Gentleman."
A DISSERTATION ON MUD
The second of our rest days is over, and to-morrow night we shall go into the firing line and relieve the ——s. We shall march back the way we came out, down the sad-looking green valley round the lips of which some of our batteries are hidden; through the deserted streets of ——, with its boarded-up shops and houses; on over the weed-grown railway track, through a little village whose church is still unbroken; though few of its cottage windows have any glass left in them; across the busy little river to Ambulance Corner—a favourite target for Boche shells, that bit of road—and so through the wooded hollow where the German gas lies deadly thick when it comes, into the foot of Manchester Avenue, the long communication trench leading up to the Battalion's trench headquarters in the support line, where "A" Company will branch off to the right, "B" to the left, and "C" to the extreme left of our sub-sector.
That town I mentioned—not the little village close to Ambulance Corner, where most roofs and walls show shell-torn rents and a few are smashed to dust—is rather like a city of the dead. It has a cathedral which the gentle Hun has ranged on with thoughtful frightfulness. But though, under the guidance of his aerial observers, the Boche has smashed up that cathedral pretty thoroughly, and its tower has great gaping chunks riven out of its sides by shells, yet, as folk say miraculously, its crowning attraction, a monstrous gilt figure of the Madonna and Child, thirty to fifty feet high, remains intact. But this remarkable gilt statue has been undermined at its base by H.E. shell, and now hangs over at right angles to the street far below it—a most extraordinary sight. The devout naturally claim that no German projectile will prove powerful enough to lower the sacred emblem any farther. Boche savagery in France has not weakened anyone's faith, I think; possibly the reverse.
A foundry or factory near by is now a tangled mass of scrap iron, and as one marches through the town one has queer intimate glimpses of deserted bedroom interiors, with homely furnishings exposed to all the weather, where a shell has sliced one wall clean down from a first or second storey and left the ground floor intact.
But I was going to tell you about trenches. When I first began to walk up Manchester Avenue, my thought was, "There's nothing much to grumble at here. I call this pretty good. A little sloppy under foot perhaps, but really nothing to write home about." I've often laughed at that since. For several hundred yards it cuts through a ridge of chalk. It is wide enough to enable one to pass a man in it anywhere with comfort. Its parapet and parados tower white, clean, and unbroken a foot or so over your head. Its sides are like the sides of a house or a tunnel; good, dry, solid chalk, like our Salisbury trenches, with never a sign of caving in about them. And on the hard bottom under foot-perhaps two or three inches of nice clean chalky slime and water. It has a gentle gradient which makes it self-draining.
You could easily go right up it to Battalion Headquarters in the support trench in ordinary marching boots, and be none the worse. And since then I've known what it means to get a bootful of muddy water, when wearing trench boots; rubber thigh-boots, you know, with straps buckling to your belt. The change begins a little way above the Battalion Headquarters dug-out, in support line. You leave the chalk behind you and get into clay, and then you leave the clay behind you and get into yellow porridge and treacle. And then you come to a nice restful stretch of a couple of hundred yards or so, in which you pray for more porridge; and it seems you're never coming to any more. This is a vein of glue in the section which "A" will go to-morrow night.
"Very old and curious!" "Remarkably fine, full body!" Oh! that glue vein is from the end bin, genuine old-vatted, I can assure you. It must have eaten up some hundreds of pairs of boots by now, and a regular Noah's Ark full of trench stores, ammunition, and other useful material.
The glue vein probably had a bottom in bygone days, but now I fancy the Hun has knocked the bottom out of it. In any case, we never met anyone who had found bottom in that bit of line, and as the tallest man in the company is only six foot two, I hope we never shall. At first you think you will skip along quick, like skating fast on very thin ice, and with feet planted far apart, so as to get the support of the trench sides. That bit of trench is possessed of devils, and they laugh when you stretch your legs, meaning to get through with it as quick as you can. The glue's so thick and strong, after the soupy stuff you've been wading through, that you welcome the solid look of it. (That's where the devils begin their chuckling.)
Perhaps at the first few steps you only sink about a foot, leaving your knees easily clear. "Oh! come!" you say (and that's where the devils of the glue patch laugh out loud). At the next step you go in a little deeper, and in your innocence give quite a sharp tug to lift your foot. You lift it all right, perhaps half-way up the leg of your boot, possibly ripping off a brace button in the process, if you've been unwise enough to fasten up the top straps of your boots that way. (The devils go on laughing.) Then you pause, reflectively, while shoving your foot down in your boot again, and take a good look round you, wondering what sort of a place you've struck. (This is where the devils have to hold their sides in almost painful hilarity.)
While you reflect you sink, so slowly and softly that you don't notice it till you try the next step. And then, with the devils of that section roaring their ugly Hunnish heads off all round you, if you have no better luck than Tommy Dodd had, his first night in, you may continue reflecting for quite a long while, till somebody comes along who knows that particular health resort. Then two or three Samaritans with picks and shovels and a post or two will be brought, and, very laboriously, you'll be dug and levered out; possibly with your boots, possibly without either them or your socks.
But what reduces the devils to helpless, tearful contortions of merriment, is a coincidental decision on the part of a Boche gunner to start peppering that bit of trench with shrap., or a machine-gun, during your reflective period. Then it's great; a really first-class opportunity for reviewing the errors of your past life.
After this substantial pièce de résistance (yes, thanks, I'm progressing very nicely with my French this term), you come to a delicately refreshing dessert in Sauchiehall Street, where the water lies very deep in most parts, but so sweetly liquid as to wash the glue well off up to our coat pockets. This innocent stuff can be pumped out quite easily, and is pumped out every day, into a gully, which we devoutly hope leads well into a Boche sap. But pump as you will, it fills up very rapidly. And so, with new washed boots (and coat pockets) to Whizz-bang Corner, where Sauchiehall Street enters the fire trench, and the Hun loves to direct his morning and evening hymns of hate in the hope of catching tired ration-carriers, and, no doubt, of spilling their rations. It was there that Martin of No. 3 Platoon got his quietener on the morning we came out. But with luck and no septic trouble, hell be back in a month or so. The surroundings are a bit toxic, as you may imagine. That's why, after even the slightest wound, they inoculate with anti-tetanus—marvellously successful stuff.
The fire trench in this particular bit is rather a mockery, as "the Peacemaker" said, when he tried to climb out of it, our first night in, to have a look at the barbed wire and No Man's Land. He had a revolver in one hand and a bomb in the other, but I am pleased to say the safety-pin of that bomb was efficient; and, in any case, I relieved him of it after he fell back the second time. The sides of that trench have been so unmercifully pounded by the Boche, and the rain has been so persistent of late that the porridge here is more like gruel than the breakfast dish, and the average sand-bag in the parapet, when not submerged, is as unfriendly to get a grip on, as one of those crustaceous pink bombs they sometimes swindle you with at restaurants. You know, the kind you chase round your plate and find splinter-proof.
Thirty or forty yards north from Whizz-bang Corner, in the fire trench, you come to a loop turn to the rear called Whitehall, not because there's a War Office there, but because there's a queer little vein of chalk which disappointingly peters out again in less than a dozen paces. That leads to the Company Headquarters dug-out; an extraordinary hole, I thought, when I first saw it; a jolly nice, homely dug-out I think it now, and with a roof—well, not shell-proof, you know, but water-tight, and quite capable of standing a whizz or a grenade, or anything short of serious H.E. You stride over a