Our “dug-out” was a little rectangular room five mètres long by two mètres wide, cut in the stiff soil, stayed up with planks, covered with beams and roofed with earth.[3] It was dark as an oven. It was entered by an opening so narrow that my pack could not pass, and to get to this door, if one could call it a door, one had to perform prodigies from the roadside onwards to avoid being bogged up to the knees. There was a little straw on the floor, and the furniture consisted of a chair.
There we were going to take up our residence, my seven men and I—Dhuic, Laroche, Ponnery, Bobet, Thiérard, Emmanuel and that terrible-looking fellow Hurel, with his vulture’s face and insane alcoholic eye. I can see him now at the bottom of the trench, his face emerging from a sheep-skin coat which made him look more than ever like a wild beast. “If the Bosches catch sight of you,” an unindulgent comrade said to him, “they will certainly clear out in double-quick time.”
We got here from Nieuport at four o’clock in the morning. The regiment was closed up and the men stumbled at each step over the débris of houses, which littered the road. Dead silence reigned, and the cold north wind of early morning made our eyes water. No shells or bullets were flying, but we heard from time to time the noise of tiles falling from some roof or the din of a falling skirt of wall. Star shell were being used, and each time they lit up the country they made us jumpy, for we presumed that they would be followed by a shell only too well placed.
Day dawned, and I came cautiously out of my hole to have a look at the country. The human imagination never, I imagine, has conceived, nor ever can picture, anything sadder or more desolate than what I saw. I found myself on the road leading from Nieuport to Saint-Georges at a point almost equally distant from both of these remains of towns. The banked-up road meandered over an immense muddy plain, necked with pools of grey water, now frozen. Nieuport was on my right. From here I could not see a single house which was, I won’t say intact, but only damaged by the bombardment. It was a heap of gutted buildings, crumbling walls and twisted and broken trees. On my left was Saint-Georges, in if anything worse state. Nothing remained but a pile of stones, and one would never have supposed that a village had once existed there.