You hear some quaint remarks under heavy artillery fire. One day
everything was quiet for a bit except for their shells, and one fellow
shouted, “Fall in here for your pay, ‘A’ Company,” which caused men
and officers to laugh aloud. When once we get under fire we take very
little notice of it, for it seems to come natural to us. All we look
for is something to shoot at, taking no notice of what our comrades
are doing on either side. When ammunition is gone we shout, “Some more
souvenirs for the Huns”: _Pte. Homewood, Duke of Cornwall’s Light
Infantry_.
“Mein Gott!”
A funny thing happened about a week ago. The scout officer of our
regiment went out reconnoitring one night and rather lost his bearings.
As he thought he was on his way back he bumped up against a trench
which he took for his own, and started to walk along it till he came
to someone, obviously an officer, walking up and down. “Hullo! Good
evening,” he said; when the other officer, jumping back, said, “Mein
Gott, the English!” and before he had got over his surprise the scout
officer jumped out of the trench and got away without being hit: _A
British Scout_.
“Tickets, Please!”
There’s a corporal of a regiment that I won’t name who was a
ticket-collector on the railway before the war, and when he was called
back to the colours he wasn’t able to forget his old trade. One day
he was in charge of a patrol that surprised a party of Germans in a
wood, and, instead of a usual call to surrender, he sang out, “Tickets,
please!” The Germans seemed to understand what he was driving at, for
they surrendered at once, but that chap will never hear the end of the
story, for when everything else ceases to amuse in the trenches, you
have only to shout out, “Tickets, please!” to set everybody in fits: _A
Gunner of the Royal Artillery_.
No Uhlans Need Apply!
We were about as hungry as men could be when we came on a party of
Uhlans just about to sit down to a nice dinner which had been prepared
for them at a big house. They looked as if they had had too much of a
good time lately and wanted thinning down; so we took them prisoners,
and let them watch us enjoying their dinner. They didn’t like it at
all, and one of them muttered something about an English pig. The baby
of the troop asked him to come outside to settle it with fists, but he
wasn’t having it. After the best dinner I’ve had in my life we went
round to where the Uhlans had commandeered the supplies and offered to
pay, but the people were so pleased that we had got the food instead of
the Germans that they wouldn’t hear of payment: _Trooper Dale, Royal
Dragoons_.