---
title: "Homage to Catalonia"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 5 of 14
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-homage-catalonia-fp20181044/5/
cite: "George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, section 5. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-homage-catalonia-fp20181044/5/"
---

# Homage to Catalonia

*George Orwell*

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> Title: Homage to Catalonia
Date of first publication: 1938
Author: George Orwell (1903-1950)
Date first posted: Oct. 23, 2018
Date last updated: Oct. 23, 2018
Faded Page eBook #20181044

> This eBook was produced by: Delphine Lettau, Howard Ross
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

> GEORGE ORWELL

> _Homage to Catalonia_

> Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest
             thou be like unto him.
             Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he
             be wise in his own conceit.
                                        PROVERBS, XXVI, 4-5

> Copyright 1938 by Eric Blair

> TRANSCRIBER NOTES

> Hyphenation of words has been made consistent.

> [The end of _Homage to Catalonia_ by George Orwell]

## 5. V

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-homage-catalonia-fp20181044/5/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-homage-catalonia-fp20181044/5/#p-N

[¶0] On the eastern side of Huesca, until late March, nothing
happened—almost literally nothing. We were twelve hundred metres from
the enemy. When the Fascists were driven back into Huesca the Republican
Army troops who held this part of the line had not been over-zealous in
their advance, so that the line formed a kind of pocket. Later it would
have to be advanced—a ticklish job under fire—but for the present the
enemy might as well have been non-existent; our sole preoccupation was
keeping warm and getting enough to eat.

[¶1] Meanwhile, the daily—more particularly nightly—round, the common task.
Sentry-go, patrols, digging; mud, rain, shrieking winds, and occasional
snow. It was not till well into April that the nights grew noticeably
warmer. Up here on the plateau the March days were mostly like an
English March, with bright blue skies and nagging winds. The winter
barley was a foot high, crimson buds were forming on the cherry trees
(the line here ran through deserted orchards and vegetable gardens), and
if you searched the ditches you could find violets and a kind of wild
hyacinth like a poor specimen of a bluebell. Immediately behind the line
there ran a wonderful, green, bubbling stream, the first transparent
water I had seen since coming to the front. One day I set my teeth and
crawled into the river to have my first bath in six weeks. It was what
you might call a brief bath, for the water was mainly snow-water and not
much above freezing-point.

[¶2] Meanwhile nothing happened, nothing ever happened. The English had got
into the habit of saying that this wasn't a war, it was a bloody
pantomime. We were hardly under direct fire from the Fascists. The only
danger was from stray bullets, which, as the lines curved forward on
either side, came from several directions. All the casualties at this
time were from strays. Arthur Clinton got a mysterious bullet that
smashed his left shoulder and disabled his arm, permanently, I am
afraid. There was a little shell-fire, but it was extraordinarily
ineffectual. The scream and crash of the shells was actually looked upon
as a mild diversion. The Fascists never dropped their shells on our
parapet. A few hundred yards behind us there was a country house, called
La Granja, with big farm-buildings, which was used as a store,
headquarters, and cook-house for this sector of the line. It was this
that the Fascist gunners were trying for, but they were five or six
kilometres away and they never aimed well enough to do more than smash
the windows and chip the walls. You were only in danger if you happened
to be coming up the road when the firing started, and the shells plunged
into the fields on either side of you. One learned almost immediately
the mysterious art of knowing by the sound of a shell how close it will
fall. The shells the Fascists were firing at this period were wretchedly
bad. Although they were 150 mm they only made a crater about six feet
wide by four deep, and at least one in four failed to explode. There
were the usual romantic tales of sabotage in the Fascist factories and
unexploded shells in which, instead of the charge, there was found a
scrap of paper saying 'Red Front', but I never saw one. The truth was
that the shells were hopelessly old; someone picked up a brass fuse-cap
stamped with the date, and it was 1917. The Fascist guns were of the
same make and calibre as our own, and the unexploded shells were often
reconditioned and fired back. There was said to be one old shell with a
nickname of its own which travelled daily to and fro, never exploding.

