Unconscious Humorists
It cannot be claimed, perhaps, for any one class of society that they
are more humorous than are others, but as soldiers live, day and night,
in a crowd, they sharpen each other's wits, and their training has, or
ought to have, the effect of making them good observers.
As the British soldier is brave without knowing it, so is he an
unconscious humorist. He does not set up to be that sad thing--a "funny
man."
Our soldiers began the campaign against Germany facetiously by printing
in chalk on the troop trains at Boulogne "No-stop run to Berlin."
When our soldiers come home, you will hear some wonderful French. A
man from Limerick asked a war correspondent to translate an English
sentence into French. "I did it to the best of my ability". He looked
at me very solemnly; then said: 'Do it agin, sorr.' I did it again,
and he stopped me. 'Whisht, hold yer jaw, or be me soul the guarrd'll
arrest ye for a German spy; yer Frinch is homemade an' brought up on
th' bottle.'
A bombardier of the Royal Field Artillery wrote:
"One of our fellows thought he would try for some eggs at a farmhouse.
Naturally they couldn't understand him, so he opened his mouth, rubbed
his stomach, flapped his arms and cried, 'Cock-adoodle-doo!' The eggs
came promptly. Another chap tried to get some bread at a farm. After he
had made all sorts of queer signs the woman seemed to understand and
said, 'Oui, oui, M'sieur,' rushed back into the house and brought back
a bundle of hay! There was a terrific roar of laughter from the troops.
The non-plussed look on the woman's face and 'fed up' expression on the
chap's made a picture."
Private Macnamara, of the Royal Fusiliers, relates that during the
fighting on the Aisne a German called out to a company of Fusiliers:
"Wait till we catch you in our barber's shop in London." The Fusiliers
wiped out the German company with the bayonet, a private shouting: "You
won't get to London again."
Another soldier wrote, probably joking: "Our trenches and the enemy's
were only a couple of hundred yards apart, but we could not get the
beggars to give us a chance to pot them. So at last I called out,
'Waiter!' and up went five heads at once."
At one time, when the German shells were particularly numerous, a
private of the 1st Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry called out, "Fall
in here for your pay, A company." There was a good laugh.
Another shell also caused a good laugh. In the rush to avoid it, two of
our men fell over each other, and one actually sat upon the shell. It
exploded. When the smoke cleared away the man was discovered to have
escaped with very slight injuries to himself; but his trousers were
torn to shreds, to the great amusement of his comrades.
A private of the Royal Irish Regiment wrote this to his mother:
"There's plenty of hard fighting coming our way these days, and though
we suffer cruelly once in a while, we always give them something to let
them know that we have not lost our fighting powers in 'Paddy's land,'
whatever else we may have lost. You could not help laughing at some
of the tales the German prisoners have about us. When they knew they
had been captured by an Irish regiment they wanted to know how it was
we were not at home in the civil war that was going on. Says I to one
of them that came off with that blarney in his queer English, 'This
is the only war we know, or want to know, about for the time being,
and there's mightily little that's civil about it or the way you are
behaving yourselves.'"
It was the birthday of Pat Ryan, of the Connaught Rangers, and he
thought that he ought to do something to celebrate it. Without telling
anyone, he went out of the trenches in the afternoon, and came back
after dusk with two big Germans in tow. How or where he got them nobody
knows. The captain of his company asked him how he managed to catch the
two. "Sure, and I surrounded them, Sorr," was the reply.
Even in the midst of a bayonet charge an Irish soldier caused laughter
by calling out, "Look at thim German divils retratin' with their backs
facin' us."
Private William Price, R.A.M.C., wrote: "Last Sunday week about 6 p.m.
a shell (coal boxes we call them), eight inches wide and four feet
long, passed through the roof and side wall of a barn in which the
bearers sleep, and fell into the grounds of the hospital, where we were
having a little service; but, thank God, it didn't explode. Strange
to relate, the subject of the sermon was 'Miracles,' and this was one
of the greatest, for had it come a little later there would have been
several of us having food and rest in the barn. The shell smashed heavy
beams, hurling them just where I should have been resting. We buried
the shell, and enclosed it with a fence. This is the verse we made up
and placed on it":
Sunday, September 27th, 1914.
"Here lies a shell of German invention,
To do us great harm was their intention;
And in striking a barn it caused great alarm,
While the troops were singing the ----th Psalm.
But don't be afraid, the danger is o'er;
Still if it goes off we'll say 'au revoir.'
So now we'll conclude with love and affection,
Sincerely trusting there'll be no resurrection."
An Irish soldier told his mother in a letter that they had German
shells for breakfast--not egg shells. She was not to believe, however,
about the hardships they had to endure, even from her son. "I never
believe anything I hear and only half of what I say."
Outside a temporary post office was the notice, "We close from noon to
2 p.m." Underneath a joker wrote, "Prussian cannon are requested to do
the same."
The Germans, in crushing numbers, were about to enter a town. It was
necessary to hold them back long enough to enable the British troops
to retire in good order. A handful of Scots were selected for this
duty. Sheltered in one of the first houses of the village, they kept
up a well-sustained fire on the enemy, but had to endure themselves a
perfect storm of bullets. The shattered windows flew in all directions.
