The Ypres Times.
123
THE TRENCHES OF 1914.
By FIELD OFFICER."
You ask me to tell you what interested me most on my return to the Salient. First,
the Cloth Hall ruins. Second, Tyne Cot cemetery. Third, the last remaining vestiges of
our old trenches. They are the most terrible, the most thrilling, the most tragic relics in
the whole world. A volume might be written on them.
What a difference between those first trenches of 1914 and those of three years
later It was the difference between stately and palatial corridors and dismal gutters.
And in these sloppy gutters tens of thousands of troops were compelled to live throughout
an exceptionally hard winter.
UVewspaper Illustrations.
Germans retiring through the still beautiful salient country in the
autumn of 1914; long before the days of trench systems and pill-boxes.
In those early dayseight years ago-we couldn't boast an uninterrupted line, but
a series of separate trenches. There were no communication trenches, and this obliged
us to perform reliefs at night. To get to the front line you had to crawl across the surface,
transformed into a million mud ponds. When a shell exploded overhead you dropped
flat on your stomach, with your nose in the mud, and trusted to luck. As there were no
paths nor guide posts, each battalion holding the sector furnished a guide for the troops
who were supposed to know the way, and whose business it was to keep the Tommies
from falling into shell holes and being drowned, or getting inextricably entangled in
barbed wire. Several men in one regiment perished in this fashion. One poor fellow in
the Durham Light Infantry fell and broke his arm in a crater and rested all night in the
bottom, half covered with water, which froze in the night, so that when he was foundstill
therehe had to be chopped out. Every soldier who served in the trenches before Ypres
in 1914-15 can tell you a hundred stories of his adventures trying to get to the front line
exposed to shell, rifle and machine gun fire, illuminated by star shells. And when he had
gained his objective and successfully passed all these perils he got to his trench. Did
he heave a sigh of relief What refuge-what haven did he find A ditch nearly full
of water and mud. For there were not even duck boards in those early days.
