The advance on the map at our quarters extended as the brief army
reports were read into the squares every morning by the key of figures
and numerals with a detail that included every little trench, every
copse, every landmark, and then we chose where we would go that day.
At corps headquarters there were maps with still more details and
officers would explain the previous day's work to us. Every wood and
village, every viewpoint, we knew, and every casualty clearing station
and prisoners' inclosure. At battalion camps within sight of the Ridge
and within range of the guns, where their blankets helped to make
shelter from the sun, you might talk with the men out of the fight and
lunch and chat with the officers who awaited the word to go in again or
perhaps to hear that their tour was over and they could go to rest in
Ypres sector, which had become relatively quiet.
They had their letters and packages from home before they slept and
had written letters in return after waking; and there was nothing to
do now except to relax and breathe, to renew the vitality that had
been expended in the fierce work where shells were still threshing the
earth, which rose in clouds of dust to settle back again in enduring
passive resistance.
There was much talk early in the war about British cheerfulness; so
much that officers and men began to resent it as expressing the idea
that they took such a war as this as a kind of holiday, when it was
the last thing outside of Hades that any sane man would choose. It
was a question in my own mind at times if Hades would not have been a
pleasant change. Yet the characterization is true, peculiarly true,
even in the midst of the fighting on the Ridge. Cheerfulness takes
the place of emotionalism as the armor against hardship and death;
a good-humored balance between exhilaration and depression which
meets smile with smile and creates an atmosphere superior to all
vicissitudes. Why should we be downhearted? Why, indeed, when it does
no good. Not "Merrie England!" War is not a merry business; but an
Englishman may be cheerful for the sake of self and comrades.
Of course, these battalions, officers and men, would talk about when
the war would be over. Even the Esquimaux must have an opinion on the
subject by this time. That of the men who make the war, whose lives are
the lives risked, was worth more, perhaps, than that of people living
thousands of miles away; for it is they who are doing the fighting,
who will stop fighting. To them it would be over when it was won.
The time this would require varied with different men--one year, two
years; and again they would turn satirical and argue whether the sixth
or the seventh year would be the worst. And they talked shop about
the latest wrinkles in fighting; how best to avoid having men buried
by shell-bursts; the value of gas and lachrymatory shells; the ratio
of high explosives to shrapnel; methods of "cleaning out" dugouts or
"doing in" machine guns, all in a routine that had become an accepted
part of life like the details of the stock carried and methods of
selling in a department store.
Indelible the memories of these talks, which often brought out
illustrations of racial temperament. One company was more horrified
over having found a German tied to a trench _parados_ to be killed by
British shell fire as a field punishment than by the horrors of other
men equally mashed and torn, or at having crawled over the moist bodies
of the dead, or slept among them, or been covered with spatters of
blood and flesh--for that incident struck home with a sense of brutal
militarism which was the thing in their minds against which they were
fighting.