sentry platform, which is set at such a height in the earth that a man standing on it is a head taller than the top of the rampart. The marksman stands at his sentry post, a more or less armoured niche, with his head protected by a wall of sandbags or a steel plate. The actual lookout is through tiny slits through which a rifle barrel is pushed. The quantities of earth that were dug out of the trench are piled up in a wall behind the trench, a parados affording protection from the rear; machine-gun emplacements are built into these earthworks. On the front side of the trench, the earth is kept level, so as to leave the field of vision as clear and uncluttered as possible.
In front of the trench, often in multiple lines, is a wire entanglement, a complicated web of barbed wire designed to keep the attacker busy, so that he presents an easy target for the defensive sentries.
Rank weeds climb up and through the barbed wire, symptomatic of a new and different type of flora taking root on the fallow fields. Wild flowers, of a sort that generally make only an occasional appearance in grain fields, dominate the scene; here and there even bushes and shrubs have taken hold. The paths too are overgrown, but easily identified by the presence on them of round-leaved plantains. [German Wegerich: the weed plantain (etymologically derived from the French plante, ‘sole of the foot’) which flourishes along footpaths, rather than the tropical vegetable of the same name (from the Spanish platano, ‘banana’). Anna Akhmatova’s 1921 book of poems was called Plaintain in the same sense.]
Bird life thrives in such wilderness, partridges for instance, whose curious cries we often hear at night, or larks, whose choir starts up at first light over the trenches.
To keep the firing trench from being raked by flanking fire, it’s laid out in a meandering line, forever doubling and tripling back on itself. Each of these turns forms a traverse, to catch any shells fired from the side. The fighter is thus protected from behind, from the side and, of course, from the front.
To rest in, there are dugouts, which have evolved by now from rudimentary holes in the ground to proper enclosed living quarters, with beamed ceilings and plank-cladded walls. The dugouts are about six feet high, and at a depth where their floors are roughly level with the bottom of the trench outside. In effect, there is a layer of earth on top of them thick enough to enable them to survive oblique hits. In heavy fire, though, they are death-traps, and it’s better to be in the depths of the shelters.
The shelters are braced with solid wood joists. The first is fixed in the front wall of the trench, level with the bottom, and from this entrance each successive joist is set a couple of hand’s breadths lower, so that the amount of protection is rapidly increased. By the thirtieth step, there are nine yards of earth overhead, twelve counting the depth of the trench. Then there are slightly wider frames set straight ahead or perpendicular to the steps; these constitute the actual living quarters. Communication is possible by lateral tunnels, while branchings-off towards the enemy lines are used for mining or listening posts.
The whole thing should be pictured as a huge, ostensibly inert installation, a secret hive of industry and watchfulness, where, within a few seconds of an alarm being sounded, every man is at his post. But one shouldn’t have too romantic an idea of the atmosphere; there is a certain prevailing torpor that proximity to the earth seems to engender.
I was sent to the 6th Company, and, a few days after my arrival, moved into line at the head of a platoon, where I was straightaway welcomed by a few English ‘toffee-apples’. These are brittle iron shells, filled with high explosive, somewhat resembling fruit on a stalk; or imagine a fifty-kilogram dumbbell, with one of the weights missing. They went off with a muffled thud, and, moreover, were often masked by machine-gun fire. It therefore made an eerie impression on me when sudden flames lit up the trench just next to us, and a malignant wave of air pressure shook us. The men quickly pulled me back into the platoon dugout, which we were just passing. We felt the next five or six mortar thumps from within. The mine doesn’t actually impact, it seems more to nestle down; the calmness of its devastation was somehow the more unsettling. The following day, when I first inspected the trench by daylight, I saw those big emptied steel casings hanging up by their stalks outside dugouts, serving as alarm gongs.
C Sector, which our company held, was the regiment’s most forward sector. In Lieutenant Brecht, who had hurried back from the United States at the outbreak of war, we had the very man to defend such a position. He loved danger, and he died in battle.
Life in the trenches was a matter of unbending routines; I will now describe the course of a single day of the kind that we had, one after another, for a year and a half, except when normal levels of fire were intensified to what we called ‘turbulence’.
Day in the trenches begins at dusk. At seven o’clock someone from my platoon comes in to wake me from my afternoon nap, which, with a view to night duty, I like to have.
I buckle on my belt, stick a Verey-light pistol in it and some bombs, and leave my more or less cosy dugout. As I walk through the by now highly familiar sector, I automatically check that the sentries are all in position. The password is given in low tones. By now, it is night-time, and the first silvery flares climb aloft, while peeled eyes scrutinize no man’s land. A rat skitters about among the tin cans thrown over the ramparts. Another joins it with a squeak, and, before long, the whole place is swarming with the lithe shapes emerging from their holes in ruined village basements or among the shot-up bomb shelters. Hunting rats is a much-loved change from the tedium of sentry duty. A piece of bread is put out as bait, and a rifle is leveled at it, or gunpowder from dud shells is sprinkled in their holes and torched. Then they come squeaking out with singed fur. They are repellent creatures, and I’m always thinking of the secret desecrations they perform on the bodies in the village basements. Once, as I was striding through the ruins of Monchy on a warm night, they came oozing out of their hiding-places in such indescribable numbers that the ground was like a long carpet of them, patterned with the occasional white of an albino. Some cats have moved in with us from the ruined villages around; they love the proximity of humans. One large white torn with a shot-off front paw is frequently seen ghosting about in no man’s land, and seems to have been adopted by both sides.