THE COMRADESHIP OF THE TRENCHES
“All the bright company of Heaven
Hold him in their high comradeship,
The Dog-Star and the Sisters Seven,
Orion’s Belt and sworded hip ...
Through joy and blindness he shall know,
Not caring much to know, that still
Nor lead nor shell shall reach him, so
That it be not the Destined Will.”
(_“Into Battle,” by Captain Julian Grenfell, killed in action, Ypres,
May, 1915._)
The firing-line is the touchstone of character. It is the final
instance. There is no appeal beyond it. A man may have shown himself
at home to be the best of officers, self-possessed, self-reliant,
conscientious, thoughtful for his men; but half an hour’s
“frightfulness” at the front can undo the good impression made in
months of home training. A good sergeant will relieve an officer of a
great deal of routine in ordinary circumstances, but when the company
comes under fire the sergeant will, like the men, lean unconsciously on
the moral strength of the officer.
No man can hope to be eternally master of his nerves. Modern shell-fire
wears the nerves away. A man who would lead his platoon fearlessly into
the jaws of hell may feel himself inwardly cringing when he hears the
long high whistle of a shell, mingling with the ominous hiss that means
it is nearing the end of its journey. But if a man is what the army
calls “a good officer,” the first thought that will rise to the surface
in him when he comes under fire is, “The men.”
He will know that, almost automatically, the men are watching him to
see what he will do. Be they the toughest of veterans, and he the
greenest of “subs.,” there is always a subconscious disposition in the
soldier under fire to mould himself on the example given by an officer.
An officer who is always exhorting his men to be careful (and by this
I do not mean the officer who takes sensible measures to check the
irrepressible foolhardiness of the British soldier under fire), who
indulges in exaggerated demonstrations of horror when a shell shatters
a man to fragments at his very elbow, will “rot” the finest company.
The men will begin to think before they act, and in consequence lose
that singleness of purpose that takes the soldier straight to his
appointed goal, that makes just the difference between good and bad
troops.
The firing-line is a strange place. There are few situations in life
where a man is called upon to hold himself permanently in check. There
are emergencies in civil life where a man must subordinate his feelings
to a higher interest, but only in war is he compelled to make the
perpetual sacrifice of his feelings, to face again and again an ordeal
which perhaps never loses its terrors for him.
Do you realize the weight of responsibility resting on the shoulders of
the Regimental Officer in war? Here is a situation he is frequently
called upon to face. A shell falls right into the midst of his platoon
as he is leading his men to or from the trenches. Maybe the men are
fresh from home, and this sudden horror that cleaves its bloody path
through their ranks is their first taste of war.
There is one man in that platoon who must not lose his head. That is
the officer, boy though he be. Those raw and mangled corpses, those
groaning, whimpering men that strew the ground, may affright the rank
and file; they may make no visible impression on him. In his hands
repose the lives of a couple of hundred men. He owes them not only to
those men themselves, but to the State. He must maintain his calm,
so that the men shall come to see with him that this is but a common
incident of war; he must decide whether to put the men under cover or
to march straight on; he must collect the survivors, and form them up
again; he must, in short, take command for the moment, not only of
his own feelings, but of those of his men as well. Though a senseless
terror, which highly strung men who come under shell-fire for the first
time know all too well, creep over him, he must not show it. He must
play the veteran, though the heavens fall in.
The whole relationship between officer and man in our army is based
on incidents like these. To get the best out of his men, an officer
must show them that he does not fear to do what he demands of them.
Seldom, if ever, is a stout-hearted officer “let down.” His example
endures, even after he is gone. More than once, I am sure, the souls
of our officers, slain in battle, have paused, as they winged their
way homewards, to contemplate with pride their men, their officers
all dead, holding on in an obliterated trench, sustained in their
resolution by the lesson their dead leaders taught them.
