Night after night the skies opened and let down steady
torrents, which turned all that country into one great bog of slime.
Those little rivers or "beeks," which ran between the knobby fingers
of the clawlike range of ridges, were blown out of their channels and
slopped over into broad swamps. The hurricanes of artillery fire which
our gunners poured upon the enemy positions for twenty miles in depth
churned up deep shell-craters which intermingled and made pits which
the rains and floods filled to the brim. The only way of walking was
by "duck-boards," tracks laid down across the bogs under enemy fire,
smashed up day by day, laid down again under cover of darkness. Along
a duckboard walk men must march in single file, and if one of our men,
heavily laden in his fighting-kit, stumbled on those greasy boards (as
all of them stumbled at every few yards) and fell off, he sank up to
his knees, often up to his waist, sometimes up to his neck, in mud and
water. If he were wounded when he fell, and darkness was about him, he
could only cry to God or his pals, for he was helpless otherwise.
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