First-Hand Report From Trenches in France in High Point Review, 1918

“Tells of Night Life in the Trench….Correspondent Gives Thrilling Description of First Experience at Front…..Lighted by Starry Balloon…..Night Watchers Trust Nobody but Themselves—Both Sides Watching for Flaring Bombing and Machine Gunning at Intervals” from the High Point Review, March 14, 1918

With the French Armies in the Field—Night life in a first-line trench has its little bag of thrills for the beginner. Polus say night trenches are monotonous, but all Poilus have seen livelier things than trench life.

To an American correspondent, spending the first night on the fringe of No Man’s Land precisely as no doubt hundreds of thousands of Americans will before the end of the war, a nocturnal trench has all the melodramatic elements to keep up interest and drive monotony away.

Darkness seems to settle down quickly over the frowsy, weedy, gray strip in front, which nobody owns and nobody treads in daylight.

A battery of French guns bark sharply in the rear. Firefly flashes wink a mile behind the enemy’s wire. The French gunners are saying “Good night” to a Boche battery, and the dull “boom,” “boom,” “boom”—then the squeal of enemy steel above tells you the Boche is answering.  Unless unforeseen things happen tonight, the gunners will “rest on their arms” until daybreak. On “quiet” sectors like this it often happens.

With darkness down, the night shift is eating supper in their dugouts and rigging out in sheepskin jackets to begin the silent night watch over the parapets. The dugouts—corrugated steel and sand-bag construction at intervals of a few yards back of the first line—are smelly and dark, but filled with life. It’s human life and insect life, the latter making little difference as long as steel and sandbags shed vagrant shells. Men say they can get accustomed to insects, but the bite of a shell is different.

Signs of America

The correspondent found the inevitable American sign in these dugouts tonight. Penciled names in the wooden bunks suggested New York’s East side, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Milwaukee and other purer American names suggested early settlers on the prairies of the middle West. In fact, it was in the trench just outside that a small body of American “Sammies” on November 3 fought desperately against overwhelming German odds in America’s first battle of the big European war.

The night Poilus have taken their places a few yards apart along the parapet. The day Poilus have filed into the dugouts for food and rest.

A machine gun is “rat-tat-tat-ing” its evening tryout. All machine guns are frequently tested at night. A fainter “rat-tat-tat-tat” shows that the Boche is doing it, too. A bright, fiery streak roars up nearby and a small white parachute floats gently down with an incandescent flare lighting up No Man’s Land for a hundred yards around. Someone saw a suspicious move beyond the wire, and officer explained. The officer orders a few rifle grenades fired as a warning to prowling Boches, perhaps trying to learn something or to cut the wire. The Poilus heads, silhouetting over the parapet at intervals against the blackness beyond, “duck down” for an instant while the grenades explode with cavernous roars. These missiles fly into a hundred pieces each and wipe out life for rods around.

More machine guns are tapping their warnings or having their “tryouts” here and there along the line. The Boche again, as if nervous, is doing it, too.

Nobody Is Trusted

A half-hour follows without a single spark of fireworks. But it breaks out again—both sides watching, flaring, bombing, machine-gunning, suspicious things in that uncanny black stretch of No Man’s Land, fringed on each side with night watchers who trust nobody but themselves.

Another period of silence except low voices of men talking in “trench whispers.” They’ve learned to “trench whisper” by constant practice. A Poilu apologetically explained, as he rearranged his nest of black egglike hand grenades on the trench shelf before him, that American soldiers talked too loud at first. But finally they learned to “parler doucement” he added.

The Bouche is active again. A flock of hand grenades roar themselves into silence on the other side as fiery light streaks perform arcs like Roman candles and then float gracefully down under their parachutes into the German wire. A rifle grenade explodes half-way across No Man’s Land and Boche machine guns take up the tune. The Boche having told the French by the display that no German soldiers are prowling in this part of No Man’s Land, there is silence again until time makes things uncertain.

“The Boche has no reason to be nervous yet,” whispered an officer. “Our first patrol goes out at 2 o’clock. Would you like to go along?”

Patrolling is one of the milder games of hide and seek in No Man’s Land at night and it’s something most all American trench solders will learn before the war is over.