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Action Front by Boyd Cable
page 66 of 229 (28%)
under their own entanglements.

There may be some who will wonder that an officer should feel such
qualms as Ainsley had over the simple job of a night patrol over the
open ground in front of the German trench; but, then, there are patrols
and patrols, or as the inattentive recruit at the gunnery class said
when he was asked to describe the varieties of shells he had been told
of: "There are some sorts of one kind, and some of another."

There are plenty of parts on the Western Front where affairs at
intervals settled down into such a peaceful state that there was
nothing more than a fair sporting risk attaching to the performance of
a patrol which leaves the shelter of our own lines at night to crawl
out amongst the barbed wire entanglements in the darkness. There have
been times when you might listen at night by the hour together and
hardly hear a rifle-shot, and when the burst of artillery fire was a
thing to be commented on. But at other times, and in some parts of the
line especially, business was run on very different lines. Then every
man in the forward firing-trench had a certain number of rounds to fire
each night, even although he had no definite target to fire at.
Magnesium flares and pistol lights were kept going almost without
ceasing, while the artillery made a regular practice of loosing off a
stated number of rounds per night. The Germans worked on fairly similar
lines, and as a result it can easily be imagined that any patrol or
reconnoitering work between the lines was apt to be exceedingly
unhealthy. Actually there were parts on the line where no feet had
pressed the ground of No Man's Land for weeks on end, unless in open
attack or counter-attack, and of these feet there were a good many that
never returned to the trench, and a good many others that did return
only to walk straight to the nearest aid-post and hospital.
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