Letters From the Front

Dated: October 6, 1915

I am sitting in my own special little dugout, the walls of which are lined with sand bags. There are two small tables about two feet by two feet square, made of rough pieces of board and parts of boxes, and my door has even got an old fashioned handle and bolt, the latter on the outside and workable from the inside as well. The window is about two feet by eight inches wide and simply a hole. The roof is well covered with corrugated iron sheets, on top of which sand bags are piled, then dirt, and the whole supported by four stout timbers, none squared except the front one. The space I have inside is about four feet by seven feet and mostly taken up by a six feet by two feet bed. I am in charge of a 'Keep' for the support of the front line trenches and am well off indeed, the only danger being from shrapnel, 'Jack Johnsons' and stray bullets. They shell our immediate surroundings frequently, and while one bombardment was going on in response to an awakening our guns gave the Gerboys, I wrote a couple of letters indoors the while listening to the big fellows whistling and half wheezing and shrieking as they passed. It was most uncomfortable at times too, as one could not help wondering where, say, that one just this moment which is hovering hesitatingly, it would seem just overhead, would land. The very big ones come up something like steam engines and make an awful row when they crash to earth scattering steel, mud and twigs in every direction. The first day I spent in the front line I saw a tree cut as clean as one could wish by a small shrapnel shell. Most of the men seem to like trench life better than the huts or dugouts in rear, from which they have to come down here as fatigue parties often when they would sooner rest up.
What amazes me now is how easily we get used to it all. My desire now is to get out over a front line parapet and crawl along between the lines in search of annoying snipers. Others have done it and are doing it every night and meeting with success occasionally, when there is much rejoicing. It is a far safer operation too than you can imagine owing to the well known undulations of ground that are always likely to occur between lines 85 to 300 yards apart.