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the inhabitants called the place "The Grass Bank." Through it the map showed a lonely little red capillary, wandering by itself for a quarter of an inch, and fading off into nothing again. The stout German colonel of the local artillery group--big guns which barked mostly of nights--having found his forward observation post knocked in by a small field-gun shell, had come back and growled like a bear all dinner-time, most inconsequentially, about the lack of cover from heavy shells in the back areas. His real object was to abuse the men at the table with him; but one junior Staff Officer, hankering after promotion, looked round for the best dug-out site; and caused to be burrowed downwards, from the bottom of a steep grassy bank which ran half-way across a neighbouring field, four narrow dark tunnels leading into low square rooms, held up with stout beams, and all connected with each other. Two were lined with rough bunks on wooden frames folding against the wall. Another held a table covered with papers, a telephone switchboard, and four busy clerks. The fourth was panelled carefully with deal, the ceiling neatly gridironed with dark stained wood, a cupboard let into a recess with a looking-glass panel above it, a comfortable bunk with an electric bulb above the pillow and a telephone by the bedside. The group commander slept there undisturbed, even when the British suddenly pushed their front forward, and the Grass Bank began to shake with the thump of 9-inch shells. The junior Staff Officer wonders why he is a junior Staff Officer still. The great battle climbed like some slow, devouring monster up one green slope, down the next, and up the green slopes beyond, clawing on to green fields, and leaving them behind it a wilderness of pock-marked slime. One of the many small obstacles, which held up its local progress for a while, was some sort of nest of Germans behind a certain bank. Several attacks had been made on it. The Intelligence Officer of an Australian Brigade followed the Intelligence Officer of an Australian Battalion on his stomach, for one night, up to the barbed wire; and gave it as his opinion that the enemy kept his machine-guns in dug-outs at the bottom of the bank. Later, a wild night of driving rain, and flashes, and crashes, and black forms struggling in the mud against the glint of flares on slimy white crater edges, left things still uncertain. It was there that Tim Gibbs came in--and Booligal.
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