The subtlety of the Military mind beats and will beat me to the end.
Yesterday we lived in a row of earthen dwellings in a depression in the
ground, which anyone might be excused for referring to, if not as
trenches, at least as dugouts. These alone of all the marvels of
military engineering I have observed during the War admitted of being
shelled with equal exactitude from due in front and due in rear; and
water seemed to have been laid on throughout. Taking all these things
into consideration some Authority labelled them, once for all,
"Billets."
Last night we moved into a commodious cellar of a house which still
leans against the next. It is only five minutes from town, and tramlines
pass the door. Nay more, they stop abruptly at the door--such are the
improvements effected by R.E. Inside the cellar are three bits of
chairs, a table-top on boxes, and an inimitable ancestral smell that no
deodorizer known to modern warfare can cope with. And all this is called
"Trenches!" Our servants do their best to support the official illusion
by neglecting to clean our boots and regarding with surprise and some
little sadness any tendency on our part to wash.
But you must not imagine that life here is all honey. Even here we do a
bit for our eight-and-sixpence. Every evening there comes down from the
front line a report that our men there want more food. A stricter or
less beneficent C.O. than ours might at once institute a court of
inquiry into what has happened to all the food we gave them last night.
But not so with us. "The boys want food," he says to the Adjutant, "and,
by Heaven, the boys shall have it."
No sooner said than handed on to someone else to do. The Adjutant works
off a little bit of his strong personal dislike for me in a note,
couched, if you please, in the most friendly terms, intimating that he
has raised heaven and earth to get me off, but the C.O. insists that I
(as the only competent officer for the task) shall supervise the conduct
of our rations to the front, middle and back lines to-night. He adds
that the Intelligence Corps report that information received from
deserters leads us to suppose that Fritz intends to strafe all roads and
communication trenches in our sector to-night.
The carrying party is supplied by a sister battalion, and makes the
night thoroughly well acquainted with its views about a unit that can't
supply blanks to carry their blanked rations for their blanked selves.
Sometimes a second or a third trip may be necessary, and then the
carriers' patriotic fervour expresses itself in terms almost potent
enough to do the carrying for them. For some reason or other the R.E.,
who design material for our porterage, consider its end and not its
portability. Their special line of ready-made wire entanglements would
entangle a hippopotamus; and when it comes to carrying one a
mile-and-a-half you find it has no wheels, no handles, and simply won't
fold up into the pocket. The usual procedure is for a man or two to roll
on one of these barbed-wire death-traps until they are well stuck on
them and then crawl to the point of delivery.
Sometimes, of course, we have accidents. Last night, for instance, two
men were proceeding (by the way the great point about being a soldier is
that you never walk, run or otherwise ambulate--you proceed, or proceed
at the double, which of course is much nicer for you)--yes, were
proceeding, one at each end of an entanglement, along the top of a
slope, when the leader missed his footing altogether and rolled down to
the morass below. The second, after a brief struggle, followed with the
entanglement. This movement involved not only the man behind, who was
bearing a footboard, but also the remainder of the section. The entire
avalanche was precipitated on to the leaders, and remained there
struggling like the population of a fly-paper until a squad arrived with
wire-cutters. When the R.E. heard of it they wanted the episode
published in Corps Orders as a testimonial. But what the men wanted done
about the R.E. I dare not tell you.
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