1921.] 



Agriculture Behind the Lines. 



807 



horses only required a little imagination. Field-gun ammunition 

 boxes, made to hold 4 shells and their cartridge cases in one, 

 when filled with earth made a very suitable and stable material 

 with which to construct the sides of a hut, and there was no 

 lack of corrugated iron for the construction of the roof. 



In a very short time therefore layouts for the various hutted 

 camps were prepared, and construction went forward rapidly, 

 and before long a series of camps was completed, with all 

 accessory buildings, roadways and paths and even, in some cases, 

 adorning shrubs. The importance of these camps will be 

 appreciated later. 



The first duty that fell to block commanders was to survey 

 their respective blocks with a view to seeing how much land could 

 be ploughed straight away without any preliminary preparation, 

 and to get tractors put on to such areas without delay. As 

 regards the remainder, the work of clearing was handed over 

 to companies of German prisoners of war. 



As has already been intimated, across the plateau, roughly 

 from north to south, ran the front line marking the limit of 

 the German offensive of 1918. Here were two front trench 

 lines with all their reserve lines and communication trenches. 

 Naturally these were somewhat more numerous on the British 

 side of the lines, namely, on the defensive side. Moreover, all 

 trenches were protected by heavy belts of wire of varying thick- 

 nesses and there were, in addition, innumerable strong points 

 which were even more heavily protected. 



The work of preparing the ground for cultivation did not there- 

 fore consist merely in filling in trenches, but involved the tearing 

 up and stacking at suitable points of all the wire and other 

 obstructions which encumbered the ground. Even when the 

 ground had been cleared, the troubles were not at an end. 

 There were many localities in the area where, either on account 

 of the existence of concealed enemy battery positions or suspected 

 dug-out systems, the shelling by the heavy British artillery had 

 been intense. The type of shell used was an armour-piercing 

 variety with a delay action fuse, intended to destroy dug-outs 

 at some distance below the ground level. Where no dug-out 

 existed the shell merely penetrated to a considerable depth and 

 then exploded. The result w T as that, owing to the depth to 

 which the shell had gone, the force of the explosion merely 

 formed a subterranean cavity of varying dimensions, without 

 leaving a crater on the surface, and a cursory examination of the 

 ground did not reveal anything unusual. 



