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A Royal Engineer in the Low Countries

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With the Third Guards during the Peninsular War

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Observation Posts

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Observation Posts
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Author(s): Coningsby Dawson
Date Published: 2012/01
Page Count: 236
Softcover ISBN-13: 978-0-85706-744-9
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-0-85706-743-2

Letters from under the Guns

Observation Posts, a special Leonaur book, brings together two books by Dawson concerning warfare as experienced by the men in the trenches during the First World War on the Western Front. ‘Carry On’ and its sequel ‘Living Bayonets’ are based on the author’s time as an artillery officer and principally comprise his letters to his family. Dawson was an intelligent, thoughtful correspondent who in fine prose has left posterity an intimate ‘gunner’s’ view of the Great War making this book an essential source work for students of the period. This good value ‘two-in-one’ Leonaur edition enables collectors to own these uncommon and related accounts in a single, value-for-money volume.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket.

France<br>
April 19, 1917<br>
I sit in a hole in a recent battlefield. Over my head is some tattered canvas, upheld by Fritzie shovels. In a battered bucket wood splutters, and the rain it raineth every day. To make my appearance more gipsy-like I may add that my hands are cracked with the mud. When the war is ended I shall lie in bed for a month.<br>
We’ve come through some very lively times of late, and I shall have plenty of local colour to impart to you when the war is ended. My mind is packed with vivid pictures which I cannot tell. This huge silence which rests between individuals is the most terrific thing about the war. You get the terror made concrete for you when you creep to your observation post and spy upon the Hun country. In the foreground is a long stretch of barbed wire, shell-holes and mud. Behind that a ruined town; then gradually, greenness growing more vivid as it recedes to the horizon.<br>
Nothing stirs. You may look through your telescope all day, but nothing stirs. Yet you know that in every hole the hidden death lurks; should you for a moment forget and raise your head unwarily, you are reminded of your folly by the crack of a rifle. I’ve always made the mistake of believing the best of everyone—and, as a soldier, I’ve never been able to credit the fact that anyone of a big nation would count himself happy to get my scalp.The actual passes belief.<br>
I recall so vividly that story of the final war, written by a German, The Human Slaughter-house. The chap never realizes the awfulness of his job until for the first time he comes face to face with the young boy he’s called upon to kill.<br>
We kill by hundreds from a distance, but the destroyed and the destroyers rarely have a hint of each other’s identity. I came to a dugout the other day in a battered trench. Even the water in the shell-holes was dyed by explosives to the colour of blood. Outside lay a German, face downwards in the mud—an old man with grizzled hair.<br>
I shoved my revolver round the mouth of the dugout and called to anyone who was there to come out. A Cockney voice answered; then followed a scrambling; two huge feet came up through the dark; they belonged to a dead German; two of his comrades grinned cheerfully at me from behind the corpse and propelled it none too reverently into the mud.<br>
Behind the party I discovered my Cockney-adventurer—a machine-gunner who, having lost his company, made amends by capturing three Fritzies and killing two others with the aid of a pal with a shattered leg. I told him to bring his pal up.<br>
Under his directions the Fritzies trotted back into the hole and brought out the wounded fellow. They were extraordinarily meek-looking and quite surprisingly gentle; when I’d told them where the dressing-station was, they made a bandy-chair of their hands, placed our fellow’s arms about their necks and staggered away through the barrage—or curtain of fire, as the papers like to call it—back to safety with their wounded enemy. And yet within the hour all these people had been chucking bombs at one another.<br>
A few days ago I was detailed for a novel experience—to follow up the infantry attack across No Man’s Land to the Hun front line and as far as his support trenches. I called for volunteers to accompany me and had a splendid lot of chaps. My party got away with the adventure without a scratch—which was extraordinarily lucky. Moreover we accomplished the particular job that we were called upon to do.<br>
Tonight I’m out from dusk to daylight poking through the darkness in a country where one dare not use a flashlight. Between two ruined towns I have to pass a battered calvary. The Christ upon His Cross is still untouched, though the shrine and surrounding trees are smashed to atoms. I think He means more to me like that—stripped of His gorgeousness—than ever. He seems so like ourselves in His lonely and unhallowed suffering. The road which leads to and from Him is symbolic—shell-torn, scattered with dead horses and men, while ahead the snarl of shrapnel darts across the sky and spends itself in little fleecy puffs.<br>
All this desolation will be recreated one day, the country will grow green and, in another country, greener than any upon earth, those dead men will walk and laugh—and in that other country the Christ will no longer hang alone and aloofly.<br>
I like to think of that—of the beauty in the future, if not in this, then in some other world. One grows tired, just like that image on the Cross. How little the body counts! War teaches us that.
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