The system of trenches grew into a sort of enormous gridiron, and if you walked about--which you could only attempt to do at night--you were almost certain to drop into a trench or a hole of some sort. This made getting about a very exciting job, and it added enormously to the intense strain of fighting in the trenches, a strain which was hardest to bear in the night-time, when we were constantly expecting attacks and when the Germans adopted all kinds of devices to get at us.
The Germans are what we call dirty fighters, and they will take advantage of anything to try and score over you. They have no respect for anything and made a particular point in many of the places they overran of desecrating the churches. They never hesitated to turn a place of worship into a scene for an orgy, and I remember going into one church after the Germans had occupied it and being shocked at their conduct. In this particular place they had been able to lay hands on a good deal of champagne and they had drunk to excess, turning the church into a drinking-place, so that when we reached it there was an indescribable scene--filthy straw on the floor, empty champagne bottles littered everywhere, and the whole building degraded and desecrated.
The Germans had got a French uniform and stuffed it with straw and propped it up to resemble a man, and on the uniform they had stuck a piece of paper with some writing on it in German. I do not know what the writing was, but I took it to be some insult to the brave men who were defending their country and preventing the Germans from getting anywhere near Paris. I could tell you much more and many things of the Germans’ dirty fighting, and of things that were far worse than such an incident as turning a church into a drinking-place; but perhaps enough has been said on that point of late.
But that dirty fighting does not mean that the Germans do not fight bravely--far from it; they are hard cases, especially when they are in overwhelming numbers, which is the form of fighting that they like best of all. They are great believers in weight and hurling masses of men at a given point, and they are absolutely mad at times when their opponents are the English.