THE WINTER OF 1916
_France, December 20th._
A friend has shown me a letter from Melbourne. Its writer had asked a
man--an educated man--if he would give a subscription for the Australian
Comforts Fund. "Certainly not," was the reply. "The men have every
comfort in the trenches."
That is the sort of dense-skinned ignorance which makes one unspeakably
angry--the ignorance which, because it has heard of or read a letter
from some brave-hearted youngster, making light of hardships for his
mother's sake, therefore flies to the conclusion that everything written
and spoken about the horrors of this war is humbug, and what the Army
calls "eyewash"--a big conspiracy to deceive the people who are not
there.
As a matter of fact, the early winter of 1916 which these men have just
been going through will have a chapter to itself in history as long as
history lasts. It is to some extent past history now--to what extent I
do not suppose anyone on the German side or ours can tell.
I, personally, do not know how the men and their officers can live
through that sort of time. Remember that a fair proportion of them were
a few months ago adding up figures in the office of an insurance company
or a shipping firm--gulping down their midday coffee and roll in a
teashop in King or Collins Streets. But take even a Central District
farmer or a Newcastle miner--yes, or a Scottish shepherd or an English
poacher--take the hardest man you know, and put him to the same test,
and it is a question whether the ordeal would not break even his spirit.
Put him out of doors into the thick of a dirty European winter; march
him ten miles through a bitter cold wind and driving rain, with--on his
back--all the clothing, household furniture, utensils and even the only
cover which he is allowed to take with him; dribble him in through mud
up to his knees--sometimes up to his waist--along miles and miles of
country that is nothing but broken tree stumps and endless shell
holes--holes into which, if a man were to fall, he might lie for days
before he were found, or even might never be found at all. After many
hours, trickle him, half dead with dragging his feet at every step out
of the putty-like mud, into a shallow, straggling, open ditch not in any
way different from a watery drain between two sodden country paddocks,
except that there is no grass about it--nothing but brown, slippery mud
on floor and trench sides and over the country in all directions as far
as eye can see. At the end of it all put him to live there, with what
baggage he carried on his back and nothing more; put him in various
depths of mud, to stay there all day in rain, wind, fog, hail,
snowstorm--whatever weather comes--and to watch there during the endless
winter nights, when the longed-for dawn only means another day and
another night out there in the mud ditch, without a shred of cover. And
this is what our men have had to go through.
The longed-for relief comes at last--a change to other shell-battered
areas in support or reserve--and the battalion comes back down the long
road to the rear, white-faced and dreary-eyed, dragging slowly through
the mud without a word. For they have been through a life of which you,
or any people past and present who have not been to this war, have not
the first beginnings of a conception; something beside which a South
Polar expedition is a dance and a picnic. And that is without taking
into account the additional fact that night and day, on the Somme where
these conditions existed, men live under the unceasing sound of guns. I
can hear them as I write--it is the first longed-for gloriously bright
day, and therefore there is not an interval of a second in that
continuous roar, hour after hour. There is nothing like it anywhere else
in the world--there has never yet been anything to approach it except at
Verdun.
Life is hard enough in winter in the old-established trenches along more
settled parts of the front--there is plenty for the Comforts Fund to do
there. Dropping into the best of quiet front trenches straight from his
home life the ordinary man would consider himself as undergoing
hardships undreamt of. Visiting those trenches straight from the Somme
the other day, with their duck-boards and sandbags, and the occasional
ping of a sniper's bullet, and the momentary spasm of field guns and
trench mortars which appeared in the official summary next day as
"artillery and trench mortar activity"--after the Somme, I say, one
found oneself looking on it, in the terms of the friend who went with
me, as "war de luxe."
It is unwise to take what one man writes of one place as true of all
places or all times, or indeed of anything except what he personally
sees and knows at the moment. These conditions which I have described
are what I have seen, and are fortunately past history, or I should not
be describing them. I personally know that English troops, Scottish
troops and Australian troops went through them, and have, in some cases,
issued from such trenches and taken similar German trenches in front of
them. Our troops are more comfortable than they were, but it is in the
nature of war to find yourself plunged into extremes of exertion and
hardship without warning; and no man knows when he writes to-day--and I
doubt whether anyone of his superiors could tell him--whether he will,
at any given date, be in a worse condition or a better one.
What the German is going through on his side of the muddy landscape is
described in another chapter. For our grand men--and though to be called
a hero is the last thing most Australians desire, the men are never
grander than at these times--the Australian Comforts Fund, the Y.M.C.A.
and the canteen groceries provide almost all the comfort that ever
enters that grim region. In the areas to which those tired men come for
a spell, the Comforts Fund is beginning to give them theatres for
concert troupes and cinemas. It provides some hundreds of pounds to be
spent locally on the most obtainable small luxuries at Christmas,
besides such gifts in kind as Christmas brings.
But, for those who are actually in the front or just behind it, one cup
of warm coffee in a jam-tin from a roadside stall has been, in certain
times and places, all that can be given; the Fund has given that, and it
has been the landmark in the day for many men. In those conditions there
was but one occasional solace. A friend of mine found an Australian in
the trenches in those days, standing in mud nearly to his waist,
shivering in his arms and every body muscle, leaning back against the
trench side, fast asleep.