(p. 116)

THE DUG-OUT BANQUET

You ask me if the trench is safe?
As safe as home, I say;
Dug-outs are safest things on land,
And 'buses running to the Strand
Are not as safe as they.

You ask me if the trench is deep?
Quite deep enough for me,
And men can walk where fools would creep,
And men can eat and write and sleep
And hale and happy be.

The dug-out is the trench villa, the soldiers' home, and is considered
to be proof against shrapnel bullets and rifle fire. Personally, I do
not think much of our dug-outs, they are jerry-built things, loose in
construction, and fashioned in haste. We have kept on improving them,
remedying old defects, when we should have taken the whole thing to
pieces and started afresh. The French excel us in fashioning dug-outs;
they dig out, we build. They begin to burrow from the trench downwards,
and the roof of their shelter is on a line with the floor of the
trench; thus they have a cover over them seven or eight feet in (p. 117)
thickness; a mass of earth which the heaviest shell can hardly pierce
through. We have been told that the German trenches are even more
secure, and are roofed with bricks, which cause a concussion shell to
burst immediately it strikes, thus making the projectile lose most of
its burrowing power. One of our heaviest shells struck an enemy's
dug-out fashioned on this pattern, with the result that two of the
residents were merely scratched. The place was packed at the time.

As I write I am sitting in a dug-out built in the open by the French.
It is a log construction, built of pit-props from a neighbouring
coal-mine. Short blocks of wood laid criss-cross form walls four feet
in thickness; the roof is quite as thick, and the logs are much
longer. Yesterday morning, while we were still asleep, a four-inch
shell landed on the top, displaced several logs, but did us no harm.
The same shell (pipsqueaks we call them) striking the roof of one of
our trench dug-outs would blow us all to atoms.

The dug-out is not peculiar to the trench. For miles back from the
firing-line the country is a world of dug-outs; they are everywhere,
by the roadsides, the canals, and farmhouses, in the fields, the (p. 118)
streets, and the gardens. Cellars serve for the same purpose. A fortnight
ago my section was billeted in a house in a mining town, and the enemy
began to shell the place about midnight. Bootless, half-naked, and
half-asleep, we hu