[¶3] At night small patrols used to be sent into no-man's-land to lie in
ditches near the Fascist lines and listen for sounds (bugle-calls,
motor-horns, and so forth) that indicated activity in Huesca. There was
a constant come-and-go of Fascist troops, and the numbers could be
checked to some extent from listeners' reports. We always had special
orders to report the ringing of church bells. It seemed that the
Fascists always heard mass before going into action. In among the fields
and orchards there were deserted mud-walled huts which it was safe to
explore with a lighted match when you had plugged up the windows.
Sometimes you came on valuable pieces of loot such as a hatchet or a
Fascist water-bottle (better than ours and greatly sought after). You
could explore in the daytime as well, but mostly it had to be done
crawling on all fours. It was queer to creep about in those empty,
fertile fields where everything had been arrested just at the
harvest-moment. Last year's crops had never been touched. The unpruned
vines were snaking across the ground, the cobs on the standing maize had
gone as hard as stone, the mangels and sugar-beets were hypertrophied
into huge woody lumps. How the peasants must have cursed both armies!
Sometimes parties of men went spud-gathering in no-man's-land. About a
mile to the right of us, where the lines were closer together, there was
a patch of potatoes that was frequented both by the Fascists and
ourselves. We went there in the daytime, they only at night, as it was
commanded by our machine-guns. One night to our annoyance they turned
out _en masse_ and cleared up the whole patch. We discovered another
patch further on, where there was practically no cover and you had to
lift the potatoes lying on your belly—a fatiguing job. If their
machine-gunners spotted you, you had to flatten yourself out like a rat
when it squirms under a door, with the bullets cutting up the clods a
few yards behind you. It seemed worth it at the time. Potatoes were
getting very scarce. If you got a sackful you could take them down to
the cook-house and swap them for a water-bottleful of coffee.

[¶4] And still nothing happened, nothing ever looked like happening. 'When
are we going to attack? Why don't we attack?' were the questions you
heard night and day from Spaniard and Englishman alike. When you think
what fighting means it is queer that soldiers want to fight, and yet
undoubtedly they do. In stationary warfare there are three things that
all soldiers long for: a battle, more cigarettes, and a week's leave. We
were somewhat better armed now than before. Each man had a hundred and
fifty rounds of ammunition instead of fifty, and by degrees we were
being issued with bayonets, steel helmets, and a few bombs. There were
constant rumours of forthcoming battles, which I have since thought were
deliberately circulated to keep up the spirits of the troops. It did not
need much military knowledge to see that there would be no major action
on this side of Huesca, at any rate for the time being. The strategic
point was the road to Jaca, over on the other side. Later, when the
Anarchists made their attacks on the Jaca road, our job was to make
'holding attacks' and force the Fascists to divert troops from the other
side.

[¶5] During all this time, about six weeks, there was only one action on our
part of the front. This was when our Shock Troopers attacked the
Manicomio, a disused lunatic asylum which the Fascists had converted
into a fortress. There were several hundred refugee Germans serving with
the POUM. They were organised in a special battalion called the
Battalion de Choque, and from a military point of view they were on
quite a different level from the rest of the militia—indeed, were more
like soldiers than anyone I saw in Spain, except the Assault Guards and
some of the International Column. The attack was mucked up, as usual.
How many operations in this war, on the Government side, were _not_
mucked up, I wonder? The Shock Troops took the Manicomio by storm, but
the troops, of I forget which militia, who were to support them by
seizing the neighbouring hill that commanded the Manicomio, were badly
let down. The captain who led them was one of those Regular Army
officers of doubtful loyalty whom the Government persisted in employing.
Either from fright or treachery he warned the Fascists by flinging a
bomb when they were two hundred yards away. I am glad to say his men
shot him dead on the spot. But the surprise-attack was no surprise, and
the militiamen were mown down by heavy fire and driven off the hill, and
at nightfall the Shock Troops had to abandon the Manicomio. Through the
night the ambulances filed down the abominable road to Siétamo, killing
the badly wounded with their joltings.

[¶6] All of us were lousy by this time; though still cold it was warm enough
for that. I have had a big experience of body vermin of various kinds,
and for sheer beastliness the louse beats everything I have encountered.
Other insects, mosquitoes for instance, make you suffer more, but at
least they aren't _resident_ vermin. The human louse somewhat resembles
a tiny lobster, and he lives chiefly in your trousers. Short of burning
all your clothes there is no known way of getting rid of him. Down the
seams of your trousers he lays his glittering white eggs, like tiny
grains of rice, which hatch out and breed families of their own at
horrible speed. I think the pacifists might find it helpful to
illustrate their pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice. Glory of
war, indeed! In war _all_ soldiers are lousy, at least when it is warm
enough. The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at
Senlac, at Thermopylae—every one of them had lice crawling over his
testicles. We kept the brutes down to some extent by burning out the
eggs and by bathing as often as we could face it. Nothing short of lice
could have driven me into that ice-cold river.

