Because the enemy was on the high ground and our men were in the low
ground, many of our trenches were wet and waterlogged, even in summer,
after heavy rain. In winter they were in bogs and swamps, up by St.-Eloi
and southward this side of Gommecourt, and in many other evil places.
The enemy drained his water into our ditches when he could, with the
cunning and the science of his way of war, and that made our men savage.
I remember going to the line this side of Fricourt on an August day in
'15. It was the seventeenth of August, as I have it in my diary, and
the episode is vivid in my mind because I saw then the New Army lads
learning one of the lessons of war in one of the foulest places. I also
learned the sense of humor of a British general, and afterward, not
enjoying the joke, the fatalistic valor of officers and men (in civil
life a year before) who lived with the knowledge that the ground beneath
them was mined and charged with high explosives, and might hurl them to
eternity between the whiffs of a cigarette.
We were sitting in the garden of the general's headquarters, having a
picnic meal before going into the trenches. In spite of the wasps, which
attacked the sandwiches, it was a nice, quiet place in time of war.
No shell same crashing in our neighborhood (though we were well within
range of the enemy's guns), and the loudest noise was the drop of an
over-ripe apple in the orchard. Later on a shrill whistle signaled a
hostile airplane overhead, but it passed without throwing a bomb.
“You will have a moist time in some of the trenches,” said the general
(whose boots were finely polished). “The rain has made them rather
damp... But you must get down as far as the mine craters. We're
expecting the Germans to fire one at any moment, and some of our
trenches are only six yards away from the enemy. It's an interesting
place.”
The interest of it seemed to me too much of a good thing, and I uttered
a pious prayer that the enemy would not explode his beastly mine under
me. It makes such a mess of a man.
A staff captain came out with a report, which he read: “The sound of
picks has been heard close to our sap-head. The enemy will probably
explode their mine in a few hours.”
“That's the place I was telling you about,” said the general. “It's well
worth a visit... But you must make up your mind to get your feet wet.”
As long as I could keep my head dry and firmly fixed to my shoulders, I
was ready to brave the perils of wet feet with any man.
It had been raining heavily for a day or two. I remember thinking that
in London--which seemed a long way off--people were going about under
umbrellas and looking glum when their clothes were splashed by passing
omnibuses. The women had their skirts tucked up and showed their pretty
ankles. (Those things used to happen in the far-off days of peace.) But
in the trenches, those that lay low, rain meant something different, and
hideously uncomfortable for men who lived in holes. Our soldiers,
who cursed the rain--as in the old days, “they swore terribly in
Flanders”--did not tuck their clothes up above their ankles. They took
off their trousers.
There was something ludicrous, yet pitiable, in the sight of those hefty
men coming back through the communication trenches with the tails of
their shirts flapping above their bare legs, which were plastered with a
yellowish mud. Shouldering their rifles or their spades, they trudged on
grimly through two feet of water, and the boots which they wore without
socks squelched at every step with a loud, sucking noise--“like a German
drinking soup,” said an officer who preceded me.
“Why grouse?” he said, presently. “It's better than Brighton!”
It was a queer experience, this paddling through the long communication
trenches, which wound in and out like the Hampton Court maze toward the
front line, and the mine craters which made a salient to our right, by
a place called the “Tambour.” Shells came whining overhead and somewhere
behind us iron doors were slamming in the sky, with metallic bangs, as
though opening and shutting in a tempest. The sharp crack of rifle-shots
showed that the snipers were busy on both sides, and once I stood in a
deep pool, with the water up to my knees, listening to what sounded like
the tap-tap-tap of invisible blacksmiths playing a tattoo on an anvil.
It was one of our machine-guns at work a few yards away from my head,
which I ducked below the trench parapet. Splodge! went the officer
in front of me, with a yell of dismay. The water was well above his
top-boots. Splosh! went another man ahead, recovering from a side-slip
in the oozy mud and clinging desperately to some bunches of yarrow
growing up the side of the trench. Squelch! went a young gentleman whose
puttees and breeches had lost their glory and were but swabs about his
elegant legs.
“Clever fellows!” said the officer, as two of us climbed on to the
fire-stand of the trench in order to avoid a specially deep water-hole,
and with ducked heads and bodies bent double (the Germans were only two
hundred yards on the other side of the parapet) walked on dry earth for
at least ten paces. The officer's laughter was loud at the corner of
the next traverse, when there was an abrupt descent into a slough of
despond.