The walls were riddled with bullet holes. Already several of our men
had dropped. Suddenly the German fire ceased; the enemy were evidently
shifting ground to a better position, and one of those silent moments
of waiting ensued--the worst of all to endure. While the pause lasted,
a Scottish sergeant noticed that our frail fortress was a grocer's
shop. On a shelf he found a few packets of chocolate. An idea occurred
to him. Turning to his men, he held up the packets, saying: "Whoever
bowls his man over gets a piece." The German fusilade began anew. The
Scots, roaring with laughter at the sergeant's marksmanship prizes,
fired back as coolly as if at target practice. The sergeant, while
keeping his own rifle busy, watched the effect of the fire on the
advancing enemy. He recorded each successful shot with "Got him," and
handed over a cake of chocolate to the winning marksman. Alas! there
were few prize winners who lived to taste their reward.
Here is an instance of dour Scotch humour. Two Highlanders, one bigger
than the other, were both hit, and there was only one stretcher
available. The little one refused to enter it and the big one got angry
at the refusal, so raising himself with his unwounded arm he cried,
"You go the noo, Jock, an if you're not slippy about it, you'll gaur me
gae ye something ye'll remember when am a' richt again." Jock didn't
wait any longer after that.
A British cavalry subaltern who was cut off from his men hid in the
edge of a wood by a road. It was not long before he saw an unsuspecting
armed German soldier patrolling the road. He could have shot the man
without warning, but felt that it would be akin to murder to kill him
in cold blood. In order to instil a little of the spirit of combat into
the affair, therefore, he crept out of cover, ran up behind the "boch,"
as our Allies would call him, and gave him a ferocious kick. Instead of
showing fight the startled and pained German gave a yell and ran for
dear life, leaving the subaltern laughing too hard to shoot.
This sort of chivalry, however, had for once to pay a penalty. A patrol
of the Gloucestershire Regiment met two German soldiers looting an
orchard. They did not like to shoot them with their backs turned, so
they shouted to give them a chance of defending themselves. One of the
Germans turned about and sent a bullet crashing into the brain of the
man who had been the first to suggest that they should be warned.
A Highlander writes home from the war to a friend that things are going
so badly with "our dear old chum Wilhelm" that "I've bet X---- a new
hat that I'll be home by Christmas."
Bets are common in the trenches. Gunners wager about the number of
their hits, riflemen on the number of misses by the enemy. A soldier
told a correspondent that they gambled in the trenches on the next man
to be killed. "We'd get up a little sweepstake, draw names and--wait!
There was always a favourite. I held that not altogether enviable
position three times. But I disappointed my backers! One day I noticed
that a fellow a few yards away kept on turning round to look at me. He
did it so often that at last I realised with a bit of a shock that he
had drawn me in the sweepstake. He was waiting to see me tumble down
with a bullet through me. It would have been worth 15s. to him."
Here is an extract from a letter: "I received your request for a German
helmet off a head I had knocked over. Will try to get you a German's
ear or some other portable article. I am very fit and well, and trying
to force British culture on the Germans. I think now we have put a
spoke in the Kaiser's wheel for good, and I am proud to think that I
have been a small splinter in the spoke."
It is unlawful to trade with the enemy, but our soldiers consider that
it is legitimate to play practical jokes on the Germans when their
trenches are near ours, as is sometimes the case. A beetroot field
was near, so our men carved caricatures of the Kaiser on beetroot and
inside put reports of the Allies' successes in East and West. The
"busts" were then adroitly hurled into the German trenches. This sort
of pleasantry frequently led to furious abuse and the liberal exchange
of bullets, generally harmless.
At one place the German trenches were advanced to within sixty yards
of the British first line of trenches. The Germans had fixed up barbed
wire entanglements, to which they attached here and there a number of
empty jam tins, arranged in couples in such a way that on the slightest
disturbance they were bound to jangle. Crawling very cautiously out in
the dead of night, one of our men fastened the end of a ball of string
to the nearest point of the barbed wire, and let the string run out as
he crawled no less cautiously back again. The first tug at the string
when he had regained the shelter of the British trench started a faint
jangling, which startled the German sentries. The next produced a
fusilade; and the Germans blazed away at the clattering jam tins, while
the British roared with laughter.
For nearly a week a battery of the R.F.A. on a ridge had been shelling
the enemy's position, and the Germans could not find them; but at
last they did, and made it so hot for a time that the gunners had
temporarily to leave their charges. When darkness fell, however, they
removed the guns to a fresh position on the left, but, in order to
mislead the enemy, they rigged up some ploughs and bundles of straw to
resemble guns, and left them in the old position. The ruse was entirely
successful, and our men were laughing up their sleeve all the next day,
for the Germans kept up an incessant fire upon the dummy guns.
In one trench, where a German sharpshooter regularly opened the day
with a shot through a certain loophole, the trench amused itself by
insuring being waked up for the fighting. They hung a strip of metal at
the back of the loophole. The clang of bullet on metal woke them up--an
alarm clock "made in Germany."
Here is a tale of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. The Germans
opposite them get their rations--cognac, bread, and meat--every
Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday night. The Argyll and Sutherland
Highlanders found this out, and regularly on these nights they did a
bayonet attack, and brought back quite a lot of grub.