We clambered down into the first of these chambers. It was exactly as
its occupants had left it. On the floor amongst some tumbled blankets
and odd pieces of clothing, socks for the most part, was scattered a
stock of German grenades, each like a grey jampot with a short handle.
The blankets had come from a series of bunks which almost filled up the
whole dark chamber. These bunks were made roughly of wood, in pairs one
over another, packed into every corner of the narrow space with as much
ingenuity as the berths in an emigrant ship. There were, I think, six of
them in that first chamber. Inlet into the wall, at the end of one set
of bunks, was a wooden box doing service for a cupboard. In it were a
penny novel, and three or four bottles of a German table water. At least
one of these was still full. So the garrison of Fricourt was not as hard
put to it for supplies as some of the German prisoners with whom I spoke
the day before. They had told me that for three or four days no water
could be brought to them up their communication trenches owing to the
British bombardment.

I expect that the garrison of Fricourt had been almost entirely in those
dug-outs during the bombardment. The chambers seemed to have more than
one entrance in some cases, and one suspects they also led into one
another underground. A subterranean passage led forward beneath the
parapet to a door opening into No Man's Land--you could see the daylight
at the end of it.

The fire trench was battered in places out of recognition. But here and
there we came across a bay of it which the bombardment had left more or
less untouched. There were slings of cartridges still hanging against
the wall of the trench. There were the two steel plates through which
they had peered out into No Man's Land, the slits in them half covered
by the flap so as just to give a man room to peep through them. There