It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things,
of war's brutality-I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of it
was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of civilian
life and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all our old
philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It played the “hat trick”
with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought up to
Christian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at mothers'
knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, music, the gentle
arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of half-tones, delicate scales
of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in their sense of
beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like ape-men; and it
was abominably funny. They laughed at the most frightful episodes, which
revealed this contrast between civilized ethics and the old beast
law. The more revolting it was the more, sometimes, they shouted with
laughter, especially in reminiscence, when the tale was told in the
gilded salon of a French chateau, or at a mess-table.
It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been
played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that
the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that
mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct,
cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and
claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, all religion had preached
this gospel and this promise.
Now that ideal had broken like a china vase dashed to hard ground. The
contrast between That and This was devastating. It was, in an enormous
world-shaking way, like a highly dignified man in a silk hat, morning
coat, creased trousers, spats, and patent boots suddenly slipping on a
piece of orange-peel and sitting, all of a heap, with silk hat flying,
in a filthy gutter. The war-time humor of the soul roared with mirth at
the sight of all that dignity and elegance despoiled.
So we laughed merrily, I remember, when a military chaplain (Eton,
Christ Church, and Christian service) described how an English sergeant
stood round the traverse of a German trench, in a night raid, and as
the Germans came his way, thinking to escape, he cleft one skull after
another with a steel-studded bludgeon--a weapon which he had made with
loving craftsmanship on the model of Blunderbore's club in the pictures
of a fairy-tale.
So we laughed at the adventures of a young barrister (a brilliant fellow
in the Oxford “Union”) whose pleasure it was to creep out o' nights into
No Man's Land and lie doggo in a shell-hole close to the enemy's barbed
wire, until presently, after an hour's waiting or two, a German soldier
would crawl out to fetch in a corpse. The English barrister lay with his
rifle ready. Where there had been one corpse there were two. Each night
he made a notch on his rifle--three notches one night--to check the
number of his victims. Then he came back to breakfast in his dugout with
a hearty appetite.
In one section of trenches the men made a habit of betting upon
those who would be wounded first. It had all the uncertainty of the
roulette-table... One day, when the German gunners were putting over a
special dose of hate, a sergeant kept coming to one dugout to inquire
about a “new chum,” who had come up with the drafts.
“Is Private Smith all right?” he asked.
“Yes, Sergeant, he's all right,” answered the men crouching in the dark
hole.
“Private Smith isn't wounded yet?” asked the, sergeant again, five
minutes later.
“No, Sergeant.”
Private Smith was touched by this interest in his well-being.
“That sergeant seems a very kind man,” said the boy. “Seems to love me
like a father!”
A yell of laughter answered him.
“You poor, bleeding fool!” said one of his comrades. “He's drawn you in
a lottery! Stood to win if you'd been hit.”
In digging new trenches and new dugouts, bodies and bits of bodies were
unearthed, and put into sand-bags with the soil that was sent back down
a line of men concealing their work from German eyes waiting for any new
activity in our ditches.
“Bit of Bill,” said the leading man, putting in a leg.
“Another bit of Bill,” he said, unearthing a hand.
“Bill's ugly mug,” he said at a later stage in the operations, when a
head was found.
As told afterward, that little episode in the trenches seemed immensely
comic. Generals chuckled over it. Chaplains treasured it.
How we used to guffaw at the answer of the cockney soldier who met a
German soldier with his hands up, crying: “Kamerad! Kamerad! Mercy!”
“Not so much of your 'Mercy, Kamerad,'” said the cockney. “'And us over
your bloody ticker!”
It was the man's watch he wanted, without sentiment.
One tale was most popular, most mirth-arousing in the early days of the
war.
“Where's your prisoner?” asked an Intelligence officer waiting to
receive a German sent down from the trenches under escort of an honest
corporal.
“I lost him on the way, sir,” said the corporal.
“Lost him?”
The corporal was embarrassed.
“Very sorry, sir. My feelings overcame me, sir. It was like this, sir.
The man started talking on the way down. Said he was thinking of his
poor wife. I'd been thinking of mine, and I felt sorry for him. Then he
mentioned as how he had two kiddies at home. I 'ave two kiddies at 'ome,
sir, and I couldn't 'elp feeling sorry for him. Then he said as how his
old mother had died awhile ago and he'd never see her again. When he
started cryin' I was so sorry for him I couldn't stand it any longer,
sir. So I killed the poor blighter.”
Our men in the trenches, and out of them, up to the waist in water
sometimes, lying in slimy dugouts, lice--eaten, rat-haunted, on the
edge of mine-craters, under harassing fire, with just the fluke of luck
between life and death, seized upon any kind of joke as an excuse for
laughter, and many a time in ruins and in trenches and in dugouts I have
heard great laughter. It was the protective armor of men's souls. They
knew that if they did not laugh their courage would go and nothing would
stand between them and fear.
“You know, sir,” said a sergeant-major, one day, when I walked with him
down a communication trench so waterlogged that my top-boots were full
of slime, “it doesn't do to take this war seriously.”
And, as though in answer to him, a soldier without breeches and with
his shirt tied between his legs looked at me and remarked, in a
philosophical way, with just a glint of comedy in his eyes:
“That there Grand Fleet of ours don't seem to be very active, sir. It's
a pity it don't come down these blinkin' trenches and do a bit of work!”
“Having a clean-up, my man?” said a brigadier to a soldier trying to
wash in a basin about the size of a kitchen mug.
“Yes, sir,” said the man, “and I wish I was a blasted canary.”
One of the most remarkable battles on the front was fought by a
battalion of Worcesters for the benefit of two English members of
Parliament. It was not a very big battle, but most dramatic while it
lasted. The colonel (who had a sense of humor) arranged it after a
telephone message to his dugout telling him that two politicians were
about to visit his battalion in the line, and asking him to show them
something interesting.
“Interesting?” said the colonel. “Do they think this war is a peep-show
for politicians? Do they want me to arrange a massacre to make a London
holiday?” Then his voice changed and he laughed. “Show them something
interesting? Oh, all right; I dare say I can do that.”
He did. When the two M. P.'s arrived, apparently at the front-line
trenches, they were informed by the colonel that, much to his regret,
for their sake, the enemy was just attacking, and that his men were
defending their position desperately.
“We hope for the best,” he said, “and I think there is just a chance
that you will escape with your lives if you stay here quite quietly.”
“Great God!” said one of the M. P.'s, and the other was silent, but
pale.
Certainly there was all the noise of a big attack. The Worcesters were
standing-to on the fire-step, firing rifle--grenades and throwing
bombs with terrific energy. Every now and then a man fell, and the
stretcher-bearers pounced on him, tied him up in bandages, and carried
him away to the field dressing-station, whistling as they went, “We
won't go home till morning,” in a most heroic way... The battle lasted
twenty minutes, at the end of which time the colonel announced to his
visitors:
“The attack is repulsed, and you, gentlemen, have nothing more to fear.”
One of the M. P.'s was thrilled with excitement. “The valor of your men
was marvelous,” he said. “What impressed me most was the cheerfulness
of the wounded. They were actually grinning as they came down on the
stretchers.”
The colonel grinned, too. In fact, he stifled a fit of coughing. “Funny
devils!” he said. “They are so glad to be going home.”
The members of Parliament went away enormously impressed, but they had
not enjoyed themselves nearly as well as the Worcesters, who had fought
a sham battle--not in the front-line trenches, but in the support
trenches two miles back! They laughed for a week afterward.