IN THE TRENCHES
Up for days in the trenches,
Working and working away;
Eight days up in the trenches
And back again to-day.
Working with pick and shovel,
On traverse, banquette, and slope,
And now we are back and working
With tooth-brush, razor, and soap.
We had been at work since five o'clock in the morning, digging away at
the new communication trench. It was nearly noon now, and rations had
not come; the cook's waggons were delayed on the road.
Stoner, brisk as a bell all the morning, suddenly flung down his
shovel.
"I'm as hungry as ninety-seven pigs," he said, and pulled a biscuit
from his haversack.
"Now I've got 'dog,' who has 'maggot'?"
"Dog and maggot" means biscuit and cheese, but none of us had the
latter; cheese was generally flung into the incinerator, where it
wasted away in smoke and smell. This happened of course when we were
new to the grind of war.
"I've found out something," said Mervin, rubbing the sweat from (p. 070)
his forehead and looking over the parapet towards the firing line. A
shell whizzed by, and he ducked quickly. We all laughed, the trenches
have got a humour peculiarly their own.
"There's a house in front," said Mervin, "where they sell _café noir_
and _pain et beurre_."
"Git," muttered Bill. "Blimey, there's no one 'ere but fools like
ourselves."
"I've just been in the house," said Mervin, who had really been absent
for quite half an hour previously. "There are two women there, a
mother and daughter. A good-looking girl, Bill." The eyes of the
Cockney brightened.
"Twopence a cup for black coffee, and the same for bread and butter."
"No civilians are allowed here," Pryor remarked.
"It's their own home," said Mervin. "They've never left the place, and
the roof is broken and half the walls blown away."
"I'm for coffee," Stoner cried, jumping over the parapet and stopping
a shower of muck which a bursting shell flung in his face. We were
with him immediately, and presently found ourselves at the door (p. 071)
of a red brick cottage with all the windows smashed, roof riddled with
shot, and walls broken, just as Mervin had described.
A number of our men were already inside feeding. An elderly,
well-dressed woman, with close-set eyes, rather thick lips, and a
short nose, was grinding coffee near a flaming stove, on which an urn
of boiling water was bubbling merrily. A young girl, not at all
good-looking but very sweet in manner, said "Bonjour, messieurs," as
we entered, and approached each of us in turn to enquire into our
needs. Mervin knew the language, and we placed the business in his
hands, and sat down on the floor paved with red bricks; the few chairs
in the house were already occupied.
The house was more or less in a state of disorder; the few pictures on
the wall, the portrait of the woman herself, _The Holy Family
Journeying to Egypt_, a print of Millet's _Angelus_, and a rude
etching of a dog hung anyhow, the frames smashed and the glass broken.
A Dutch clock, with figures of nymphs on the face, and the timing
piece of a shell dangling from the weights, looked idly down, its
pendulum gone and the glass broken.
Bill, naughty rascal that he is, wanted a kiss with his coffee, (p. 072)
and finding that Mervin refused to explain this to the girl, he
undertook the matter himself.
"Madham mosselle," he said, lingering over every syllable, "I get no
milk with cawfee, compree?" The girl shook her head, but seemed to be
amused.
"Not compree," he continued, "and me learnin' the lingo. I don't like
French, you spell it one way and speak it the other. Nark (confound)
it, I say, Mad-ham-moss-elle, voo (what's "give," Mervin?) dunno,
that's it. Voo dunno me a kiss with the cawfee, compree, it's better'n
milk."
"Don't be a pig, Bill," Stoner cut in. "It's not fair to carry on like
that."
"Nark you, Stoner!" Bill answered. "It mayn't be fair, but it'd be
nice if I got one."
"Kiss a face like yours," muttered Mervin, "she'd have a taste for
queer things if she did."
"There's no accountin' for tastes, you know," said Bill. "Oh, Blimey,
that's done it," he cried, stooping low as a shell exploded overhead,
and drove a number of bullets into the roof. The old woman raised her
head for a moment and crossed herself, then she continued her (p. 073)
work; the daughter looked at Bill, laughed, and punched him on the
shoulder. In the action there was a certain contempt, and Bill forthwith
relapsed into silence and troubled the girl no further. When we got
out to our work again he spoke.
"She was a fine hefty wench," he said, "I'm tip over toes in love with
her."
"She's not one that I'd fancy," said Stoner.
"Her finger nails are so blunt," mumbled Pryor, "I never could stand a
woman with blunt finger nails."
"What is your ideal of a perfect woman, Pryor?" I asked.
