Our military prison was in a barn about a mile from Headquarters. I
used to go there for service every Monday afternoon at six o'clock. By
that time, the men had come back from work. They slept on shelves, (p. 124)
one over another. The barn was poorly lighted, and got dark early in
the afternoon. The first time I took service there, I was particularly
anxious that everything should be done as nicely as possible, so that
the men would not think they had come under the ban of the church.
Most of their offences were military ones. The men therefore were not
criminals in the ordinary sense of the term. I brought my surplice,
scarf and hymn books, and I told the men that I wanted them to sing.
They lay on the shelves with only their heads and shoulders visible. I
told them that I wanted the service to be hearty, and asked them to
choose the first hymn. A voice from one of the shelves said--
"Here we suffer grief and pain."
A roar of laughter went up from the prisoners, in which I joined
heartily.
At the front, we held Hill 60 and the trenches to the south of it. In
a railway embankment, a series of dugouts furnished the Brigade that
was in the line with comfortable billets. The Brigadier's abode had a
fireplace in it. One of the dugouts was used as a morgue, in which
bodies were kept till they could be buried. A man told me that one
night when he had come down from the line very late, he found a dugout
full of men wrapped in their blankets, every one apparently asleep.
Without more ado, he crawled in amongst them and slept soundly till
morning. When he awoke, he found to his horror that he had slept all
night among the dead men in the morgue. There was a cemetery at
Railway Dugouts, which was carefully laid out. Beyond this there was
another line of sandbag homes on one side of a large pond called
"Zillebeke Lake." They were used by other divisions.
From Railway Dugouts, by paths and then by communication trenches, one
made one's way up to Hill 60 and the other parts of the front line,
where the remains of a railway crossed the hill. Our dugouts were on
the east side of it, and the line itself was called "Lover's Lane".
The brick arch of a bridge which crossed the line was part of our
front.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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