Part 3

And, with it all, mind you, they're so English. I mean they are _kind_, right through to their bones; good fellows, you know; sportsmen, every one of 'em; fellows you'd trust to look after your mother. They're as keen as mustard to get to the strafing of Boches; but that's because the Boche is the enemy, war is war, and duty is duty. You couldn't make haters of 'em, not if you paid 'em all ambassadorial salaries to cultivate a scowl and sing hymns of hate. Not them. Not all the powers of Germany and Austria could make baby-killers, women-slayers, and church-destroyers of these chaps of ours. If I know anything about it, they are fine soldiers, but the Kaiser himself--"Kayser," they call him--couldn't make brutes and bullies of 'em. Warm their blood--and, mind you, you can do it easily enough, even with a football in a muddy field, when they've been on carrying fatigues all day--and, by Jove! there's plenty of devil in 'em. God help the men in front of 'em when they've bayonets fixed! But withal they're English sportsmen all the time, and a French child can empty their pockets and their haversacks by the shedding of a few tears.

But I run on (and my candle runs down) and I give you no news. This is our last night here, and I ought to be asleep in my flea-bag, for we make an early start to-morrow for our first go in the trenches. But it's jolly yarning here to you, while the whole village is asleep, and no chits are coming in, and the Battalion Orderly Room over the way is black and silent as the grave, except for the sentry's footsteps in the mud. I'm in rather good quarters here, in the Mayor's house. When we left that first village--I'm afraid I haven't written since--we had three days of marching, sleeping in different billets each night. Here in this place, twelve miles from the firing line, we've had five days; practising with live bombs, getting issues of trench kit, and generally making last preparations. To-morrow night we sleep in tents close to the line and begin going into trenches for instruction.

But, look here, before I turn in, I must just tell you about this household and my hot bath last night. The town is a queer little place; farming centre, you know. The farm-houses are all inside the village, and mine--M. le Maire's--is one of the best. From the street you see huge great double doors, that a laden wagon can drive through, in a white wall. That is the granary wall. You enter by the big archway into a big open yard, the centre part of which is a wide-spreading dung-hill and reservoir. All round the yard are sheds and stables enclosing it, and facing you at the back the low, long white house, with steps leading up to the front door, which opens into the kitchen. This is also the living-room of M. le Maire and his aged mother. Their family lived here before the Revolution, and the three sturdy young women and one old, old man employed on the farm, all live in the house.

M. le Maire is a warm man, reputed to have a thorough mastery of the English tongue, among other things, as a result of "college" education. So I gather from the really delightful old mother, who, though bent nearly double, appears to run the whole show, including the Town Hall opposite our Battalion Headquarters. I have never succeeded in inducing the Mayor to speak a word of English, but he has a little dictionary like a prayer-book, with perfectly blinding print, and somehow carries on long and apparently enjoyable conversations with my batman (who certainly has no French), though, as I say, one never heard a word of English on his lips.

I know what the newspapers are. They pretend to give you the war news. But I'll bet they'll tell you nothing of yesterday's really great event, when the Commander of No. 1 Platoon took a hot bath, as it were under municipal auspices, attended by two Company Headquarters orderlies, his own batman, and the cordially expressed felicitations of his brother officers, not to mention the mayoral household, and the whole of No. 1 Platoon, which is billeted in the Mayor's barns and outbuildings. Early in the day the best wash-tub had been commandeered for this interesting ceremony, and I fancy it has an even longer history behind it than the Mayor's pre-Revolution home. It is not definitely known that Marie Antoinette used this tub, bathing being an infrequent luxury in her day; but if she had been cursed with our modern craze for washing, and chanced to spend more than a year or so in this mud-set village of M----, she certainly would have used this venerable vessel, which, I gather, began life as the half of a cider barrel, and still does duty of that sort on occasion, and as a receptacle for the storing of potatoes and other nutritious roots, when not required for the more intimate service of M. le Maire's mother, for the washing of M. le Maire's corduroys and underwear, or by M. le Maire himself, at the season of Michaelmas, I believe, in connection with the solemn rite of his own annual bath, which festival was omitted this year out of deference to popular opinion, because of the war.

The household of the Mayor, headed by this respected functionary himself, received me at the portals of his ancestral home and ushered me most kindly and graciously, if with a dash of grave, half-pitying commiseration, to what I thought at first was the family vault, though, as I presently discovered, it was in reality the mayoral salon or best parlour--as seen in war time--draped in sacking and year-old cobwebs. Here, after some rather embarrassing conversation, chiefly gesticulatory on my side--my conversational long suit is "Pas du tout! Merci beaucoup," and "Mais oui, Madame," with an occasional "Parfaitement," stirred in now and again, not with any meaning, but as a kind of guarantee of good faith, because I think it sounds amiable, if not indeed like my lambs in their billets, "Bien gentil," and "Très convenable, Monsieur." It is thus they are invariably described to me when I go inspecting. As I was saying, here I was presently left alone with the household cat, two sick rabbits in a sort of cage which must once have housed a cockatoo or parrot, my own little towel (a torn half, you know, designed to reduce valise weight), my sponge (but, alack! not my dear old worn-out nail-brush, now lying in trenches on Salisbury Plain), and the prehistoric wash-tub, now one quarter filled by what the Mayor regarded, I gathered, as perhaps the largest quantity of hot water ever accumulated in one place--two kettles and one oil-can full, carried by the orderlies.

