In the sand-dune area they used a vast quantity of sandbags, and they met the shortage of jute stuffs by making small sacks of bedstead hangings and curtains which, in the dry heat of the summer, wore very well.

The enemy's trenches were knocked to pieces; uprooted trees, planks, sandbags and dead bodies lay about in confusion.

Sandbags protected them for some time, but at last the aid-de-camp was struck by shrapnel and had his face virtually blown away.

They found that a small and badly placed charge of dynamite had merely knocked out a few stones between two of the buttresses, leaving the bridge intact enough for all the armies of Europe to pass over it; and the Turks did not even put a mitrailleuse behind sandbags in the streets or use field-guns from the adjacent hills to delay the Bulgars in their crossing.

"Well, if we can't get any sandbags," he is probably saying to a sergeant, "we will just have to bank it up with earth, and put those men on the other side of the traverse," or something like that.

Bullets are flicking the tops of the sandbags on the parapet in hundreds, whilst white streaks are shooting up with a swish into the sky and burst into bright radiating blobs of lightthe star shell at its best.

We filled sandbags with the earth excavated from the sap, and with frenzied energy tried to complete our defences before dawn.

Five men, a sergeant and myself, wet through and muddy all over; no sleep, little to eat, silently digging and filling sandbags with an ever-watchful eye for the breaking of the dawn.

I arranged a pile of sandbags at each side of the hole in the floor in such a way as to be able to lay this curiosity on top to form a roof, the mattress part downwards.

Above this roof I determined to pile up sandbags against the wall, right away up to the roof of the cottage.

This necessitated about forty sandbags being filled, so it may easily be imagined we didn't do this all at once.

I saw the handle of something like a broom or a water scoop moving above the sandbags.

I decided to come back later for the coal, with a few sandbags for filling, so I covered it over and hid it as much as possible.

Making improvements to our trenches led to endless work with sandbags, planks, dug-outs, etc.

No sandbags to spare, of course, so the question was, "What shall we make a parapet of?" We plodded off back to the village and groped around the ruins for something solid and high enough to carry the gun.

It was nearly high enough, and with just three or four sandbags we felt certain it would do.

The parapet was a jumbled assortment of sandbags, clay, and old bricks from the neighbouring barn: but we finally got a good sound parapet made, and in about another hour's time had fixed a machine gun, with plenty of ammunition, in a very unattractive position from the Boche point of view.

By their light I could see the whole position, but could only form an approximate idea of how our lines ran, as our parapets and trenches merged into the mud so effectively as to look like a vast, tangled, disorderly mass of sandbags, slime and shell holes.

It was a curious sort of a trench too, quite a different pattern to those we had occupied at St. Yvon, The first thing that struck me about all these trenches was the quantity of sandbags there were, and the geometrical exactness of the attempts at traverses, fire steps, bays, etc.

The ground above the trenches was so eaten away by the filling of sandbags and the cavities caused by shell fire, that I found it far quicker and simpler to walk along in the trenches themselves, squeezing past the men standing about and around the thick traverses.

The bank had removed itself and its business to the underground vaults, and the large room on the ground floor, with its polished mahogany counters, brass grills and desks, loomed dim and indistinct in the light which filtered past the sandbags piled outside.

When he came back along the trench five minutes later he found Bunthrop feverishly busy re-piling sandbags and strengthening the parapet, ducking hastily and crouching low when a shell roared past overhead, but hurriedly resuming work the instant it had passed.

I scarcely dared to stir abroad; had sandbags put to my doors to keep out the measles; forbade my neighbours' children playing in my yard to avoid the whooping-cough;

You go down seventy-two stepsbackwards, or you hit your headto a German room, which smells German, and you will find my boudoir, furnished with sandbags, a shaving mirror and a telephone.

At eleven o'clock I lie on the sandbags and, like the great hunter, close my eyes immediately in dreamless sleep.