Having read the novel years ago, I remember most the scene where the protagonist and his companions are in a trench under a particularly heavy artillery attack (I assume by the French), and he says they were lucky they were in an older, deeper trench rather than a more modern shallower one, or they would have been wiped out. Which artillery weapons would have been used for that effect?
"If we were in one of those light dug-outs that they have started building lately instead of this deeper one, none of us would be alive" p.76 (Mayflower edition).
A few pages earlier Remarque writes (p.69):
"The English artillery has been strengthened, that we can detect at once. There are at least four more batteries of nine-inch guns to the right of the farm, and behind
the poplars they have put in trench-mortars. Besides these they have brought up a number of those little French beasts with instantaneous fuses."
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