On countless occasions in this war the teachings of the Regimental
Officer have borne fruit, even after he himself had joined the great
majority. In the assault on Neuve Chapelle in March the leading
companies of the 1st 39th Garhwalis lost all their officers in the
first ten minutes. But the brave little Nepalese hillmen never wavered.
They had seen their officers die at the head of their companies. They
remembered ... and it kept them firm. In the same historic fight the
Scottish Rifles lost all their officers save one, Lieutenant Somervail,
a Second Lieutenant of Special Reserve. But the men of this splendid
regiment, whose tradition is that there shall be no surrender, went
on behind their non-commissioned officers, despite heavy losses,
against barbed wire and machine-guns, “moulding themselves,” as their
regimental sergeant-major said to me afterwards, “on the glorious
example of their officers.” When we recaptured at Hooge on August 9
the positions we lost on July 30, a party of twenty-five men of the
2nd Durham light Infantry, under the command of Lance-Corporal Smith,
were lost in the dense smoke of battle, and held out alone in an
obliterated trench for more than twenty-four hours, without orders,
without connection with the rest of the troops, and only came away when
they saw a fresh line being dug behind the line they were holding. The
officers of this fine battalion had created in their men’s minds the
proper idea of the functions of an officer, so that, when there were no
officers left to lead, this young lance-corporal stepped forward and
“carried on” in the best traditions of the service.
In the firing-line you get down to bedrock. Character tells. The cult
is of the “stout fellow,” the “thruster.” The men will vaguely admire
the clever strategy of their Generals which enabled the soldier to sing:
“We gave them hell
At Neuve Chapelle.
Here we are again!”
But their outspoken praise of any one General will always be traceable
back to qualities of personal bravery that he has displayed. If they
admire and respect Sir John French, it is because they recall him
on the South African veld, because they remember him sitting on the
roadside with them among the shells during the retreat from Mons. If
they think a world of Sir Douglas Haig, it is likewise because they
have seen him in the midst of his men on many critical occasions, not
forgetting that historic afternoon in the first battle of Ypres, when
the Commander-in-Chief and Sir Douglas Haig, waiting at Hooge, heard
the news that the Germans had broken our line, and later that the 2nd
Worcesters had saved the day. In present circumstances practically
the only Generals that come into direct contact with the men are the
Brigadiers, and I have found that the Brigadiers who are the best loved
are those who are constantly making the round of the trenches, who
show the men that they are willing to expose themselves to the same
perils as they ask the men to incur.
I have been on many a long round of trenches with the Brigadiers
through mud and water and evil smells, along roads in view of the
Germans where bullets sang and snapped, across fields where shells
were plumping, right up to the firing-line, where “whizz-bangs” were
demolishing the parapet. I have often found myself admiring the
physical endurance and the calm courage of these Brigadiers--who are
not all young men--and have read the reflection of my own thought in
the eyes of the men in the trenches who saluted as we passed.
It is in the firing-line that the relationship between officer and man,
which it has taken so many decades to build up in the British Army,
comes to full fruition. Its essence is the spirit of the playground.
I am sure that the British officer is to his men, more than anything
else, the captain of the team. The game is stern, the stakes are high,
but the spirit is the old one: “Buck up! and play the game!”
Officer and man live together in closer companionship than ever was
possible before they entered the firing-line. Their bond of mutual
confidence is sealed by a thousand recollections of dangers faced
together, of assaults side by side against the enemy, of perilous
patrols at night. The daily tragedies of the trenches unite them still
closer, drawing them together as men sleeping in the open will huddle
up for warmth.
A young Captain was in his dug-out in the trenches one day, when word
came back to him that one of his men had been sniped. He hurried out
and along the trench to the spot indicated. As he came to a traverse,
a man sprang out of a “funk-hole.” “Don’t go round there, sir,” he
said; “there’s a sniper watching that traverse. He’s just got one
of the men.” In a feeling of spontaneous sympathy the young officer
went on. As he rounded the traverse in sight of his man, who had just
expired on the floor of the trench, the sniper’s rifle cracked again,
and the officer collapsed with a bullet through the body.
