Between the Lines

by Boyd Cable

Boyd Cable (1878 - 1943) wrote Between the Lines about the Western Front in World War I. He wanted the people back home to know what really was happening not just what they heard from official sources. The book opens with a lookout listening for enemy footsteps in a rainstorm. "For perhaps the twentieth time in half an hour the look-out man in the advanced trench raised his head cautiously over the parapet and peered out into the darkness. A drizzling rain made it almost impossible to see beyond a few yards ahead, but then the German trench was not more than fifty yards off and the space between was criss-crossed and interlaced and a-bristle with the tangle of barb-wire defences erected by both sides. For the twentieth time the look-out peered and twisted his head sideways to listen, and for the twentieth time he was just lowering his head beneath the sheltering parapet when he stopped and stiffened into rigidity. There was no sound apart from the sharp cracks of the rifles near at hand and running diminuendo along the trenches into a rising and falling stutter of reports, the frequent whine and whistle of the more distant bullets, and the quick hiss and 'zipp' of the nearer ones, all sounds so constant and normal that the look-out paid no heed to them, put them, as it were, out of the focus of his hearing, and strained to catch the fainter but far more significant sound of a footstep squelching in the mud, the 'snip' of a wire-cutter at work, the low 'tang' of a jarred wire."

Genres: History, World War I

146 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1915

About the author

Ernest Andrew Ewart (1878-1943) was an Australian author who wrote under the pseudonym Boyd Cable.

Reviews

[Malachi Cyr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Its been awhile since I read this book, which was history of the WWI front told in story style, based off of actual reports from the lines. It takes a perspective of reading between the lines of what the reports or papers would say. For example, if the report was "Detonated a mine under the enemy trench" it would detail what that was like for the soldiers on the line and the engineers who did the painstaking work to construct the mine, so it's a really cool perspective. It was very well written and interesting. Recommended to history fans.

[Perry Whitford · Rating 3 out of 5]

During WWI the folks at home were mostly fed a steady diet of propaganda and vague press statements that didn't really reveal the reality of life in the trenches. This book, written by a journalist 'at the Front and within the sound of the German guns' aimed to remedy that.

What did it actually mean when the newspapers informed their readers that, for example, 'On the Western Front there is nothing to report. All remains quiet.'

In the author's dramatisation of this typical statement a new battalion to the frontline experience a day and night of constant shelling and mortaring in which nine men perished and thirty-six were wounded, where the enemies nearest trench is taken and lost not once but twice but no substantial territory was gained.

Men are alive one minute and randomly dead the next, ricochets claim as many lives as direct hits, bodies lie everywhere and rot in the mud before they can be removed and given a decent burial. I highly doubt the purpose of this publication was to discourage volunteers but I fail to see how it could have motivated anyone to rush down to their local recruiting office.

And yet despite being more graphic than most of the reportage from WWI that I have read, there was still something held back. The more obviously dramatised the individual stories were, the more unrealistic the element of personal drama they injected, the better they were for it.

Stories about the work of a sapper and a doctor were proof of this. The former was particularly suspenseful, the later especially tragic. I guess I'm used to reading subsequent accounts of the horrors of war, which have hidden nothing. As such, a story is preferable to a half-truth.

Also worth a mention though was the insight into the soldiers of both armies hurling songs and insults across the trenches at each other as well as bullets and grenades. In one episode a cockney regiment appropriate the German's famous 'Hymn of Hate' and have lots of fun singing it back to the enemy.