!74
THE YPRES TIMES
and so save us the trouble of putting the wire in order. However, our officer, full
of the courage bred in the training camps in Blighty, would not hear of us doing
any such thing, and insisted upon taking us out at once and do what we had come
to do. So we were conducted to the trench stores and each man picked up the
load assigned to him, and we then proceeded to clamber up the trench into the
void beyond. The first man to climb out lost his footing and rolled down into a
mixture of tins and other oddments with a deafening crash. His rifle, steel helmet,
box respirator and coil of barbed wire got hopelessly mixed, and the more the
unfortunate man struggled to free himself the more noise he made. I climbed
down to him and endeavoured to sort out the spare parts, but the noise was so
great that the Germans sent up several star-shells (as the war correspondents
called them).
The machine guns began to pop all around us, and someone in our
trench, not knowing the cause of the disturbance, commenced to throw bombs at
us. Fortunately, his aim was bad, for of the three bombs he threw before he could
be stopped one burst some distance from us, another fell into the company officer's
dug-out and blew up sundry rats, a coke fire in a brazier and a few other things,
but did no further harm as the dug-out was empty at the time, and the third bomb
the bomber dropped at his own feet, but as it was not detonated he was saved a
rapid rise. By this time I had managed to disentangle the first man of my wiring
party, and the remainder got over without accident.
The officer in charge of the party then came along and told us to follow him.
We went on and on until I began to think we would soon be in the Hun lines,
and felt tempted to say that we were a wiring party and not an army of invasion,
and if we visited the Huns without a proper invitation they might cut up rough
about it and be quite rude to us. However, the officer had such a look of an early
Christian martyr that I hesitated to speak to him.
At length we all halted, and so suddenly that the hindmost man, who had kept
as close as possible to his comrade in front lest he got lost, bumped violently into
this same comrade and then fell over backwards. Crack went his rifle against
his steel helmet, and rattle, rattle, rattle went the coil of wire he was carrying
as it flew from his grasp to nestle with a jangling noise in a cosy bed of empty
tins. The remainder of us had to keep as still as statues as one light after another
went up from the Hun lines. So close were we to the enemy that many of their
lights narrowly missed burning us as they fell to the ground.
At any moment I expected the German machine guns would open fire
upon us, but except for a few odd rifle shots nothing came over. As
soon as things had quietened down again, our officer told me that this was the
spot where the wire had to be put up. So we set to work, but it was so dark that
more than once I found a chap coiling barbed wire round my body in mistake for
the iron stake. This caused delay and loss of temper. We toiled on in such silence
as was possible, broken only by a clang" as some fellow's rifle struck another's
steel helmet, and a steady muttered swearing which reminded one of the demons
in hell vide Dante's Inferno At long last the officer declared the gap to be
filled, and we returned again to the British trench.
Here we found the company officer of the other regiment in a high state of
excitement, and his language was decidedly more forcible than polite. At last he
managed to overcome his temper sufficiently to be able to inform us that he and
his C.S.M. had waited for the past few hours at the spot which required wiring,
and just as he had given up all hope of seeing us again in this world he had
observed us wandering back from the German wire. So we had filled in a gap in
the enemy's wire! No wonder they did not fire at us to any extent!
