Brewster 'A Glimpse of War through a Private's Eyes', a retrospective account of experiences in World War I, 1915-1917 / John James Brewster - Page 133
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Transcription
[Page 133]
The next man stooped down to make sure, then standing up, said very quietly to the first speaker. "Have a good look at what you are standing on! On doing do he was shocked to find he had been standing on the body of a dead man. Further observation showed that dead men were lying all along the bottom of the trench & the delay had been occasioned by the men ahead trying to avoid treading on the bodies.
The gruesome walk continued to the end, at one short "traverse" in the trench the bodies had been piled three feet high & a Machine Gun could be heard playing upon the spot some time before it was reached. When the first man was hit, the second man had evidently stepped forward to help when he was also struck & so on, hence the pile of bodies.
To get past this, one had to bend the neck & body very low & lift & straighten the leg & so slide over the dead. A little further on the duck boards had not been laid & as there was a foot or 18 Inches of water in the trench one of the men stepped on what appeared to be a sand bag, only to find it prove to be a body floating, which when stood upon "gave" under the weight & the man was thus thrown full length into the arms of another dead man just ahead, causing the live man to utter a groan of horror loud enough to be heard in the Hun trench, and arousing an angry reprimand from the officer "in the lead".
On arriving at the end of the "Sap" we found that we were in "No mans land". The work to be done was to build a breastwork "sap" about 70 yards out towards the Huns. We could see where the "foundation" sand bags had been laid, evidently by the battalion to which the dead men in the sap formerly
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