There was no doctor in the trench at the time. The wounded man’s
comrades, who examined him, found that he had been shot through the
abdomen. The only chance of life was to leave him where he lay. So,
while a message was sent down for the doctor, his men built a shelter
over him in the open trench.
Food or drink are fatal in the case of grave internal wounds like this.
The wounded man was racked with thirst, but all they could do was to
moisten his lips from time to time with a damp handkerchief. The men in
his company went about their duties with set faces, for, one and all,
they loved their Captain. His servant was in despair, and watched him
in his shelter. His best friend in the regiment, the Captain of another
company, sat with him until evening, when he had to go to take his
company back into reserve.
That night the wounded man died. One who saw him laid to rest in the
little burial-ground of the battalion by a ruined farm says the grief
of his men at the graveside was poignant to witness. When the dead man
first took over the company it was slack and unruly, the worst company
in the battalion. The new man who succeeded him told me it was the
best company he had ever seen, for the spirit of the dead officer was
living in every man. Such are the relations of officer and man; such
are the little dramas that keep friendship green in our army in the
field.
The British soldier’s indifference to danger, while it is one of his
finest qualities, is often the despair of his officer. The Irish
regiments are the worst. Their recklessness is proverbial. An officer
in one of the Irish battalions--he was a “ranker,” and therefore
knew his subject--told me some amazing instances of the complete
indifference of his men to the dangers of their situation. Crossing
a railway on one occasion, in full view of the Germans, he came upon
a party of men engaged in setting up bottles along the line. To his
vigorous inquiry as to what they were doing, they disingenuously
replied that they were setting up targets to shoot at from an angle of
the trench! If the Germans had turned on a machine-gun down the line,
not one of those men would have escaped alive.
I have had more than one experience myself of the British soldier’s
indifference to danger. When I was going up to some trenches in the
Ypres salient one day, the guide, a particularly stolid-looking
private, stopped suddenly on a road and said: “Will you go by the road
or the trench, sir?” Of course, I had not the least choice, not knowing
the ground, so I asked him which was the shorter way. “The road’s a
long way the shorter,” he replied. So we went by the road. But when I
told the officers up at the mess in the trenches that I had come by
that road they stared, and asked if we had been shelled. I said we had
not. Then they told me that that particular stretch of road was one of
the most “unhealthy” spots in the neighbourhood by day.
The guide was interrogated. “Some takes the road, and some the trench,”
he said. “But don’t you know they are always shelling that road?” the
officer asked. “They do put one over now and again,” the man replied,
“but the road’s a deal shorter, sir!” “You’ll find it a short-cut to
heaven one of these days, if you go on using that road,” the officer
said, whereat the man grinned broadly.
The relationship between courage and discretion is always a difficult
thing in war. Many lives have been lost, I fear, in this war because
officers, particularly those new to the game, would not take cover
when a shell came over, lest they might appear “rattled.” In point of
fact, a man may often escape a wound, or perhaps even save his life, by
taking refuge in a dug-out or seeking refuge behind a tree or a wall,
when he hears by the diminishing speed of a shell that it is about to
burst in his neighbourhood.
A very few weeks in the field, however, makes most men fatalistic
about shell-fire--a man sees so often that life and death hang on a
fraction of a second, on a foot this way or that. Going up to trenches
one afternoon with two companions in a particularly lively part of our
line, we had to cross a little bridge over a ditch. Twenty yards from
this bridge was a dug-out in which the headquarters of the battalion I
had come to visit was situated. I had just reached the dug-out, when
I heard the slow drone of a shell. As I turned towards the direction
from which the sound came the shell burst square over the bridge we
had crossed less than a minute before, and two other shells fell close
by within a few seconds. With the utmost satisfaction, I must admit,
I dwelt on the thought that, if I had delayed for a minute to fasten
a boot-lace or to light a cigarette, I should in all probability have
been on that bridge just when those three shells burst there.
