A note of a train of thought forced upon me hereabouts may find a place
here, as it was set down.
(_Feb. 4._) It was nothing more nor less than the appearance at dinner
to-day of a bully stew and a sort of ration lime juice, which drove my
thoughts, always willing to be driven in that direction, towards a
nervous period of 1916, my initiation into trench warfare. The meal
was something of a facsimile; and soon after it, by a coincidence, I
was sitting under the scissors of a volunteer barber much as once after
such a dinner I sat in the alleyway by company headquarters, opposite the
red roofs of Auchy. The _Bonadventure's_ bridge, I meditated as I endured
the shears of a B.E.F. man again, looked not unlike those so-called
"communication trenches" in the Richebourg district, those make-believes;
and, as the steam-valve suddenly made me jump with its thudding volley
of minor explosions, I experienced an echo of the ancient terrors in
those same scantily covered ways when cross-firing machine-guns opened
upon my working-party.
The lime juice, in the present case, was of a milder disposition than
that to which we were accustomed. Yet there was perceptible in it that
uncivilized strength which proved it to come of the same honest origin. We
were, I must confess--it is not too late--much lacking in our appreciation
of that uncompromising, biting liquid which circulated in the trenches,
carried in jars which should have been, it was felt, carrying rum. In
itself a sort of candid friend, that lime juice lacked advancement
through faults not its own. I mean, there was the chlorinated water,
which for all its virtues was hardly popular, and there was the sugar,
which was half-and-half, associating, very friendly, with tea dust.
Moreover, this same _sugar_, in its nocturnal progress at the bottom of
a sandbag, while its carrier now stepped into an artificial lake and
now lay down for the bullets of Quinque Jimmy to pass by unimpeded, had
acquired an interspersion of hairy particles; as generally did our loaves
of bread, which in some cases might easily be supposed to be wearing
wigs. In this manner, the germ-destroyer, the intrusion of tea dust and
the moulted coat of sandbags, combined to prevent the lime juice, like
crabbed poet, "from being as generally tasted as he deserved to be."
At Company Headquarters, too, there was often in those easy times a rival
beverage. Here and there a messenger might be sent back to an estaminet
and return to the war with comforts within a couple of hours.
Yet I myself did my best to cultivate the "lime-juice habit," and to me
it remains an integral part of the interiors, gone but not forgotten,
of many a Rotten Row in the Bethune Sectors. I see its gloomy and
mottled surface, in the aluminium tumbler, besides my platter of "meat and
vegetable" or (as to-day) of bully rehabilitated by the smoky cooks;
and about me the shape of the lean-to dugout rises sufficiently high for
a tall man to enter without going on all fours. Here, is the earth
settee, running round three sides of the table, there, the glory hole in
which, one at a time, we crawl to sleep, with a fine confused bedding of
British Warms and sandbags. The purple typescript of _Comic Cuts_,[4]
in which what imagination and telescope has striven to reveal of the
"other fellow," mind, body and soul, is set in military prose, flaps
neglectedly from its nail. In their furious tints, the ladies of the
late Kirchner beam sweetly upon him who sets put on patrol and him who
returns; while in the convenient niches between the walls and the
corrugated iron roof above, which as a protection might perhaps amount
to the faith of the ostrich, Mills bombs and revolvers and ammunition
nestle.
There, given the noise of shells travelling over, trench mortar bombs
dropping short, machine guns firing high--or of shells alighting abruptly
on the parados, trench mortar bombs thundering into the next traverse,
machine guns in spitfire temper stripping the top layer of sandbags--the
boyish gay P. would with his subalterns pore over the maps, receive
with sinking heart the ominous "secret and confidential" and "very
secret" messages brought in by those fine youths the runners; fill in, not
without murmurings, those _pro forma's_ which at one time seemed likely to
turn fighting into clerkship, or "censor" those long pages of homely
scrawl in copying pencil which were to keep up yet a day more the spirits
of sweethearts, mothers and wives.
Thus the particular memories of trenches and our times and seasons in
them, roused by such a light matter as this which has aroused them now,
pass with the greatest emotion before the mind. It is not fashionable
to talk of the war. Is the counsel, then, to follow the Psalmist:
I said, I will take heed to my ways: that I offend not in my
tongue....
I held my tongue, and spake nothing. I kept silence, yea, even
from good words; but it was pain and grief to me.
One has not to follow him very long in that.
My heart was hot within me, and while I was thus musing the
fire kindled: and at the last I spake with my tongue.
One wonders, though, how the Psalmist himself, had he been one of us,
would have found means to communicate his strange undertones of
experience, according to their significance for himself? To whom would it
be of interest, if he described such a particle as St. Vaast Keep on
the Richebourg road, though he saw daily again in some odd way its
sandbagged posts with the fine wood panels from the shell-like house
beside built in?--seen once, for a lifetime. Or Port Arthur, that wreckage
of a brewery near Neuve Chapelle--why should every yard of its flimsy
fortification be coexistent with me? I could lead the hearer through
its observation-posts, its emplacements, its warrens for human beings,
its relics of other days, with practical and geographical accuracy; but
the words would not contain my own sense of the place, which from the
very first I never needed nor endeavoured to put into words. And yet
it is intense and instant. The reflection of the crazy stronghold as it
was, and with what it meant for me, comes in a second when my thoughts
lie that way, and it is but one of a series of equal insistency. It is no
question, this, of looking back on such a past as in any degree
glorious, of shirking the anguish that overcast any adventurous gleam that
these scenes awakened. Their memory is as sombre and as frightening as
they were themselves in their aspect and their annals.
They come unbidden,
and when they will come, the mind is led by them as birds are said to be
lured by the serpent's eye. A tune, a breath of sighing air, an odour--and
there goes the foolish ghost back to Flanders.
Even here, I suppose, in the Atlantic's healthy blue, I am at the mercy of
a coincidence in lime-juice.
-----
[Footnote 4: Divisional Intelligence Report.]