On the events of October 1916, the first two weeks.

I am afraid that few of the men I served with have been very forthcoming in providing any written stories or even reports from the points before this. And since a good many men died, there is little which they could add now except what they left behind. The families are rarely eager to discuss the writing which was sent to them and finding any official reports is something which future generations will probably have better luck than I have had thus far; so what I continue to provide is my perspective ( mostly underground) and that of the people who were able and willing to add to it.

The October weather was very good to us, in fact I cannot remember it raining before the first two attacks, the winds were mild to fair which was good because it protected us from the damned gas attacks. Usually the winds were in our favor, there were atleast two occasions when they shifted and the damned gas man set upon us with poisons and chemicals.

We had managed to keep everything moving along fairly well despite having less than half the men we needed. This was both due to the fact that England is slow to deliver and quick to ask more of you, we had opted to keep a number of men "on the books" until it was proved they were dead. More food and supplies would show up for them until they eventually came home again or were proved dead and we were forced to report it. Men go missing all the time, it's nothing new to the army to have men gone a week in a battle field and turn up when things settled down enough and it was a lot of trouble to make a man "not dead" once the army had decided he was dead. There were several times men were in battle and wounded or simply lost in the confusion for days and returned to our unit after they had gotten medical care.

Now our task was one of tunneling, and listening to the Germans digging. I had great plans for all of this and every day when men weren't being squandered in the trenches we had them all working on deepening our tunnels for I had decided that crawling was both wasting men's time while they went about their jobs and making our unit look like a joke at parades which we were expected weekly to attend. I had just about finished our present task which was to create a proper base for our men to sleep and work in at the end of Sept, we were still fairly well off for man power and had managed to borrow some men in order to complete my project. The unit was to sleep in what was carefully redesigned to resemble "A proper barracks" as the English would know it.

I had envisioned four separate rooms for fifty men each with a central set of rooms / hall way which they were on opposing sides of. The rooms were laid out so that a man had to walk a serpentine walkway down underground to the level of the sleeping spaces. Then he would enter into a small "mud room" which served as an air lock to protect from chemical weapons attacks as well as explosives and marauding German troopers who might take the trenches. After the mud room they'd enter a second chamber which had three doorways; left / right / and middle. The first two were for the barracks sections, and from here those men could fire into the "mud room" through firing ports in the walls while locking the door from this inside track. After about ten feet the middle door could be opened and it had an identical set up, this was repeated several times. Those next two doors on the sides were for the officer's rooms who dealt with the men directly, then in the section afterwards was another barracks. At some point there were two doors which were later made the toilets for the men, we had instituted a policy where each man had a bucket and it was his to use and keep clean. As a result the instances of sick calls went down rapidly which made everyone happy it also kept the terrible smells down ( I have no sense of smell, but I"m told it was over powering when we arrived). Also it helped us wage war against the rats who's evils I have already informed you of.

Now at the back of our new layout was an "emergency exit" or the back door; and rapidly we found ourselves using it more and more to get cargo in and out of the tunnels. The problem was mainly that even though we had a truck, there wasn't anywhere secure beyond the small hole which we had carved out and sand bagged and tarped for our beloved ( filthy wreck) of a french truck. Late one night while I was given the less then enviable position of night guards for the back door ( They shoot you if you fall asleep) and it's also a place likely to get his by German artillery, mortars and the damned airplanes. I saw something coming towards us on the even more dubious "road to Paris" which was in fact the muddy filth path the trucks took supplies in on when they deemed to supply us at all. Now the problem is; they rarely supply us and when they do someone runs a message down here and we have to go get it from somewhere else.

To see lights approaching my position; even ones which were very dim were a clue to the enemy something was coming and somewhere there were German's sighting in guns or god save us their artillery. The lights became more and more numerous to a point I could see dozens of them and then the rumble of gas engines told me there were trucks and a good many of them coming towards me. I braced myself for whatever bad news was about to arrive and the yet unknown danger which was certainly to follow with them. What happened next was almost comical if it weren't so soon to be deeply depressing for all concerned with it. The first trucks stopped and out came a dashing officer in the Republic's finest uniform. Behind him were almost a dozen more finely clad men who were first timer's to the battle field. They were smoking and talking to each other in French.

I was the only person nearby they moved to me quickly, after several confused moments I managed to get enough out of them that this was a newly trained division from the Republic of France's infantry training grounds. They had been sent for a secret mission to the front lines here and somewhere along the way the drivers became confused over exactly where they were supposed to be taking up station. The trucks were filled with men, nearly a thousand or so of them and all of their equipment and supplies. This was exactly what I had been asking for and wasted no time getting them to kill all the lights after explaining the German's were only three hundred yards away from us. I showed them down to our modest situation and quickly explained that no one had told us they were coming, so I did not have nearly enough room for all the men but that I could house the officers right away. Then showing them to back to the place where our truck was housed and the "truck tunnel" which I was trying to get established for removal of dirts and soils I hit upon an idea which was one of my best. I took them down into a section of tunnel which was largely unused at the time and explained that this was all England had to offer France for sleeping quarters. They were displeased to say the least of it, but then I mentioned that we had an a supply of digging supplies and timbers, were the enlisted French men to spend say eight hours I could help them create an entire facility which could house them and serve as a head quarters for their entire force while safe and snug away from any German spies looking over the no-man's land.

