‘We have now got our dugout in some order again, ‘ he told Pips, but it had taken them three days of hard work.
It had all started on Tuesday (it was now Friday), when he had gone into Bethune with Morris to do some shopping, and to pick up any letters or parcels that might be waiting at Company HQ. He had also taken the chance to have a bath, and get money out for the men, but ‘as I started back down the long trench which leads to the district where we lived it came on to rain and poured faster and faster as I went along. The walk was 4 miles…and I arrived soaked to the skin and found…that the rain had caused the trenches to fall in in many places. At last I arrived back and found the trench which branched off from the main trench had fallen in and I had to climb over masses of soft earth – and what a sight for you to see arriving home drenched!’
Bethune – Before the War. From Memories of Active Service, Vol 2, facing page 388. By permission of the Surrey History Centre (Ref: 2332/3/9/3/4)
‘The sandbags on each side of the door had fallen in and the railway lines, which served as girders, were hanging like the sword of Damocles over the door – the sandbags had fallen inwards and covered our neatly dug out floor with damp, rotten looking earth.’
Gibson had already gone off to the mine, so he and Morris crawled inside, to find it as ‘unfriendly-looking’ as the outside: ‘the earth walls had dropped in places and pieces were peeling off as we stood in there, so, as my servant suggested that the “place looked all of a screw and weren’t very safe to stay in”, we clambered out.’
Sherriff had then gone up to the mine to ask the RE officers if they could lend one of their men, which they did, and with a number of other volunteers from Morris’s dugout they made the door sufficiently safe for him to spend the night inside – ‘but what an awful night it was’. After he had some supper (which Morris had handed through the door, because, as he put it,”e and the plates couldn’t both get through together’) he had crawled into bed, and spent the rest of the night watching the earth crumbling away from the walls, and wondering if the whole structure would come down round about him. In the event, most of it stayed in place, ‘except for a big piece of the corner falling in and revealing the sky above’.
Bethune – After the War. From Memories of Active Service, Vol 2, facing page 388. By permission of the Surrey History Centre (Ref: 2332/3/9/3/4)
The whole of the next day they spent trying to shore up the dugout. ‘I cannot describe the chaos that then occurred,’ he wrote to Pips, ‘ – it suggested a good skit for Harry Tate [a well-known music hall comedian] – “Mending a Dugout”‘. Having secured all the materials they needed from the RE, and bringing all the necessary timber and wire inside, ‘it became so crowded that you did nothing but fall over in the attempts to get over piles of empty and filled sandbags.’ Then they had to lever up the door, which they did by piling up sandbags, and then ‘all getting on the end of an iron bar’, and while the girder was propped up, Morris would try to find a wedge to put in place between the girders and the sandbags, but the only wood he could find tended to ‘squash up like a sponge’ when it took the weight from above. To make matters worse, he then struggled to get out the door because the sandbags were in the way, ‘reminding me of the historic man who built a house from the inside and omitted the doors and windows’.
That was enough description for one day, he told Pips, since he now had to write to his brother Bundy, whose birthday it was [he was turning 17], but he promised more on his dugout woes the following day.
[Next letter: 11 November]