[¶7] Everything was running short—boots, clothes, tobacco, soap, candles,
matches, olive oil. Our uniforms were dropping to pieces, and many of
the men had no boots, only rope-soled sandals. You came on piles of
worn-out boots everywhere. Once we kept a dug-out fire burning for two
days mainly with boots, which are not bad fuel. By this time my wife was
in Barcelona and used to send me tea, chocolate, and even cigars when
such things were procurable; but even in Barcelona everything was
running short, especially tobacco. The tea was a godsend, though we had
no milk and seldom any sugar. Parcels were constantly being sent from
England to men in the contingent, but they never arrived; food, clothes,
cigarettes—everything was either refused by the Post Office or seized
in France. Curiously enough, the only firm that succeeded in sending
packets of tea—even, on one memorable occasion, a tin of biscuits—to
my wife was the Army and Navy Stores. Poor old Army and Navy! They did
their duty nobly, but perhaps they might have felt happier if the stuff
had been going to Franco's side of the barricade. The shortage of
tobacco was the worst of all. At the beginning we had been issued with a
packet of cigarettes a day, then it got down to eight cigarettes a day,
then to five. Finally there were ten deadly days when there was no issue
of tobacco at all. For the first time, in Spain, I saw something that
you see every day in London—people picking up fag-ends.

[¶8] Towards the end of March I got a poisoned hand that had to be lanced and
put in a sling. I had to go into hospital, but it was not worth sending
me to Siétamo for such a petty injury, so I stayed in the so-called
hospital at Monflorite, which was merely a casualty clearing station. I
was there ten days, part of the time in bed. The _practicantes_
(hospital assistants) stole practically every valuable object I
possessed, including my camera and all my photographs. At the front
everyone stole, it was the inevitable effect of shortage, but the
hospital people were always the worst. Later, in the hospital at
Barcelona, an American who had come to join the International Column on
a ship that was torpedoed by an Italian submarine, told me how he was
carried ashore wounded, and how, even as they lifted him into the
ambulance, the stretcher-bearers pinched his wrist-watch.

[¶9] While my arm was in the sling I spent several blissful days wandering
about the countryside. Monflorite was the usual huddle of mud and stone
houses, with narrow tortuous alleys that had been churned by lorries
till they looked like the craters of the moon. The church had been badly
knocked about but was used as a military store. In the whole
neighbourhood there were only two farm-houses of any size, Torre Lorenzo
and Torre Fabián, and only two really large buildings, obviously the
houses of the landowners who had once lorded it over the countryside;
you could see their wealth reflected in the miserable huts of the
peasants. Just behind the river, close to the front line, there was an
enormous flour-mill with a country-house attached to it. It seemed
shameful to see the huge costly machines rusting useless and the wooden
flour-chutes torn down for firewood. Later on, to get firewood for the
troops further back, parties of men were sent in lorries to wreck the
place systematically. They used to smash the floor-boards of a room by
bursting a hand-grenade in it. La Granja, our store and cook-house, had
possibly at one time been a convent. It had huge courtyards and
outhouses, covering an acre or more, with stabling for thirty or forty
horses. The country-houses in that part of Spain are of no interest
architecturally, but their farm-buildings, of lime-washed stone with
round arches and magnificent roof-beams, are noble places, built on a
plan that has probably not altered for centuries. Sometimes it gave you
a sneaking sympathy with the Fascist ex-owners to see the way the
militia treated the buildings they had seized. In La Granja every room
that was not in use had been turned into a latrine—a frightful shambles
of smashed furniture and excrement. The little church that adjoined it,
its walls perforated by shell-holes, had its floor inches deep in dung.
In the great courtyard where the cooks ladled out the rations the litter
of rusty tins, mud, mule dung, and decaying food was revolting. It gave
point to the old army song:

[¶10] _There are rats, rats,_
                    _Rats as big as cats,_
                    _In the quartermaster's store!_

[¶11] The ones at La Granja itself really were as big as cats, or nearly;
great bloated brutes that waddled over the beds of muck, too impudent
even to run away unless you shot at them.

