Free Zero Hour by Leon Davidson

TROOPER

WHEN SECOND LIEUTENANT Lindsay Inglis wrote home, he had little to say. ‘Once more from the same old place. Still living the same old life, still fighting the same old war.’ Days blended into weeks and months as the men followed the same routines. In their battalions, the men spent eight days in billets, four days in the subsidiary line, and four days in the front and support lines.
    The first line of defence was the front-line. Although it was lightly held to prevent annihilating casualties during bombardments, the soldiers were still expected to hold off an attack until help arrived from troops in the support line, 130 metres to the rear. This fully manned trench was considered the strongest defence line. The subsidiary line, another fully held trench, was 450 metres further back, and was used as a semi-resting position before the men returned to their billets.
    In the front-line, seven to eight men defended each bay in the two-metre-deep trenches, taking turns to monitor no-man’s-land through periscopes—it was too dangerous to look over the parapet. Usually, little was seen of the Germans, or ‘Fritz’ as the Australians and New Zealanders called them, just the occasional grey-clad figure, or a dark silhouette moving in the distance. But ‘Parapet Joe’—a nickname for the German machine-gunners who shot up the sandbags in front of the trenches—made sure they weren’t forgotten. New Zealander Lance Corporal Ernest Williams found his first night in the trenches ‘very quiet, the only thing we heard from Fritz being an occasional burst of machine-gun fire’.
    At dusk, and again at dawn, the men ‘stood to’ for an hour with bayonets fixed to their rifles. Both sides used the grey uncertain light to launch attacks, as those charging could see the ground but might not be spotted until too late. At ‘stand down’, one sentry in each bay watched no-man’s-land while the others cleaned rifles and had hot tea, bacon and bread for breakfast. During quiet days, they chatted, read, played cards, slept on the fire steps or in shelters, and wrote letters. At night—a more dangerous time—two men watched no-man’s-land from each bay as the others waited or dozed, in full equipment, until their turn came.
    Lieutenant George Mitchell felt that ‘night crept slowly by. Time never lags so much as when in the front line.’ Once, for entertainment, he practised firing single shots with his Lewis gun. Opposite him, a German soldier copied each shot. Mitchell fired off several shots in a rhythm. The German echoed them. Mitchell shot over a rifle grenade, saying, ‘That shut the cow up.’ But the German mimicked that too. After firing a phosphorous bomb, and hearing a ‘terrible yell’, Mitchell returned to his dugout to read. Not long after, three of his comrades ducked for cover as a phosphorous bomb exploded over their trench.
    FATIGUES , PATROLS AND RATS
    When not in the front-line, soldiers did fatigues—jobs required for the maintenance and defence of the trenches. They dug ditches for telephone signal wire, and took supplies like barbed wire, corrugated iron, pickets and ammunition up to the front-line. They also took turns on ‘gas guard’, and were extra alert when there was a wind from the east, which was signalled by windvanes on dugouts and trenches. Different gases had different odours, varying from rotten pears to mouldy hay to geraniums. When a suspicious smell was detected, the sentries banged on their empty shells and yelled ‘Gas!’ Soldiers scrambled to put on gasmasks and manned the fire steps, as church bells tolled and horns blew.
    In the darkness, groups of soldiers slipped into no-man’s-land to fix broken wire entanglements or to patrol. They passed ‘advanced listening posts’, in which several soldiers waited in shell holes to warn those in the front-line about enemy