Minenwerfers

The big shells, which we called I think it was Minenwerfers, we could watch them coming and we could dodge them. Sometimes they’d hit our trench, but we could watch them coming and we could step around the angle of the trench so as to avoid being hit by them. One came over and hit our dugout which we used for a kitchen. It was just covered by sheet metal. And after the shelling stopped at 4 o’clock, I thought, oh, we must get something to eat because, of course, we had had no lunch. And I went to this dugout where the kitchen was and a shell had come through the corrugated iron roof and was sitting on the floor of the kitchen dugout. I didn’t feel like asking my men to take it out. I knew the food was all in there. We couldn’t get any supper that night unless we got rid of it. So I thought, oh well, here goes, so I went in there and picked the thing up and I think it weighed about eighty pounds. It was about, oh, 18 inches long, and perhaps four, five or six inches in diameter. I carried it out and down the trench, and took it up back of the line and laid it very gently in a shell hole.