The cat and the rabbits watched my subsequent proceedings with the absorbed interest of an intelligent mid-Victorian infant at its first pantomime. The cat, I blush to say, was female, and old enough to know better, but I trust the rabbits were of my own sex. Anyhow, they were sick, so perhaps it doesn't matter. The entire mayoral household, with my batman and others, were assembled in the big kitchen, separated from the chamber of my ablutions only by a door having no kind of fastening and but one hinge. Their silence was broken only by an occasional profound sigh from the Mayor's aged mother, and three sounds of reflective expectoration at considerable intervals from the Mayor himself. So I judged my bathing to be an episode of rare and anxious interest to the mayoral family.

My feet I anointed copiously with a disgusting unguent of great virtue--it's invaluable for lighting braziers when one's only fuel is muddy coke and damp chits--called anti-frostbite grease, that is said to guard us from the disease known as "Trench Feet," rumoured prevalent in our sector by reason of the mellow quality and depth of its mud, which, whilst apparently almost liquid, yet possesses enough body and bouquet--remember how you used to laugh at our auction catalogue superlatives in cellar lots?--to rob a man of his boots at times. For my hands--chipped about a bit now--I used carbolated vaseline. (Do you remember the preternaturally slow and wall-eyed salesman, with the wart, in the Salisbury shop where we bought it?) And then, clothed most sumptuously in virginal underwear, I crawled into my flea-bag, there to revel from 10.40 P.M. to 6 A.M., as I am about to do now, less one hour in the morning. How I wish one could consciously enjoy the luxury of sleep while sleeping! Good night and God bless you! God bless all the sweet, brave waiting women of England, and France, and Russia; and I wish I could send a bit of my clean comfort to-night to as many as may be of our good chaps, and France's _bon camarades_, out here.

When next I write we shall have seen a bit of the trenches, I hope, and so then you should have something more like real news from your

"_Temporary Gentleman_."

THE TRENCHES AT LAST

You must forgive my not having sent anything but those two Field Service post cards for a whole week, but, as our Canadian subaltern, Fosset, says, it really has been "some" week. My notion was to write you fully my very first impression of the trenches, but the chance didn't offer, and perhaps it's as well. It couldn't be fresher in my mind than it is now, and yet I understand it more, and see the thing more intelligently than on the first night.

We are now back in the village of B----, three miles from our trenches. We are here for three days' alleged rest, and then, as a Battalion, take over our own Battalion sub-sector of trenches. So far, we have only had forty-eight hours in, as a Battalion; though, as individuals, we have had more. When we go in again it will be as a Battalion, under our own Brigade and Divisional arrangements, to hold our own Brigade front, and be relieved later by the other two Battalions of our Brigade.

"A" Company is, I am sorry to say, in tents for these three days out; tents painted to look like mud and grass (for the benefit of the Boche airmen) and not noticeably more comfortable than mud and grass. An old fellow having the extraordinary name of Bonaparte Pinchgare, has been kind enough to lend us his kitchen and scullery for officers' mess and quarters; and we, like the men, are contriving to have a pretty good time, in despite of chill rain and all-pervading mud. We are all more or less caked in mud, but we have seen Huns, fired at 'em, been fired at by them, spent hours in glaring through rag and tin-decked barbed wire at their trenches, and generally feel that we have been blooded to trench warfare. We have only lost two men, and they will prove to be only slightly wounded, I think; one, before he had ever set foot in a trench--little Hinkson of my No. 2 section--and the other, Martin, of No. 3 Platoon, only a few hours before we came out.

Hinkson was pipped by a chance bullet in the calf of the leg, as we passed through a wood, behind the support trench. Very likely a Boche loosed that bullet off in mere idleness, a couple of thousand yards away; and I doubt if it will mean even a Blighty for Hinkson. He may be put right in the Field Ambulance or Clearing Station near here, or, at farthest, down at the Base. Or he may chance to go across to Blighty--the first casualty in the Battalion. The little chap was furiously angry over getting knocked out before he could spot a Hun through the foresight of his rifle, but his mate, Kennedy, has sworn to lay out a couple of Boches for Hinkson, before he gets back to us, and Kennedy will do it.

First impressions! Do you know, I think my first impression was of the difficulty of finding one's way about in a maze of muddy ditches which all looked exactly alike, despite a few occasional muddy notice-boards perched in odd corners: "Princes Street," "Sauchiehall Street," "Manchester Avenue," "Stinking Sap," "Carlisle Road," and the like. I had a trench map of the sector, but it seemed to me one never could possibly identify the different ways, all mud being alike, and no trench offering anything but mud to remember it by. In the front or fire-trench itself, the firing line, one can hop up on the fire-step, look round quickly between bullets, and get a bearing. But in all these interminable communication and branch trenches where one goes to and fro, at a depth varying from six to ten or twelve feet, seeing only clay and sky, how the dickens could one find the way?

