Marion McCune Rice

Letter excerpt (1917)

After we left this little town we drove perhaps two miles through fields then woods. The roads never ceased to be a marvel to me. They are so good, far better than any of ours except our very finest state roads - and all this in spite of all the traffic and all the history those roads have seen. The trenches and the barbed wire began almost at once but if I can use the expression, they weren't really active, I don't believe they were much more than in reserve far back. The fields were already planted, precious little waste land in this country. In one field I saw one of those little round Boche caps hung up as a scare crow - I hope it works well. When we had driven a little way into the woods we began to get out of this life into some other, it was as if we had been suddenly put down in some primitive land. It didn't seem as if we could be in France in 1917. On both sides of the road in the woods strange little villages of huts appeared. Many seemed to be made of four upright posts supporting a sort of thatched roof, the sides shut in by branches or heavy ferns hung closely together over horizontal poles. Some were like low log cabins. You expected to see some wild African tribe come around the corner instead of a blue clad Frenchman. Most of these camps were deserted, it made it seem all the more strange and unreal. After a while we came to more, deeper and more business like trenches, no more huts and log cabins, instead of that dug outs, underground and well protected above by sand bags and logs and earth. Then we came to a little village that was hardly even a shell in some places - there were four walls standing and perhaps part of a roof, in that case it would be patched up a little, the empty window frames would be covered with cloth or paper and soldiers would be quartered there. Generally you looked through a yawning doorway and windows into perfect destruction, not a stick of anything usable could be seen. The Germans carried off every single thing. Here and there as you drove along you'd see in a trench or beside the road the remains of a stove or perhaps a broken easy chair or some such piece of furniture. I said you wouldn't see anything in the houses, sometimes you would see the twisted remains of what had once been an iron bed. Here and there were houses or rather ruins, with the doors and windows barricaded with sand bags. Between this village and the next was a sea of trenches and barbed wire - that awful barbed wire. You can't imagine what it is like, it's not just spread across in single file, there are rows and rows of posts or iron supports and the wire is crossed and recrossed and runs up and down and weaves and interweaves until it is the most devilish trap you ever imagined. If the men get caught in the barbed wire they are pretty surely lost, nobody can help them, they just die by inches, sometimes after days of agony. It is too awful to think about. The trenches aren't just straight ditches, they keep changing directions and have different projecting points for safety to say nothing of dugouts or bomb proof shelters or whatever you want to call them. They are kept from caving in by different means, some are lined with a sort of basket work of small branches or trees, woven in and out of stakes, may are strengthened with sand bags. Many had board walks to keep you out of the mud. In one trench there was a door which when we opened it showed a rather steep stairway leading down about twenty-five feet into the ground. It was a very well made staircase and the walls of the stairway were of boards neatly put together and held by narrow strips of metal. We didn't investigate the rooms at the bottom for the soldier who was with us said it was not safe, there was a lot of unexploded ammunition there. Some of those trench dug outs even had glass in their doors or windows, glass with fine wires through it so it wouldn't break easily. Some had their entrance walls made of cement.

From: Marion's View:  The Letters of Marion McCune Rice