Читать книгу Over There with the Marines at Chateau Thierry онлайн

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Each of these Marines quickly scratched off a rectangular plot about three by five feet and then began to dig. Phil and Tim, who always endeavored to keep as near together as possible in all emergencies where they might be able to aid each other, “dug in” a few feet apart. After they had cut roots and scooped the dirt out to a depth of three or four feet, they dashed about here and there in the immediate vicinity and gathered dead limbs and brushwood with which each built a shelter at one end of his funk hole, or “stub trench.” These shelters were rendered more stable and impervious to rain by heaping on them mounds of loose earth that had been shoveled out of the trenches.

But the disastrous explosion of the two shells seemed to have served as a false alarm as to what ought to be expected for some time thereafter. The fact of the matter is, “nothing happened.” Three days they remained “dug in” and not another shell or bomb struck within two hundred yards of any point of the sheltered “stub trenches” of the recently bombarded regiment.