Two officers were following one another in cars through a ruined
village close behind our lines. At the end of the village they were
stopped by a military policeman, who warned them that the road was
being shelled. The officer in the leading car decided that he would
wait for the “strafing” to cease; the other, who was in a hurry,
proceeded to his destination by another route. On arriving he found a
telephone message to say that the first car had been struck square by
a shell a few minutes after he had left, and that the officer and his
chauffeur had been killed on the spot.
The rivet that holds the regimental officers together, their common
solicitude as their common pride, are the men. The officer in the
trenches is thinking continually of the men, of their safety, of their
comfort, of their health, of their behaviour under fire. Get an officer
talking about a “show,” and he will never tire of telling you how well
the men behaved, how Private This is a most “gallant feller,” and
Private That, “my best bomber,” died. “The men did d---- well,” “The
men were splendid.” How often have I heard phrases like these!
Pride in their officers, pride in their regiment, flashes out quaintly
in the men’s talk. Listen to a group of soldiers describing a fight.
“The Captain ’e says....” “Lieutenant Blank ups with his rifle
quick-like....” “The Major? ’E’s a fair nut, ’e is. First over the
parapet ’e was, and going that fast that, what with the bombs you ’ave
round you, and them you carry in a box, we couldn’t ’ardly keep up with
’im!”
This is a sergeant-major on the death of his Colonel:
“Yes, sir,” he says in his deep, slow voice, “our Colonel was hit, the
best soldier that ever commanded this battalion. He was a grand man.
‘Sergeant-major,’ he says to me, ‘sergeant-major, I’m just going up to
have a look round.’ Well, he didn’t come back. Then a man coming down,
wounded, says in a great fuss: ‘Sergeant-major, it’s something awful up
there. The Colonel’s killed,’ he says, ‘and the Adjutant, too!’ ‘You’ve
got the wind up, my man,’ I said to the chap, not believing him. ‘You
run along to the dressing-station and get your head bound up. You
haven’t any brains to spare, remember.’ But, all the same, I went up
to see for myself what was happening. It was true, sure enough. There
was the Colonel, mortal bad he was, and the Adjutant killed. Ah, he was
a grand gentleman, our Colonel! There were not many like him, sir! We
could ill spare him!”
When you have seen officers and men together in the trenches you
understand Francis Grenfell’s dying words: “Tell them I died happy. I
loved my squadron.” Those noble words are the epitome of the lifework
of the Regimental Officer.
Out of this close friendship between officer and man springs a great
spirit of _camaraderie_ between officers in the trenches. It is no
small test of character for a group of men of different stations, ages,
and dispositions to live in the closest possible association, as men
do in the trenches, for days at a time, and never to fail to display
that mutual forbearance and readiness to serve which help men over the
rough paths of life. During the months I have been at the front I have
been privileged, at different times, to see a great deal of officers
together in the trenches. I have spent nights with them in their
dug-outs; I have had various meals with them at their messes; I have
accompanied them on their rounds. What has struck me more than anything
has been the real spirit of co-operation existing between them. This
takes the form not only of the sharing of the minor comforts of life,
such as the pooling of gifts sent out from home--which was only to be
expected--but of a continual striving to help one another, to render
one another small services in their duties, to cover up, if needs be,
one another’s shortcomings, and, above all, to make things smooth for
the new man.
On the other hand, active service appears to accentuate
inter-regimental rivalry. Trenches are a great theme for criticism.
There _may_ be a battalion in our army in the field to-day that has
given a written testimony to the troops from which it has “taken over”
of the splendid condition in which the trenches were left. If there is,
I have not found it. The relieving battalion _always_ roundly abuses
its predecessor for the state of the trenches. In every trench I have
been in I have been shown with pride the improvements made by the
actual tenants: “You should have seen the state of things those bloody
fellows in the Blankshires left behind!...” I once heard the Commander
of the Second Army get in a sly dig at a brigade on parade regarding
this inevitable trench criticism. It was a very human touch in a formal
address, and evoked broad smiles from the audience, both officers and
men.