[¶12] Spring was really here at last. The blue in the sky was softer, the air
grew suddenly balmy. The frogs were mating noisily in the ditches. Round
the drinking-pool that served for the village mules I found exquisite
green frogs the size of a penny, so brilliant that the young grass
looked dull beside them. Peasant lads went out with buckets hunting for
snails, which they roasted alive on sheets of tin. As soon as the
weather improved the peasants had turned out for the spring ploughing.
It is typical of the utter vagueness in which the Spanish agrarian
revolution is wrapped that I could not even discover for certain whether
the land here was collectivised or whether the peasants had simply
divided it up among themselves. I fancy that in theory it was
collectivised, this being POUM and Anarchist territory. At any rate the
landowners were gone, the fields were being cultivated, and people
seemed satisfied. The friendliness of the peasants towards ourselves
never ceased to astonish me. To some of the older ones the war must have
seemed meaningless, visibly it produced a shortage of everything and a
dismal dull life for everybody, and at the best of times peasants hate
having troops quartered upon them. Yet they were invariably friendly—I
suppose reflecting that, however intolerable we might be in other ways,
we did stand between them and their one-time landlords. Civil war is a
queer thing. Huesca was not five miles away, it was these people's
market town, all of them had relatives there, every week of their lives
they had gone there to sell their poultry and vegetables. And now for
eight months an impenetrable barrier of barbed wire and machine-guns had
lain between. Occasionally it slipped their memory. Once I was talking
to an old woman who was carrying one of those tiny iron lamps in which
the Spaniards burn olive oil. 'Where can I buy a lamp like that?' I
said. 'In Huesca,' she said without thinking, and then we both laughed.
The village girls were splendid vivid creatures with coal-black hair, a
swinging walk, and a straightforward, man-to-man demeanour which was
probably a by-product of the revolution.

[¶13] Men in ragged blue shirts and black corduroy breeches, with
broad-brimmed straw hats, were ploughing the fields behind teams of
mules with rhythmically flopping ears. Their ploughs were wretched
things, only stirring the soil, not cutting anything we should regard as
a furrow. All the agricultural implements were pitifully antiquated,
everything being governed by the expensiveness of metal. A broken
ploughshare, for instance, was patched, and then patched again, till
sometimes it was mainly patches. Rakes and pitchforks were made of wood.
Spades, among a people who seldom possessed boots, were unknown; they
did their digging with a clumsy hoe like those used in India. There was
a kind of harrow that took one straight back to the later Stone Age. It
was made of boards joined together, to about the size of a kitchen
table; in the boards hundreds of holes were morticed, and into each hole
was jammed a piece of flint which had been chipped into shape exactly as
men used to chip them ten thousand years ago. I remember my feeling
almost of horror when I first came upon one of these things in a
derelict hut in no-man's-land. I had to puzzle over it for a long while
before grasping that it was a harrow. It made me sick to think of the
work that must go into the making of such a thing, and the poverty that
was obliged to use flint in place of steel. I have felt more kindly
towards industrialism ever since. But in the village there were two
up-to-date farm tractors, no doubt seized from some big landowner's
estate.

[¶14] Once or twice I wandered out to the little walled graveyard that stood a
mile or so from the village. The dead from the front were normally sent
to Siétamo; these were the village dead. It was queerly different from
an English graveyard. No reverence for the dead here! Everything
overgrown with bushes and coarse grass, human bones littered everywhere.
But the really surprising thing was the almost complete lack of
religious inscriptions on the gravestones, though they all dated from
before the revolution. Only once, I think, I saw the 'Pray for the soul
of so-and-so' which is usual on Catholic graves. Most of the
inscriptions were purely secular, with ludicrous poems about the virtues
of the deceased. On perhaps one grave in four or five there was a small
cross or a perfunctory reference to Heaven; this had usually been
chipped off by some industrious atheist with a chisel.

[¶15] It struck me that the people in this part of Spain must be genuinely
without religious feeling—religious feeling, I mean, in the orthodox
sense. It is curious that all the time I was in Spain I never once saw a
person cross himself; yet you would think such a movement would become
instinctive, revolution or no revolution. Obviously the Spanish Church
will come back (as the saying goes, night and the Jesuits always
return), but there is no doubt that at the outbreak of the revolution it
collapsed and was smashed up to an extent that would be unthinkable even
for the moribund C of E in like circumstances. To the Spanish people, at
any rate in Catalonia and Aragón, the Church was a racket pure and
simple. And possibly Christian belief was replaced to some extent by
Anarchism, whose influence is widely spread and which undoubtedly has a
religious tinge.