"There is no perfect woman," was his answer, "none that comes up to my
ideal of beauty. Has she a fair brow? It's merely a space for
wrinkles. Are her eyes bright? What years of horror when you watch
them grow watery and weak with age. Are her teeth pearly white? The
toothache grips them and wears them down to black and yellow stumps.
Is her body graceful, her waist slender, her figure upright. She
becomes a mother, and every line of her person is distorted, she
becomes a nightmare to you. Ah, perfect woman! They could not (p. 074)
fashion you in Eden! When I think of a woman washing herself! Ugh!
Your divinity washes the dust from her hair and particles of boiled
beef from between her teeth! Think of it, Horatio!"
"Nark it, you fool," said Bill, lifting a fag end from the bottom of
the trench and lighting it at mine. "Blimey, you're balmy as nineteen
maggots!"
It was a few days after this incident that, in the course of a talk
with Stoner, the subject of trenches cropped up.
"There are trenches and trenches," he remarked, as we were cutting
poppies from the parapet and flinging the flowers to the superior
slope. "There are some as I almost like, some as I don't like, and
some so bad that I almost ran away from them."
For myself I dislike the narrow trench, the one in which the left side
keeps fraying the cloth of your sleeve, and the right side strives to
open furrows in your hand. You get a surfeit of damp, earthy smell in
your nostrils, a choking sensation in your throat, for the place is
suffocating. The narrow trench is the safest, and most of the English
communication trenches are narrow--so narrow, indeed, that a man with
a pack often gets held, and sticks there until his comrades pull (p. 075)
him clear.
The communication trenches serve, however, for more purposes than for
the passage of troops; during an attack the reserves wait there,
packed tight as sardines in a tin. When a man lies down he lies on his
mate, when he stands up, if he dare to do such a thing, he runs the
risk of being blown to eternity by a shell. Rifles, packs, haversacks,
bayonets, and men are all messed up in an intricate jumble, the
reserves lie down like rats in a trap, with their noses to the damp
earth, which always reminds me of the grave. For them there is not the
mad exhilaration of the bayonet charge, and the relief of striking
back at the aggressor. They lie in wait, helpless, unable to move
backward or forward, ears greedy for the latest rumours from the
active front, and hearts prone to feelings of depression and despair.
The man who is seized with cramp groans feebly, but no one can help
him. To rise is to court death, as well as to displace a dozen
grumbling mates who have inevitably become part of the human carpet
that covers the floor of the trench. A leg moved disturbs the whole
pattern; the sufferer can merely groan, suffer, and wait. When an (p. 076)
attack is on the communication trenches are persistently shelled by
the enemy with a view to stop the advance of reinforcements. Once our
company lay in a trench as reserves for fourteen hours, and during
that time upwards of two thousand shells were hurled in our direction,
our trench being half filled with rubble and clay. Two mates, one on
my right and one on my left, were wounded. I did not receive a
scratch, and Stoner slept for eight whole hours during the cannonade;
but this is another story.
Before coming out here I formed an imaginary picture of the trenches,
ours and the enemy's, running parallel from the Vosges in the South to
the sea in the North. But what a difference I find in the reality.
Where I write the trenches run in a strange, eccentric manner. At one
point the lines are barely eighty yards apart; the ground there is
under water in the wet season; the trench is built of sandbags; all
rifle fire is done from loop-holes, for to look over the parapet is to
court certain death. A mountain of coal-slack lies between the lines a
little further along, which are in "dead" ground that cannot be
covered by rifle fire, and are 1,200 yards apart. It is here that the
sniper plies his trade. He hides somewhere in the slack, and pots (p. 077)
at our men from dawn to dusk and from dusk to dawn. He knows the range
of every yard of our communication trenches. As we come in we find a
warning board stuck up where the parapet is crumbling away. "Stoop
low, sniper," and we crouch along head bent until the danger zone is
past.
Little mercy is shown to a captured sniper; a short shrift and swift
shot is considered meet penalty for the man who coolly and coldly
singles out men for destruction day by day. There was one, however,
who was saved by Irish hospitality. An Irish Guardsman, cleaning his
telescopic-rifle as he sat on the trench banquette, and smoking one of
my cigarettes told me the story.
"The coal slack is festooned with devils of snipers, smart fellows
that can shoot round a corner and blast your eye-tooth out at five
hundred yards," he said. "They're not all their ones, neither; there's
a good sprinkling of our own boys as well. I was doing a wee bit of
pot-shot-and-be-damned-to-you work in the other side of the slack, and
my eyes open all the time for an enemy's back. There was one near me,
but I'm beggared if I could find him. 'I'll not lave this place (p. 078)
till I do,' I says to meself, and spent half the nights I was there
prowlin' round like a dog at a fair with my eyes open for the sniper.
