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Gerald Kersh recounts the story of the old soldier who said: At the beginning of the War, they issued us with silly little folding spades, about nine inches long and six across. They set us to dig a trench, and we scraped away at the earth with those nasty little tools, and by the end of the day all the spades were bent and blunted, and we'd got down about a foot. Those spades were useless. But when we got across to France, and they marched us to the front, the Boche began shelling, and there was shrapnel all around, and we took our little useless shovels, and we just melted into the ground. In other words - it took as long as it took. The basic trench could be dug in a day; under fire, half a day. But over the next weeks and months, it would be improved, deepened, widened, revetted, supplied with dugouts, duckboards and firing step; a trench was never finished.

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