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MEANWHILE, the daily — more particularly nightly — round, the common task. Sentry-go, patrols, digging; mud, rain, shrieking winds, and occasional snow. It was not till well into April that the nights grew noticeably warmer. Up here on the plateau the March days were mostly like an English March, with bright blue skies and nagging winds. The winter barley was a foot high, crimson buds were forming on the cherry trees (the line here ran through deserted orchards and vegetable gardens), and if you searched the ditches you could find violets and a kind of wild hyacinth like a poor specimen of a bluebell. Immediately behind the line there ran a wonderful, green, bubbling stream, the first transparent water I had seen since coming to the front. One day I set my teeth and crawled into the river to have my first bath in six weeks. It was what you might call a brief bath, for the water was mainly snow-water and not much above freezing-point.
Meanwhile nothing happened, nothing ever happened. The English
had got into the habit of saying that this wasn’t a war, it
was a bloody pantomime. We were hardly under direct fire from the
Fascists. The only danger was from stray bullets, which, as the
lines curved forward on either side, came from several directions.
All the casualties at this time were from strays. Arthur Clinton
got a mysterious bullet that smashed his left shoulder and disabled
his arm, permanently, I am afraid. There was a little shell-fire,
but it was extraordinarily ineffectual. The scream and crash of the
shells was actually looked upon as a mild diversion. The Fascists
never dropped their shells on our parapet. A few hundred yards
behind us there was a country house, called La Granja, with big
farm-buildings, which was used as a store, headquarters, and
cook-house for this sector of the line. It was this that the
Fascist gunners were trying for, but they were five or six
kilometres away and they never aimed well enough to do more than
smash the windows and chip the walls. You were only in danger if
you happened to be coming up the road when the firing started, and
the shells plunged into the fields on either side of you. One
learned almost immediately the mysterious art of knowing by the
sound of a shell how close it will fall. The shells the Fascists
were firing at this period were wretchedly bad. Although they were
150 mm. they only made a crater about six feet wide by four deep,
and at least one in four failed to explode. There were the usual
romantic tales of sabotage in the Fascist factories and unexploded
shells in which, instead of the charge, there was found a scrap of
paper saying ‘Red Front’, but I never saw one. The
truth was that the shells were hopelessly old; someone picked up a
brass fuse-cap stamped with the date, and it was 1917. The Fascist
guns were of the same make and calibre as our own, and the
unexploded shells were often reconditioned and fired (...)
(......)
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