Once our
company lay in a trench as reserves for fourteen hours, and during
that time upwards of two thousand shells were hurled in our direction,
our trench being half filled with rubble and clay. Two mates, one on
my right and one on my left, were wounded. I did not receive a
scratch, and Stoner slept for eight whole hours during the cannonade;
but this is another story.
Before coming out here I formed an imaginary picture of the trenches,
ours and the enemy's, running parallel from the Vosges in the South to
the sea in the North. But what a difference I find in the reality.
Where I write the trenches run in a strange, eccentric manner. At one
point the lines are barely eighty yards apart; the ground there is
under water in the wet season; the trench is built of sandbags; all
rifle fire is done from loop-holes, for to look over the parapet is to
court certain death. A mountain of coal-slack lies between the lines a
little further along, which are in "dead" ground that cannot be
covered by rifle fire, and are 1,200 yards apart. It is here that the
sniper plies his trade. He hides somewhere in the slack, and pots (p. 077)
at our men from dawn to dusk and from dusk to dawn. He knows the range
of every yard of our communication trenches. As we come in we find a
warning board stuck up where the parapet is crumbling away. "Stoop
low, sniper," and we crouch along head bent until the danger zone is
past.
Little mercy is shown to a captured sniper; a short shrift and swift
shot is considered meet penalty for the man who coolly and coldly
singles out men for destruction day by day.
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