I came on his post wan night. I smelt him out because he didn't bury
his sausage skins as we do, and they stunk like the hole of hell when
an ould greasy sinner is a-fryin'. In I went to his sandbagged castle,
with me gun on the cock and me finger on the trigger, but he wasn't
there; there was nothin' in the place but a few rounds of ball an' a
half empty bottle. I was dhry as a bone, and I had a sup without
winkin'. 'Mother of Heaven,' I says, when I put down the bottle, 'its
little ye know of hospitality, stranger, leaving a bottle with nothin'
in it but water. I'll wait for ye, me bucko,' and I lay down in the
corner and waited for him to come in.
"But sorrow the fut of him came, and me waiting there till the colour
of day was in the sky. Then I goes back to me own place, and there was
he waiting for me. He only made one mistake, he had fallen to sleep,
and he just sprung up as I came in be the door.
"Immediately I had him by the big toe. 'Hands up, Hans'! I said, and
he didn't argue, all that he did was to swear like one of ourselves
and flop down. 'Why don't ye bury yer sausages, Hans?' I asked (p. 079)
him. 'I smelt yer, me bucko, by what ye couldn't eat. Why didn't ye
have something better than water in yer bottle?' I says to him. Dang a
Christian word would he answer, only swear, an swear with nothin' bar
the pull of me finger betwixt him and his Maker. But, ye know, I had a
kind of likin' for him when I thought of him comin' in to my house
without as much as yer leave, and going to sleep just as if he was in
his own home. I didn't swear back at him but just said, 'This is only
a house for wan, but our King has a big residence for ye, so come
along before it gets any clearer,' and I took him over to our trenches
as stand-to was coming to an end."
Referring again to our trenches there is one portion known to me where
the lines are barely fifty yards apart, and at the present time the
grass is hiding the enemy's trenches; to peep over the parapet gives
one the impression of looking on a beautiful meadow splashed with
daisy, buttercup, and poppy flower; the whole is a riot of
colour--crimson, heliotrope, mauve, and green. What a change from some
weeks ago! Then the place was littered with dead bodies, and limp, (p. 080)
lifeless figures hung on to the barbed wire where they had been caught
in a mad rush to the trenches which they never took. A breeze blows
across the meadow as I write, carrying with it the odour of death and
perfumed flowers, of aromatic herbs and summer, of desolation and
decay. It is good that Nature does her best to blot out all traces of
the tragedy between the trenches.
There is a vacant spot in our lines, where there is no trench and none
being constructed; why this should be I do not know. But all this
ground is under machine-gun fire and within rifle range. No foe would
dare to cross the open, and the foe who dared would never live to get
through. Further to the right, is a pond with a dead German stuck
there, head down, and legs up in air. They tell me that a concussion
shell has struck him since and part of his body was blown over to our
lines. At present the pond is hidden and the light and shade plays
over the kindly grasses that circle round it. On the extreme right
there is a graveyard. The trench is deep in dead men's bones and is
considered unhealthy. A church almost razed to the ground, with the
spire blown off and buried point down in the earth, moulders in (p. 081)
ruins at the back. It is said that the ghosts of dead monks pray
nightly at the shattered altar, and some of our men state that they
often hear the organ playing when they stand as sentries on the
banquette.
"The fire trench to-night," said Stoner that evening, a nervous light
in his soft brown eyes, as he fumbled with the money on the card
table. His luck had been good, and he had won over six francs; he
generally loses. "Perhaps we're in for the high jump when we get up
there."
"The high jump?" I queried, "what's that?"
"A bayonet charge," he replied, dealing a final hand and inviting us
to double the stakes as the deal was the last. A few wanted to play
for another quarter of an hour, but he would not prolong the game.
Turning up an ace he shoved the money in his pocket and rose to his
feet.
In an hour we were ready to move. We carried much weight in addition
to our ordinary load, firewood, cooking utensils, and extra loaves. We
bought the latter at a neighbouring _boulangerie_, one that still
plied its usual trade in dangerous proximity to the firing-line.
The loaves cost 6-1/2_d._ each, and we prefer them to the English (p. 082)
bread which we get now and again, and place them far above the
tooth-destroying army biscuits. Fires were permitted in the trenches,
we were told, and our officers advised us to carry our own wood with
us. So it came about that the enemy's firing served as a useful
purpose; we pulled down the shrapnel shattered rafters of our billets,
broke them up into splinters with our entrenching tools, and tied them
up into handy portable bundles which we tied on our packs.
At midnight we entered Harley Street, and squeezed our way through the
narrow trench. The distance to the firing-line was a long one;
traverse and turning, turning and traverse, we thought we should never
come to the end of them. There was no shelling, but the questing
bullet was busy, it sung over our heads or snapped at the sandbags on
the parapet, ever busy on the errand of death and keen on its mission.
