Allied soldiers fortifying shell craters after an advance. From The Nations at War by Willis J. Abbot, 1918 Edition.
A startling new situation confronted the Allies in their recent advance against the Germans. They are fortifying in a concealed way chains of shell craters due to intensive artillery firing of months.
"During those five days the torrential rain and snow never let up. The walls of the trench were sagging; the precarious shelters which men had dug for themselves collapsed in certain places. Trenches filled with water.It's useless to try to describe the sufferings of the men, without shelter, soaked, pierced with cold, badly fed—no pen could tell their tale. You had to have lived through these hours, these days, these nights, to know how interminable they were in times like these.Proceeding in nightly work details or to and from the front lines, men slipped and fell into shell holes filled with water and weren't able to climb out; they drowned or froze to death, their hands grasping at the edges of the craters in a final effort to pull themselves out."
Excerpt from the notebooks of French Infantry Corporal Louis Barthas, writing of grim conditions he and his men faced in the Somme sector at the end of November, 1916.
Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918 by Louis Barthas, page 282, copyright © 2014 by Yale University, publisher: Yale University Press, publication date: 2014
1916-11-29, 1916, November, Somme, Battle of the Somme, shell crater