“And I hope they can swim!” said an ironical voice from a dugout, as the
officers passed. They were lying in wet mud in those square burrows, the
men who had been working all night under their platoon commanders, and
were now sleeping and resting in their trench dwellings. As I paddled
on I glanced at those men lying on straw which gave out a moist smell,
mixed with the pungent vapors of chloride of lime. They were not
interested in the German guns, which were giving their daily dose of
“hate” to the village of Becourt-Becordel. The noise did not interrupt
their heavy, slumbrous breathing. Some of those who were awake were
reading novelettes, forgetting war in the eternal plot of cheap romance.
Others sat at the entrance of their burrows with their knees tucked up,
staring gloomily to the opposite wall of the trench in day-dreams of
some places betwixt Aberdeen and Hackney Downs. I spoke to one of them,
and said, “How are you getting on?” He answered, “I'm not getting on...
I don't see the fun of this.”
“Can you keep dry?”
“Dry?... I'm soaked to the skin.”
“What's it like here?”
“It's hell... The devils blow up mines to make things worse.”
Another boy spoke.
“Don't you mind what he says, sir. He's always a gloomy bastard. Doesn't
believe in his luck.”
There were mascots for luck, at the doorways of their dugouts--a woman's
face carved in chalk, the name of a girl written in pebbles, a portrait
of the King in a frame of withered wild flowers.
A company of our New Army boys had respected a memento of French troops
who were once in this section of trenches. It was an altar built
into the side of the trench, where mass was said each morning by a
soldier--priest. It was decorated with vases and candlesticks, and above
the altar-table was a statue, crudely modeled, upon the base of which I
read the words Notre Dame des Tranchees (“Our Lady of the Trenches”). A
tablet fastened in the earth-wall recorded in French the desire of those
who worshiped here:
“This altar, dedicated to Our Lady of the Trenches, was blessed by the
chaplain of the French regiment. The 9th Squadron of the 6th Company
recommends its care and preservation to their successors. Please do not
touch the fragile statue in trench-clay.”
“Our Lady of the Trenches!” It was the first time I had heard of this
new title of the Madonna, whose spirit, if she visited those ditches of
death, must have wept with pity for all those poor children of mankind
whose faith was so unlike the work they had to do.
From a dugout near the altar there came tinkling music. A young soldier
was playing the mandolin to two comrades. “All the latest ragtime,” said
one of them with a grin.
So we paddled on our way, glimpsing every now and then over the parapets
at the German lines a few hundred yards away, and at a village in which
the enemy was intrenched, quiet and sinister there. The water through
which we waded was alive with a multitude of swimming frogs. Red
slugs crawled up the sides of the trenches, and queer beetles with
dangerous-looking horns wriggled along dry ledges and invaded the
dugouts in search of the vermin which infested them.
“Rats are the worst plague,” said a colonel, coming out of the battalion
headquarters, where he had a hole large enough for a bed and table.
“There are thousands of rats in this part of the line, and they're
audacious devils. In the dugout next door the straw at night writhes
with them... I don't mind the mice so much. One of them comes to dinner
on my table every evening, a friendly little beggar who is very pally
with me.”
We looked out above the mine-craters, a chaos of tumbled earth, where
our trenches ran so close to the enemy's that it was forbidden to smoke
or talk, and where our sappers listened with all their souls in their
ears to any little tapping or picking which might signal approaching
upheaval. The coats of some French soldiers, blown up long ago by some
of these mines, looked like the blue of the chicory flower growing in
the churned-up soil... The new mine was not fired that afternoon, up
to the time of my going away. But it was fired next day, and I wondered
whether the gloomy boy had gone up with it. There was a foreknowledge of
death in his eyes.
One of the officers had spoken to me privately.
“I'm afraid of losing my nerve before the men. It haunts me, that
thought. The shelling is bad enough, but it's the mining business that
wears one's nerve to shreds. One never knows.”
I hated to leave him there to his agony... The colonel himself was
all nerves, and he loathed the rats as much as the shell-fire and the
mining, those big, lean, hungry rats of the trenches, who invaded the
dugouts and frisked over the bodies of sleeping men. One young subaltern
was in terror of them. He told me how he shot at one, seeing the glint
of its eyes in the darkness. The bullet from his revolver ricocheted
from wall to wall, and he was nearly court-martialed for having fired.
The rats, the lice that lived on the bodies of our men, the water-logged
trenches, the shell-fire which broke down the parapets and buried men in
wet mud, wetter for their blood, the German snipers waiting for English
heads, and then the mines--oh, a cheery little school of courage for
the sons of gentlemen! A gentle academy of war for the devil and General
Squeers!