Nothing could be more charming than the atmosphere of a trench mess.
The Colonel is back at the battalion headquarters with the Adjutant,
so that the senior officer present is the Captain in command of
the company holding the particular section of trench, or at most a
Major. The rest of the company at table will consist of two or three
subalterns, the machine-gun officer, possibly the doctor, and sometimes
the Chaplain. The “Padre” is, properly speaking, attached to the Field
Ambulance, but one often meets these gallant men in the firing-line,
making their tour of the men under their charge as conscientiously as
the Captain makes his round of his trenches.
You must picture the company seated on rough benches or
ammunition-boxes (here and there one finds a chair salved from a
wrecked farm) round a makeshift table, knocked together by the
orderlies, with sheets of newspaper in lieu of a tablecloth. Most of
the food is put on the table at once--sardines in an enamel soup-plate,
cold tongue ditto, ration bread (rather mouldy if we are in an isolated
post), some kind of hot meat on an enamel dish, and enamel cups for
drinks. The conversation is sprightly, mostly of the events of the day.
The presence of the “Padre” curbs the freedom of the language to some
extent, though, Heaven knows, he, poor man, has already discovered that
the army swears terribly in Flanders. “I can stand a good deal,” a
“Padre” said to me one day, “but I draw the line firmly at some words.”
This imperturbable young man with the shaven head and the yellow
moustache, whose dinner is being continually interrupted by gruff
voices issuing from the darkness at the door of the dug-out, “Can
I speak to the Captain?” “A message for the Captain!” “About those
blankets for the men, sir ...” is responsible for the safety of this
stretch of trench and its tenants. He transacts his business through
the door of the dug-out and eats his dinner at the same time, always
tranquilly. The hole in the back of his tunic is a souvenir of a piece
of high-explosive shell in the shoulder, and the cut in the knee of
his trousers is due to the same cause. A boy with yellow hair and pink
cheeks, who is talking telescopic rifles with the doctor, is Lord of
the Hate Squad--in other words, in charge of the snipers. Only that
afternoon I had seen him, with a companion, amid bullets snapping
viciously against a ruined wall, patiently waiting for a certain
sniping Hun whose habitat was in a tree. He had not got him that day,
but the Hate Squad had their eye on the sniper, and sooner or later his
number would go up.
A burst of laughter from the other end of the table greets a story told
with infinite gusto by the machine-gun officer, a phlegmatic young man
with the ribbon of the Military Cross on his tunic. He knows German
well, and one of his amusements is to revile the Germans in their own
tongue. He is recounting some of the epithets he applies to them.
Our army in the field has managed to scrape together a whole vocabulary
of trench slang. It is a strange medley of English, French, and
German. That immortal phrase “Gott strafe England” has given to trench
slang “strafing” as a substantive, and “to straf” as a verb. As you
have probably already gathered from reading soldiers’ letters in the
newspapers, to be “strafed” is to be bombarded by the enemy--in short,
to suffer in any way at the hands of the Hun. The morning and evening
“straf” is equivalent to the morning and evening “frightfulness” or
“hate,” the liveliness with which the German guns issue in the day and
march it out at its close. The Germans apply the words “_Morgengruss_”
(morning greeting) and “_Abendsegen_” (evening benediction) to these
periodical outbursts from our side. “Hate,” used in this sense,
undoubtedly owes its origin to that amusing sketch in _Punch_, showing
a German family indulging in its “morning hate.” This clever cartoon
had an immense vogue at the front, and I have seen it frequently
hanging up on the walls of dug-outs and billets.
To be “crumped”--another expression often heard in the trenches--is
to be bombarded with heavy howitzer shells, an onomatopœic word.
To be “archied”--a Royal Flying Corps phrase--is to be shelled by
anti-aircraft guns, which are universally known as “Archibalds” or
“Archies.”
