It was nearing Christmas when I met Capt. Corcoran. He is a genial
and, I felt sure, a rather sentimental soul; but his matter-of-fact
conversation about matter-of-fact human slaughter was altogether
chilling. So I asked him about Christmas in the trenches.
"I spent last Christmas at Loos," he said. Loos, one of the worst of
slaughter pens! I grew expectant.
"I was sapping," he said. "Part of an engineer's duties are the
extension of deep underground passages toward the enemy's lines, laying
mines under 'No Man's Land' and listening, if possible, for signs of
activity on the other side.
"I was sapping--Christmas Eve. We were down thirty-five feet, in a
little cave about nine by four. There were three of us. Along toward
midnight a big shell landed right, and we were buried. We were buried
thirteen hours. One of the boys lost his mind, but they dug us out
Christmas afternoon."
"It wouldn't have been so bad," he added, "if we had only had to wait.
But we could hear the Boche sapping just a few feet away and we hated
like everything to be mined and blown up down there. You don't mind
it when you're out in the open air, but you get nervous in a fix like
that."
"It must have been a merry Christmas after all--just to get out," I
remarked.
"No," he said. "Something happened that got on my nerves. I went as
soon as I could to get my Christmas mail--wanted to see what Santa
Claus had brought--and he didn't bring me a blessed thing but a bill
for thirty pounds."
* * * * *
I have hoped for a reaction against war on the part of the troops--a
psychological revulsion, in time, against the long-drawn-out killing. I
tried to present my theory to the captain, but he didn't seem to grasp
it.
"Everybody's nervous," he said, "for the first day or two--like a horse
just in from the quiet country being driven through your city streets.
But, sure, if he was going to shy at the 'Elevated,' he'd do it the
first week. After that, he gets used to the noise and he'd be nervous
without it. 'Tis so with a soldier. He's glad to get wounded for a
change, and be sent back home; but then he gets to missing the noise
of the whizz-bangs and the coal boxes and the darling little sausages,
and he isn't easy until he gets into the game again."
"But the horrors of hand-to-hand fighting," I protested. "How can
anybody go through that and come out sane?"
"'Tis simple," he said. "You know you've got to get your man, or he'll
get you."
"Get him? How?"
"With whatever you've got. Maybe your bayonet. Maybe your knife. Maybe
nothing but your fists and teeth."
I tried to picture youths advancing under the smoke of artillery,
through fields mowed by machine guns, dropping a moment into craters
ploughed out by giant shells, creeping out under other curtains of
smoke and reaching at last that other line of youths--then the thrust,
the stab or the fight to the death with teeth and claws. I tried to
picture young husbands and fathers and lovers, and even jolly good
fellows, getting used to this--but I failed. I am an incorrigible
mollycoddle.
* * * * *
"What is the war doing to the soldiers?" I asked. "How is it changing
them most?"
"Making men of them," said the captain. "They came out little
pasty-faced clerks with no lungs, no muscle, no nerve and no vision.
Now they've seen life--and death--and aren't afraid of either. They
have muscles and nerves of iron, and a man's outlook on life. They'll
never be mere clerks or mere Londoners again."
* * * * *
Capt. Corcoran doesn't reminisce. He doesn't romance. Getting a war
story from him is hard newspaper work; not that he isn't willing to
give information, but war conditions are no longer a novelty in Europe,
and heroes are so common that their stories are no longer interesting.
Little by little, I learned the following facts about his record, which
did not seem at all extraordinary to him:
He fought in the battles of the Aisne, Pepereign, Festubert, Hooge,
St. Eloi, Neuve Chapelle, Loos and Pommier. He was wounded at Neuve
Chapelle, sent to England, recovered and insisted on going back. He was
wounded again at Pommier last February, two miles back of the line,
when a stray shell fragment struck him in the back. The force of it
hurled him to the ground in the midst of some barbed wire entanglements
that caught in his forehead and tore back his scalp to the crown. A
comrade clapped a cap upon his head to hold the scalp in place while he
was carried to the hospital. His recovery amazed the surgeons.
Once he broke military rules by staying away from his billet all night.
That night a shell struck the billet and killed his partner with whom
he had been sleeping for months.
At another time, a shell split a house in which he was installing
signal apparatus and killed half a dozen telegraph clerks with whom he
had just been talking. He was uninjured.