Sullivan letter diary, 27 October 1915-9 October 1917 / Eugene Sullivan - Page 269
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[Page 269]
In under an hour each man had what is known as a pot-cover i.e. a hole big enough to shelter himself, and then they commenced to dig along to each other, thereby connecting the holes and forming a trench. This is subsequently built up with sand-bags and paved with duck boards, and protected from attack by rows of tangled barbed wire placed in front of it.
It was during this digging in process that our men suffered most. Some too were picked off by snipers cunningly concealed behind our new front line in the old no-man's land.
The old saying that "an onlooker sees most of the game" applies equally here and, from our position of security behind the line, we were kept in constant touch with the progress of the battle. Each night after the first advance our boys raided some fresh positions and in each case secured and held them.
I could fill a book with all the different tales of bravery and heroism haltingly told by the wounded men. The spirit of them all was magnificent and there wasn't a single grumble, despite the fact that some of them laid in a shell-hole in no-man's land, badly wounded, for days, before they were located and carried in by the bearers.
One of our Corporals, an immense fellow weighing fifteen stone, was hit in the leg by a machine gun bullet when he first hopped over the parapet. Being determined to see more of the enemy, he threw off his equipment and raced ahead with his bayonet, and, despite his wound, he bayoneted several Fritzs, until at length he fell exhausted in no-man's land - fifty yards beyond our most advanced position. He succeeded in dragging himself into a shell-hole, and there he lay for three days, under the blazing noonday sun, without any food or