A whole vocabulary has grown up about the guns which are playing
such a rôle in this war. “Gunning” is freely used as a synonym for
“shelling”; the heavy guns are, _tout court_, “the heavies”; the
howitzers are the “hows.” There is a wild and picturesque crop of
nicknames to denote the different kinds of guns and shells. Thus, our
heaviest howitzer is known as “Grandmother” or “Grandma,” while the
next below it in size is “Mother.” A certain German long-range naval
gun, whose shells have the peculiarity of bursting before you hear them
arrive, is known as “Percy.” German high-explosive shrapnel shells
are “white hopes” or “white swans.” “Jack Johnsons,” “Black Marias,”
and “coal-boxes” are used rather indiscriminately for different kinds
of heavy shells, while “whizz-bangs,” the small 15-pounder shell
thrown by a mountain-gun, are also called “pip-squeaks.” The men
in the firing-line got so free with their nicknames for shells in
official reports at one time that a list of officially recognized and
distinctive nicknames for German shells was drawn up and issued for use
by some divisions.
From the French trench slang derives one or two expressions. “To
function” (_fonctionner_) is one. A man “functions” as liaison officer,
a trench-pump will not “function.” “_Dégommer_” is often used to denote
the action of relieving an officer of his command. It is, of course,
pure French slang, and is invariably used in this sense in the French
Army. This word has a curious derivation. It was, I believe, first
applied by the _Humanité_ in its old sledgehammer days under the late
Jean Jaures, to denote Aristide Briand, most fiercely hated of all
French Ministers because, at the outset of his career, he was in
the ranks of those revolutionary Socialists whom he had to combat so
fiercely when in office. All public men who came under the ban of the
_Humanité_ had their nicknames, and were never referred to by anything
else. Thus M. Lépine, the late Prefect of Police of Paris, was spoken
of as _le sinistre gnome_, M. Clemenceau as _Le Tigre_, and M. Briand,
after his fall from power as the result of his suppression of the
railway strike, as _Le Dégommé_--“the ungummed one,” the innuendo being
that he had clung to office until he was forcibly torn from power.
Talk at the trench mess, of course, principally turns round such trench
topics as the men and their caprices, the date of relief, leave. There
is “grousing” about the slowness of promotion, about the Mentions in
Despatches. But there is no gloom. It is an eternal wonder to me that
the officers in the trenches are so consistently cheerful. Neither
death nor danger depresses their spirits; the monotony does not make
them despondent. They do not hide the fact that they hate shell-fire,
or that they could contemplate a more agreeable existence than living
in a ditch in Flanders. Only they realize that they have a job to do,
and they do it. And they will go on doing it until their work is done.
The Germans have realized too late what they have lost by sacrificing
the respect of their enemies. Our soldiers in the trenches make no
concealment of their admiration of the efficiency and bravery of the
Germans as fighters, but as men they loathe and despise them. The
British soldier is an easy-going fellow, and the Germans, had they only
regarded the conventions of soldiering, might have prevented much of
the bitterness which this war has engendered. Even as it is, though
the anger of our men against their treacherous enemy makes them a
formidable and pitiless foe in the assault with the bayonet, they are
gentle and paternal with their prisoners.
I have actually seen the British escort giving German prisoners
cigarettes. I have read letters written by German prisoners waiting in
our lines in France to be sent with a convoy to England, dwelling on
the good treatment they were receiving, and describing how they were
given the same rations as their escort, including cigarettes, and were
being taught football by their captors. The extraordinary _agapes_ that
took place during the Christmas truce, when British and Germans, for a
few brief hours, fraternized between the lines, could not, I believe,
occur again, except possibly with the Saxons, who have behaved decently
in this war, and for whom our men have a soft corner in their hearts.