But deep down in the trench we regarded it with indifference. Our way
was one of safety. Here the bullet was foiled, and pick and shovel
reigned masters in the zone of death.
We were relieving the Scots Guards (many of my Irish friends (p. 083)
belong to this regiment). Awaiting our coming, they stood in the full
marching order of the regulations, packs light, forks and spoons in
their putties, and all little luxuries which we still dared to carry
flung away. They had been holding the place for seven days, and were
now going back somewhere for a rest.
"Is this the firing-line?" asked Stoner.
"Yes, sonny," came the answer in a voice which seemed to be full of
weariness.
"Quiet here?" Mervin enquired, a note of awe in his voice.
"Naethin' doin'," said a fresh voice that reminded me forcibly of
Glasgow and the Cowcaddens. "It's a gey soft job here."
"No casualties?"
"Yin or twa stuck their heads o'er the parapet when they shouldn't and
they copped it," said Glasgow, "but barrin' that 'twas quiet."
In the traverse where I was planted I dropped into Ireland; heaps of
it. There was the brogue that could be cut with a knife, and the
humour that survived Mons and the Marne, and the kindliness that
sprang from the cabins of Corrymeela and the moors of Derrynane.
"Irish?" I asked. (p. 084)
"Sure," was the answer. "We're everywhere. Ye'll find us in a Gurkha
regiment if you scratch the beggars' skins. Ye're not Irish!"
"I am," I answered.
"Then you've lost your brogue on the boat that took ye over," somebody
said. "Are ye dry?"
I wiped the sweat from my forehead as I sat down on the banquette. "Is
there something to drink?" I queried.
"There's a drop of cold tay, me boy," the man near me replied.
"Where's yer mess-tin, Mike?"
A tin was handed to me, and I drank greedily of the cold black tea.
The man Mike gave some useful hints on trench work.
"It's the Saxons that's across the road," he said, pointing to the
enemy's lines which were very silent. I had not heard a bullet whistle
over since I entered the trench. On the left was an interesting rifle
and machine gun fire all the time. "They're quiet fellows, the Saxons,
they don't want to fight any more than we do, so there's a kind of
understanding between us. Don't fire at us and we'll not fire at you.
There's a good dug-out there," he continued, pointing to a dark (p. 085)
hole in the parados (the rear wall of the trench), "and ye'll find a
pot of jam and half a loaf in the corner. There's also a water jar
half full."
"Where do you get water?"
"Nearly a mile away the pump is," he answered. "Ye've to cross the
fields to get it."
"A safe road?" asked Stoner.
"Not so bad, ye know," was the answer.
"This place smells 'orrid," muttered Bill, lighting a cigarette and
flinging on his pack. "What is it?"
"Some poor devils between the trenches; they've been lyin' there since
last Christmas."
"Blimey, what a stink," muttered Bill, "Why don't ye bury them up?"
"Because nobody dare go out there, me boy," was the answer. "Anyway,
it's Germans they are. They made a charge and didn't get as far as
here. They went out of step so to speak."
"Woo-oo-oo!" Bill suddenly yelled and kicked a tin pail on to the floor
of the trench. A shower of sparks flew up into the air and fluttered
over the rim of the parapet. "I put my 'and on it, 'twas like a (p. 086)
red 'ot poker, it burned me to the bone!"
"It's the brazier ye were foolin' about with," said Mike, who was
buckling his pack-straps preparatory to moving, "See, and don't put
yer head over the top, and don't light a fire at night. Ye can put up
as much flare as you like by day. Good-bye, boys, and good luck t'ye."
"Any Donegal men in the battalion?" I called after him as he was
moving off.
"None that I know of," he shouted back, "but there are two other
battalions that are not here, maybe there are Donegal men there. Good
luck, boys, good luck!"
We were alone and lonely, nearly every man of us. For myself I felt
isolated from the whole world, alone in front of the little line of
sand bags with my rifle in my hand. Who were we? Why were we there?
Goliath, the junior clerk, who loved Tennyson; Pryor, the draughtsman,
who doted on Omar; Kore, who read Fanny Eden's penny stories, and
never disclosed his profession; Mervin, the traveller, educated for
the Church but schooled in romance; Stoner, the clerk, who reads my
books and says he never read better; and Bill, newsboy, street-arab,
and Lord knows what, who reads _The Police News_, plays (p. 087)
innumerable tricks with cards, and gambles and never wins. Why were we
here holding a line of trench, and ready to take a life or give one as
occasion required? Who shall give an answer to the question?