Between the Lines

This book, all of which has been written at the Front within sound of the German guns and for the most part within shell and rifle range, is an attempt to tell something of the...

The telephonist opened his case and lifted out his instrument, groped along the trench wall a few yards and found his wire, joined up to his instruments, dashed off a series of...

The nearest German trench caught the clank-clink, and by a simple process of deduction and elimination arrived at its meaning and its location. The pump and the pumpers led a tr...

The Subaltern smashed the lamp himself before he too turned and plunged, floundering and slipping and stumbling, for his exit in an agony of haste and apprehension. It was all r...

Then, quite suddenly, a tempest of high-explosive shell rained down on the battery, in front of, behind, over, and amongst the guns. Instinctively the men hesitated in their wor...

Along the firing and communication trenches parties set to work of various sorts, bailing out water from the trench bottom, putting in brushwood or brick foundations, building u...

The men eat mightily, then light their pipes and cigarettes and loll at their ease. The trees are masses of clustering pink and white blossom, the grass is carpeted thick with t...

The fighting fell to a new phase--the work of the short-arm bayonet thrust and the bomb-throwers. In the gaps between the points where the trench was taken the enemy fought with...

More cold-bloodedly unpleasant work it would be hard to imagine. The men had none of the thrill and heat of combat to help them; they had not the hope that a man has in a charge...

In the houses they passed through the men could still find sufficient traces of the former occupants to indicate their class and station. One might have been a labourer's cottag...

An officer passed hurriedly along the trench. 'If there's any firing, every man to fire over the parapet and only straight to his own front,' he said, and almost at the moment t...

Macgillivray moved out from the broken trench and hurried across the open. There were not more than fifty yards to cross, but in that narrow space the bodies lay huddled singly...

'"Well," 'e sez, "you knows 'ow much better off you are 'ere. You don't 'ave no standin' to the gun 'arf the night in the rain, an' live all the rest o' the nights an' all the d...

'"Number One gun add twenty-five yards," calls down the F.O., an' then gives some more corrections an' calls for one round battery fire. By this time the rifle fire out in front...