After supper that night a crowd sat around the dying embers of the
fires. This was one of the first positions we had been in where there
was cover sufficient to warrant fires being lighted. A mail had been
distributed that day, and the men exchanged items of news and swapped
gossip. There were men there from all parts of Newfoundland. They spoke
in at least thirty different accents....
Sometimes a friend of the absent "Half" would tell of Half's exploit
of stealing a trolley from the Reid Newfoundland Company and going
twenty miles to see a girl. Sometimes the hero was a married man. Then
it was opined that his conjugal relations were not happy, and the
reason he enlisted was that "he had heard something."... The lumbermen
of Notre Dame Bay and Green Bay told fearsome and wondrous tales of
driving and swamping, of teaming and landing, until one almost heard
the blows of ax, the "gee" and "haw" of the teamsters, and smelt the
pungent odor of new-cut pine. The Reid Newfoundland Railway, the single
narrow gauge road that twists a picturesque trail across the Island,
had given largely of its personnel toward the making of the regiment.
Firemen and engineers, brakemen and conductors, talked reminiscently of
forced runs to catch expresses with freight and accommodation trains.
There is an interesting tale of two drivers who blew their whistles
in the Morse code, and kept up communication with each other, until a
girl learned the code and broke up the friendship. A steamship fireman
contributed his quota with a story of laboring through mountainous seas
against furious tides when the stokers' utmost efforts served only
to keep steamers from losing way. By comparison with the homeland,
Turkey suffered much; and the things they said about Gallipoli were
lamentable. From the gloom on the other side of the fire a voice
chanted softly, "It's a long, long way to Tipperary, It's a long way
to go." Gradually all joined in. After Tipperary, came many marching
songs. "Are we downhearted? NO," with every one booming out the "No."
"Boys in Khaki, Boys in Blue," and at last their own song; to the tune
of "There is a tavern in the town."
And when those Newfoundlanders start to yell, start to yell.
Oh, Kaiser Bill, you'll wish you were in hell, were in hell;
For they'll hang you high to your Potsdam palace wall,
You're a damn poor Kaiser, after all.
The singing died down slowly. The talk turned to the trenches and the
chances of victory, and by degrees to personal impressions.
"I'd like to know," said one chap, "why we all enlisted."
"When I enlisted," said a man with an accent reminiscent of the
Placentia Bay, "I thought there'd be lots of fun, but with weather like
this, and nothing fit to eat, there's not much poetry or romance in war
any more."
"Right for you, my son," said another; "your King and Country need you,
but the trouble is to make your King and Country feed you."
"Don't you wish you were in London now, Gal?" said one chap, turning
to me. "You'd have a nice bed to sleep in, and could eat anywhere you
liked."
"Well," I said, "enough people tried to persuade me to stop. One fellow
told me that the more brains a man had, the farther away he was from
the firing-line. He'd been to the front too. I think," I added, "that
General Sherman had the right idea."
"I wish you fellows would shut up and go to sleep," said a querulous
voice from a nearby dugout.
"You don't know what you're talking about, Gal; General Sherman was an
optimist."
"It doesn't do any good to talk about it now," said Art Pratt, in a
matter of fact voice. "Some of you enlisted so full of love of country
that there was patriotism running down your chin, and some of you
enlisted because you were disappointed in love, but the most of you
enlisted for love of adventure, and you're getting it."
Again the querulous subterranean voice interrupted: "Go to sleep,
you fellows--there's none of you knows what you're talking about.
There's only one reason any of us enlisted, and that's pure, low down,
unmitigated ignorance." Amid general laughter the class in applied
psychology broke up, and distributed themselves in their various
dugouts.
Halfway down to my dugout, I was arrested by the sound of scuffling,
much blowing and puffing, and finally the satisfied grunt that I knew
proceeded from Hebe Wheeler.
"I've got a spy," he yelled. "Here's a bloody Turk."
"Turk nothing," said a disgusted voice. "Don't you know a man from your
own company?"
Hebe relinquished his hold on his captive and subsided, grumbling. The
other arose, shook himself, and went his way, voicing his opinion of
people who built their dugouts flush with the ground.
"What do you think of the news from the Western front?" said Art, when
I located him.
"What is it?" I asked.
"The enemy are on the run at the Western front. The British have taken
four lines of German trenches for a distance of over five miles in the
vicinity of Loos. The bulletin board at Brigade headquarters says that
they have captured several large guns, a number of machine guns, and
seventeen thousand unwounded prisoners. If they can keep this up long
enough for the Turks to realize that it is hopeless to expect any help
from that quarter, Abdul Pasha will soon give in."