Free Zero Hour by Leon Davidson Page A

patrols or raids. Crawling on their bellies, they stopped and started, aware that the slightest movement or noise could draw attention to them. When the Germans illuminated no-man’s-land with flares, the men froze and were mistaken for debris in the uncertain light. For Australian Sergeant Eric Evans, it was a nerve-racking time.
    Those damn flares constantly rising, hovering and fading, only to be replaced by yet more. Beautiful from a distance but deadly if caught in no-man’s-land, as many a patrol has discovered. It was a chilly night but we were all dripping with sweat as we lay motionless and stranded.
    Two or three patrollers, armed only with revolvers and Mills bombs, tried to locate shell-damaged enemy wire for future raids and prevent the Germans from carrying out their own patrols. They listened for digging in the German lines, which might indicate preparations for an advance, but often they heard nothing more than ‘some snatches of indistinct talk or a burst of song in undertones’. They avoided enemy listening posts. If they were spotted, the Germans would alert their comrades with a ‘low whistle’ or ‘the tinkle of a handbell’, or perhaps just hurl a stick grenade at the men instead. If they ran into a German patrol, both sides would try to retreat secretly. If they couldn’t, they’d fight a quick, brutal battle with revolvers and bombs before the survivors scurried away. If they came across a German wiring party, they returned to their lines, giving a password so they weren’t mistaken for Germans, then passed on the wiring location to the artillery or machine-gunners, who targeted the area being repaired.
    Each day, horse-drawn wagons carried up the next day’s rations and ammunition, along with timber and iron for trench reinforcement. The supplies were dropped off at the side of the road for troops to carry to the front, along with food and hot tea from kitchens set up further back. In quieter, more established areas, the men pushed up supplies in carts on rail tracks, sprinting for their lives across exposed sections. On good days, the troops got hot tea three times, and in the evening, hot stew. At other times, the food delivery was more difficult. In his diary, Private Thomas Cleary wrote: ‘Very short of tucker yesterday. Short again today. No breakfast…Very cold and miserable.’ When water was scarce, men shaved and washed around shell holes, despite knowing there might be bodies in them.
    The men’s dugouts—often small shelters with a corrugated roof, surrounded by sandbags—became their homes, even if they leaked and couldn’t withstand a direct hit. New Zealander Rifleman Alexander Hutton felt the men lived
    like rabbits in holes in the ground. It often makes me laugh to see all the heads poking out through the openings and to see how they disappear at any sign of danger in the shape of one of Fritz’s shells.
    At times, the incessant shellfire made it difficult to sleep, as did the lice, which moved over the men’s skin. Sergeant Evans found it impossible to sleep with lice ‘gnawing’ at him. ‘They are tireless brutes. My skin is already red from itching.’ He killed the eggs with a lit candle—another way was to run a thumb along the seams of clothes—and got ‘satisfaction from the popping sound of burning them. But, like the “Huns”, they don’t know when to give up.’

    Two soldiers look out of a dugout at the front-line, Hébuterne, France.
Alexander Turnbull Library G- 13190-1/2
    Rats were everywhere, and they’d grown fat from eating corpses. They lived in swampy holes or the ribs of the dead in no-man’s-land. They gnawed the men’s packs and showed no fear of the living, at times stealing whole bags of rations.
    With the endless duty of fatigues, some soldiers preferred being in the front-line. For Australian Sergeant Cecil Baldwin, it was