They'd quickly agreed to this prospect and we set about getting all the French infantry into lines of bucket brigades to dispose of the soils removed while others dug away at the wall with buckets and shovels and picks. My officers awoke to the commotion of all of this and were completely stunned to find the place swamped with "frogs" as the Brits often called them. I explained this was some kind of "gift" from high command and we were ordered to keep them underground until further notice. By the end of the first day we had cleared a sufficient space for a thousand men, their supplies. The whole area was like a cellar, and it was quickly dubbed "The wine and cheese cellar", to the English speaking members of the group. Now the French were a very amiable lot, for you see these men were largely conscripts an not too keen on their lot here at the front. As a result I could ask nearly any reasonable tasks of them and they'd gladly take them on to keep from being posted to the wall. Though it turned out we were not allowed to post them anywhere, and were allowed to make use of their numbers to help make up for inefficiencies in English infantry and labor underground.

During their brief time with us our entire facilities and infrastructure underwent a marvelous expansion to which many if not all of our other projects became realities as a result of this work. Also we learned that the French were great cooks, skilled craftsmen and other useful people to have about the place. It was also terribly true that these men were only in the barest sense of the word "soldiers"; for they had little training and no veterans or senior leadership with practical application of their duties. And they lived in daily dread of being told they were being sent over the wall, every day some unit had the job to go over and repair the wires at night or spy on the enemy or make a massed attack. None of these were good jobs. So we tried to keep their minds off of it all by sending them along with the French speaking members of our unit to perform daily tasks like listening posts, guard duties and labor for excavation projects.

It should also be said the despite everything, France was very good at feeding their men, or more accurately France was better about it than England was a good deal of the time. This meant that the two groups of soldiers quickly fell into the habit of trading food and other consumable items ( smokes, tea and coffee) between each other.

One fateful morning too soon after their arrival orders arrived from Paris, their luck had run out and our new friends were going to be sent over the wall the following night. Now in order to keep everyone as confused as possible; this was the acting head quarters but the French had been taken the day or so before and dispersed among other English units. Nearly all of their supplies were kept with us and their officers stayed here but the regular men were off in a great many places. There went several hours of sending the messages along to the poor bastards who'd arrive here to pickup their last meal and supplies before an attack which everyone knew was doomed to failure.

That night we doubled the guards at all stations, the listening posts awaited the possible attack by German sappers who might break through any time. At the appointed hour, just before dawn after a several hour artillery barrage to give the German commanders every warning we were about to attack them there came a great shout as the brave men climbed up onto the destroyed earth of the no-man's land and began walking their way through the hip deep mud, house sized craters and tangled webs of barbed wire. They chanted battle songs and marched into the grip of German machine guns who waited for them with careful patience after two years of practice on these killing fields. They cleared the distance and passed through waves of machine gun fire and artillery strikes before jumping into the trenches. Here is the greatest show of bravery, the men who had walked through the death and explosions of those men all around them then willingly hurled themselves into a hole in the ground filled by hundreds of Germans carrying short swords on the ends of rifles. Many men were killed before they even got into the trenches, others were killed terribly as they fought for every inch of ground that the German's held.

In some areas the Germans were overwhelmed and the French began to hold a section, reinforce the position and then finally push into another one. The battle raged for almost two hours, until nearly every last Frenchman was killed, very few of them managed to escape back towards our lines and the sound of their fighting and deaths were heard throughout the morning. At some point the unofficial battle ended and both sides sent out peace signs so that the wounded and dead could be removed from the field of battle. I and most of my unit volunteered, we wanted to bring everyone back who was alive and get them aid. We also wanted to return the dead to be given proper graves. There was another motive too; the French were issued good rifles and their officers had automatic pistols which were very, extremely valuable. See the English never understood that in confined spaces a large rifle isn't any good, but a small pistol with a lot of shots is just what we needed. Dead men don't need their guns, and when we picked up a dead or wounded man we always brought his kit back with him lest the German's take it as a prize themselves.

After everything was said and done we managed to "Keep on" seven of France's brave sons who were fit for duty but had nothing to return to besides a new unit and certain death. At our posting they were treated like every other soldier and given regular duties every day. They were among the best men we had at that position for a long time.

The old saying about an eye for an eye was coined just for this war, and it was commonly known the next three days were going to give us a counter attack like pure hell.