Since Christmas the hideous crime of the asphyxiating gas has drifted
in a foul miasma between us and our enemy. No man who fought in the
second battle of Ypres and saw the sufferings of the gas victims would
give his hand to a German to-day. But the psychology of the British
soldier is so enigmatic that the prophet would run grave risk of coming
to grief who ventured to predict what the British soldier will do where
his heart is concerned. Nevertheless, this much I would say--that
to-day the British soldier neither fears nor trusts the German. He
knows that, man for man, he is his superior; he looks forward to the
time when, gun for gun and shell for shell, the same will be true.
[Illustration:
_“Daily Mail” phot._
GERMAN PRISONERS.]
With the British and German lines in places only forty yards or less
apart, there is always a certain amount of communication between
ourselves and the enemy. The Germans generally contrive to find out
which of our battalions is holding the trenches opposite, and often
greet the reliefs with the name of their regiment. When a famous
Highland battalion was going away, after a long stay in one portion
of the line, the Germans played them out of the trenches with “Mary
of Argyll,” very well rendered on the cornet. The Jocks were hugely
amused, and gave the performer a round of applause to reward his
efforts.
A large sheet of water which had formed about some shell-holes outside
the trenches of the Rifle Brigade in the winter afforded both sides a
great deal of amusement. One night a patrol found a rough wooden model
of a German submarine floating in the pond, flying a paper flag on
which were inscribed the words: “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!”
The submarine was “captured,” and for the next few days several handy
fellows in the battalion of the R.B.’s holding the front line spent
all their spare time in constructing a model battleship. This was
subsequently launched at night flying a pennant with the words: “Why
don’t you come out and fight?” A night or two after our patrols found
that the pennant had been removed from the battleship, and replaced by
a flag bearing the words: “Germania rules the waves!” In the meantime
the battle of Heligoland was fought. The model was accordingly rescued
from the pond, suitably disfigured to represent a sinking ship,
“BLUECHER” painted in large letters on its side, and the flag replaced
by one bearing these words: “Has your Government told you about this
ship?” The blow told: the model disappeared, and the jest ended.
The exchange of news is very popular. I was in the front line one
afternoon when a message arrived from the division announcing the
surrender of German South-West Africa, and adding: “Perhaps the enemy
might like to know this.”
The suggestion was immediately acted upon. The news was translated into
German, “Gott strafe England!” was added to give it a proper German
ring, and when I went down the men were painting the message in white
on a large blackboard, which was going to be hoisted on the parapet
facing the German trench. The Germans attacked this part of the line
the next day, whether as the result of our message I am unable to say.
The high comradeship of our trenches is enhanced by many little
touches redolent of home. The British soldier is a homing-bird, and
he loves to perpetuate the memory of places that are dear to him
in his surroundings in the trenches. The troops in the Ploegsteert
lines--“Plug Street” of wide renown--who inaugurated the custom of
giving street names to trenches with their “Strand” and “Fleet Street”
and “Hyde Park Corner,” in reality hit upon a very practical solution
of the great difficulty of providing suitable identification for the
network of trenches which was growing up all along our lines. Now the
custom is general, and the neatly inscribed sign-boards which meet your
eyes in so many parts of the line evoke recollections of busy streets
and squares in London and provincial towns, and of gallant commanders,
some of whom have “gone west,” whose names are perpetuated in countless
“houses” and “corners” and “farms” along our line.
Since I came to France I have made it my business to visit the trenches
in almost every part of the line. There are those who say: “When you
have seen one trench, you have seen them all.” Of a truth, outwardly
there is little enough difference between them all--the same swarm of
dust-coloured figures, the same sandbags, the same timber-work, the
same mud, the same strip of No Man’s Land ahead, the same devastation
behind, the same noises echoing hollow all about. But to me each strip
of trench is another corner of the great heart of Britain, where
Britons of all stamps--the fair-haired Saxon, the darker Norman, the
Scot, the Celt, from many climes, of many races--are playing the part
in the work of Empire which is every Briton’s birthright to-day. The
bond uniting them in the steel line which the German hordes have vainly
tried to break is the companionship of the Table Round of the Empire,
the bulwark of the world’s civilization against the most formidable
menace ever launched by the powers of darkness.