Digging trenches

We were up on this Oppy front. We just seem to be holding there and we hadn’t been back very long until they put us on. What they were doing at the time was digging more trenches. They had a bunch of Chinese coolies digging them. They hung way behind the line. You can guess why, if you read about the advance that the Germans had made in the early spring of 1918, when they got within 39 miles of Paris, eh. And they were getting ready for possibly another advance. And we were put on with the engineers. They were making dugouts in chalk there again. There seemed to be an awful lot of chalk in that country. It was just like rock, you know, except a little softer. But we were digging, or they were doing the digging, the excavating there and filling sand bags, and we were lined from down in this dugout to the outside trench, passing sandbags of chalk from one to the other. And the last one dumped it and passed the bags back again. Now you hear men here complaining about being on shift work. That’s the only time I ever was on shift work. But the ones here that complain about it, they’re on eight hours and off twelve, eh. We were on eight and off eight, and on eight and off eight. That for two or three weeks. Well, those dugouts were never used, luckily. But they had to be there just in case the Heinie came again.