MORNING SERIAL

IN the dark we might have got to their wire with a small number of casualties but we would have been skinned alive trying to get through it; the small amount of damage that had been done to it before the 25th had been repaired during the nights of the 25th and 26th.

A few days later I visited Duffy in his dug-out: he was now a company stretcher-bearer.

There were good dug-outs in some parts of the Cambrin trenches which had been made by the French when they occupied this part of the line. Some were down twelve or fifteen feet in the earth and some had two outlets. Duffy’s dug-out only had one outlet: he always kept a supply of dry and wet wood and even with a dry-wood fire burning in the bottom of the dug-out a man would have to go through a strong smoke barrage before he reached the bottom, but the men sitting around the fire-bucket on the ground were quite free from the smoke which would be above their heads and going up the outlet.

When any unwelcome visitor attempted to come down the dug-out, wet wood was put on the fire and before he had come two or three steps he would be very nearly suffocated and would generally retire cursing, coughing and wiping his eyes.

I found Duffy making a brew of tea and the Young Soldier was laying on his back reading aloud a newspaper to the Old Soldier and him. French newsboys used to come up, even under shell fire, from Bethune to the mouth of the communication trenches in this sector, selling English newspapers.

The Young Soldier was reading out an account of the attack on the 25th which had been written by a well-known war correspondent who had been donkey’s miles behind the front line at the time: how the troops had gone over the top laughing and joking as if they had been on a joy-ride back in Old England. The tea was made and with a drop of rum to go in it we gave full vent to our feelings: if that well-known war correspondent whose dispatches were read by millions in England had been in that dug-out he would have heard something about himself that would have surprised him.