[¶16] It was the day I came back from hospital that we advanced the line to
what was really its proper position, about a thousand yards forward,
along the little stream that lay a couple of hundred yards in front of
the Fascist line. This operation ought to have been carried out months
earlier. The point of doing it now was that the Anarchists were
attacking on the Jaca road, and to advance on this side made them divert
troops to face us.

[¶17] We were sixty or seventy hours without sleep, and my memories go down
into a sort of blur, or rather a series of pictures. Listening-duty in
no-man's-land, a hundred yards from the Casa Francesa, a fortified
farm-house which was part of the Fascist line. Seven hours lying in a
horrible marsh, in reedy-smelling water into which one's body subsided
gradually deeper and deeper: the reedy smell, the numbing cold, the
stars immovable in the black sky, the harsh croaking of the frogs.
Though this was April it was the coldest night that I remember in Spain.
Only a hundred yards behind us the working-parties were hard at it, but
there was utter silence except for the chorus of the frogs. Just once
during the night I heard a sound—the familiar noise of a sandbag being
flattened with a spade. It is queer how, just now and again, Spaniards
can carry out a brilliant feat of organisation. The whole move was
beautifully planned. In seven hours six hundred men constructed twelve
hundred metres of trench and parapet, at distances of from a hundred and
fifty to three hundred yards from the Fascist line, and all so silently
that the Fascists heard nothing, and during the night there was only one
casualty. There were more next day, of course. Every man had his job
assigned to him, even to the cook-house orderlies who suddenly arrived
when the work was done with buckets of wine laced with brandy.

[¶18] And then the dawn coming up and the Fascists suddenly discovering that
we were there. The square white block of the Casa Francesa, though it
was two hundred yards away, seemed to tower over us, and the
machine-guns in its sandbagged upper windows seemed to be pointing
straight down into the trench. We all stood gaping at it, wondering why
the Fascists didn't see us. Then a vicious swirl of bullets, and
everyone had flung himself on his knees and was frantically digging,
deepening the trench and scooping out small shelters in the side. My arm
was still in bandages, I could not dig, and I spent most of that day
reading a detective story—_The Missing Moneylender_ its name was. I
don't remember the plot of it, but I remember very clearly the feeling
of sitting there reading it; the dampish clay of the trench bottom
underneath me, the constant shifting of my legs out of the way as men
hurried stooping down the trench, the crack—crack—crack of bullets a
foot or two overhead. Thomas Parker got a bullet through the top of his
thigh, which, as he said, was nearer to being a DSO than he cared about.
Casualties were happening all along the line, but nothing to what there
would have been if they had caught us on the move during the night. A
deserter told us afterwards that five Fascist sentries were shot for
negligence. Even now they could have massacred us if they had had the
initiative to bring up a few mortars. It was an awkward job getting the
wounded down the narrow, crowded trench. I saw one poor devil, his
breeches dark with blood, flung out of his stretcher and gasping in
agony. One had to carry wounded men a long distance, a mile or more, for
even when a road existed the ambulances never came very near the front
line. If they came too near the Fascists had a habit of shelling
them—justifiably, for in modern war no one scruples to use an ambulance
for carrying ammunition.

[¶19] And then, next night, waiting at Torre Fabián for an attack that was
called off at the last moment by wireless. In the barn where we waited
the floor was a thin layer of chaff over deep beds of bones, human bones
and cows' bones mixed up, and the place was alive with rats. The filthy
brutes came swarming out of the ground on every side. If there is one
thing I hate more than another it is a rat running over me in the
darkness. However, I had the satisfaction of catching one of them a good
punch that sent him flying.

[¶20] And then waiting fifty or sixty yards from the Fascist parapet for the
order to attack. A long line of men crouching in an irrigation ditch
with their bayonets peeping over the edge and the whites of their eyes
shining through the darkness. Kopp and Benjamin squatting behind us with
a man who had a wireless receiving-box strapped to his shoulders. On the
western horizon rosy gun-flashes followed at intervals of several
seconds by enormous explosions. And then a pip—pip—pip noise from the
wireless and the whispered order that we were to get out of it while the
going was good. We did so, but not quickly enough. Twelve wretched
children of the JCI (the Youth League of the POUM, corresponding to the
JSU of the PSUC) who had been posted only about forty yards from the
Fascist parapet, were caught by the dawn and unable to escape. All day
they had to lie there, with only tufts of grass for cover, the Fascists
shooting at them every time they moved. By nightfall seven were dead,
then the other five managed to creep away in the darkness.

[¶21] And then, for many mornings to follow, the sound of the Anarchist
attacks on the other side of Huesca. Always the same sound. Suddenly, at
some time in the small hours, the opening crash of several score bombs
bursting simultaneously—even from miles away a diabolical, rending
crash—and then the unbroken roar of massed rifles and machine-guns, a
heavy rolling sound curiously similar to the roll of drums. By degrees
the firing would spread all round the lines that encircled Huesca, and
we would stumble out into the trench to lean sleepily against the
parapet while a ragged meaningless fire swept overhead.

[¶22] In the daytime the guns thundered fitfully. Torre Fabián, now our
cook-house, was shelled and partially destroyed. It is curious that when
you are watching artillery-fire from a safe distance you always want the
gunner to hit his mark, even though the mark contains your dinner and
some of your comrades. The Fascists were shooting well that morning;
perhaps there were German gunners on the job. They bracketed neatly on
Torre Fabián. One shell beyond it, one shell short of it, then
whizz—BOOM! Burst rafters leaping upwards and a sheet of uralite
skimming down the air like a nicked playing-card. The next shell took
off the corner of a building as neatly as a giant might do it with a
knife. But the cooks produced dinner on time—a memorable feat.

[¶23] As the days went on the unseen but audible guns began each to assume a
distinct personality. There were the two batteries of Russian 75-mm guns
which fired from close in our rear and which somehow evoked in my mind
the picture of a fat man hitting a golf-ball. These were the first
Russian guns I had seen—or heard, rather. They had a low trajectory and
a very high velocity, so that you heard the cartridge explosion, the
whizz and the shell-burst almost simultaneously. Behind Monflorite were
two very heavy guns which fired a few times a day, with a deep, muffled
roar that was like the baying of distant chained-up monsters. Up at
Mount Aragón, the medieval fortress which the Government troops had
stormed last year (the first time in its history, it was said), and
which guarded one of the approaches to Huesca, there was a heavy gun
which must have dated well back into the nineteenth century. Its great
shells whistled over so slowly that you felt certain you could run
beside them and keep up with them. A shell from this gun sounded like
nothing so much as a man riding along on a bicycle and whistling. The
trench-mortars, small though they were, made the most evil sound of all.
Their shells are really a kind of winged torpedo, shaped like the darts
thrown in public-houses and about the size of a quart bottle; they go
off with a devilish metallic crash, as of some monstrous globe of
brittle steel being shattered on an anvil. Sometimes our aeroplanes flew
over and let loose the aerial torpedoes whose tremendous echoing roar
makes the earth tremble even at two miles' distance. The shell-bursts
from the Fascist anti-aircraft guns dotted the sky like cloudlets in a
bad water-colour, but I never saw them get within a thousand yards of an
aeroplane. When an aeroplane swoops down and uses its machine-gun the
sound, from below, is like the fluttering of wings.

[¶24] On our part of the line not much was happening. Two hundred yards to the
right of us, where the Fascists were on higher ground, their snipers
picked off a few of our comrades. Two hundred yards to the left, at the
bridge over the stream, a sort of duel was going on between the Fascist
mortars and the men who were building a concrete barricade across the
bridge. The evil little shells whizzed over, zwing—crash!
zwing—crash!, making a doubly diabolical noise when they landed on the
asphalt road. A hundred yards away you could stand in perfect safety and
watch the columns of earth and black smoke leaping into the air like
magic trees. The poor devils round the bridge spent much of the daytime
cowering in the little man-holes they had scooped in the side of the
trench. But there were less casualties than might have been expected,
and the barricade rose steadily, a wall of concrete two feet thick with
embrasures for two machine-guns and a small field-gun. The concrete was
being reinforced with old bedsteads, which apparently was the only iron
that could be found for the purpose.