And yet, do you know, so quickly are things borne in upon you in this crude, savage life of raw realities, so narrow is your world, so vital your need of knowing it; so unavoidable is your continuous alertness, and so circumscribed the field of your occupation, that I feel now I know nothing else in the world quite so well and intimately as I know that warren of stinking mud: the two sub-sectors in which I spent last week. Manchester Avenue, Carlisle Road, Princes Street, with all their side alleys and boggy by-ways! Why, they are so photographed on the lining of my brain that, if I were an artist (instead of a very muddy subaltern ex-clerk) I could paint the whole thing for you--I wish I could. Not only do I know them, but I've merely to shut my eyes to see any and every yard of them; I can smell them now; I can feel the precise texture of their mud. I know their hidden holes and traps, where the water lies deep. I know to an inch where the bad breaks are in the duck-boards that you can't see because the yellow water covers them. Find one's way! I know them far better than I know the Thames Embankment, the Strand, or Brixton Hill! That's not an exaggeration.

Duck-boards, by the way, or duck-walks, are a kindly invention (of the R.E., I suspect) to save soldiers from the bottomless pit, and to enable officers on duty to cover rather more than a hundred yards an hour in getting along their line of trench. Take two six-or eight-feet lengths of two inches by four inches' scantling; nail two or three inch bits of batten across these with two or three inch gaps between, the width of the frame being, say, eighteen inches. Thus you have a grating six or eight feet long and narrow enough to lie easily in the bottom of a trench. If these gratings rest on trestles driven deep down into the mud, and your trenches are covered by them throughout--well, then you may thank God for all His mercies and proceed to the more interesting consideration of strafing Boches, and avoiding being strafed by them. If you haven't got these beneficent inventions of the R.E., and you are in trenches like ours, then you will devote most of your energies to strafing the R.E., or some other unseen power for good, through your own headquarters, for a supply of duck-walks, and you will (if you are wise) work night and day without check, in well and truly laying every single length you can acquire.

("Acquire" is a good, sound word. I would never blame a man for stealing duck-walks from any source whatsoever--providing, of course, he is not so far lost to all sense of decency as to steal 'em from "A" Company; and even then, if he could manage it, his cleverness would almost deserve forgiveness; and, equally, of course, that he's going to use 'em for their legitimate purpose, and not just to squat on in a dug-out; least of all for the absolutely criminal purpose of using as fuel.)

"What a fuss you make about mere things to walk on!" perhaps you'll say. "I thought the one thing really important was getting to grips with the enemy." Mmmf! Yes. Quite so. It is. But, madam, how to do it? "There be ways and means to consider, look you, whateffer," as Billy Morgan says. (Billy was the commander of No. 2 Platoon, you remember, and now, as reserve Machine-Gun officer, swanks insufferably about "the M.G. Section," shoves most of his Platoon work upon me, and will have a dug-out of his own. We rot him by pretending to attribute these things to the influence of his exalted compatriot, the Minister of Munitions. As a fact, they are due to his own jolly hard work, and really first-rate abilities.)

This trench warfare isn't by any means the simple business you might suppose, and neither, of course, is any other kind of warfare. There can be no question of just going for the enemy bald-headed. He wishes you would, of course; just as we wish to goodness _he_ would. You have to understand that up there about the front line, the surrounding air and country can at any moment be converted into a zone of living fire--gas, projectiles, H.E. (High Explosive, you know) flame, bullets, bursting shrapnel. If you raise a finger out of trenches by daylight, you present Fritz with a target, which he will very promptly and gratefully take, and blow to smithereens. That's understood, isn't it? Right. To be able to fight, in any sort of old way at all, you must continue to live--you and your men. To continue to live you must have cover. Hence, nothing is more important than to make your trenches habitable, and feasible; admitting, that is, of fairly easy and quick communication.

To live, you see, you must eat and drink. The trenches contain no A B C's. Every crumb of bread, every drop of tea or water, like every cartridge you fire, must be carried up from the rear on men's shoulders, along many hundreds of yards of communicating trenches. Also, in case you are suddenly attacked, or have to attack, quick movement is vital. Nature apparently abhors a trench, which is a kind of a vacuum, and not precisely lovable, anyhow; and, in this part of the world, she proceeds wherever possible to fill it with water. Pumps? Why, certainly. But clay and slush sides cave in. Whizz-bangs and H.E. descend from on high displacing much porridge-like soil. Men hurrying to and fro day and night, disturb and mash up much earth in these ditches. And, no matter how or why, there is mud; mud unspeakable and past all computation. Consider it quietly for a moment, and you will feel as we do about duck-walks--I trust the inventor has been given a dukedom--and realise the pressing importance of various material details leading up to that all-important strafing of Boches.

But there, the notion of trying to tell you about trenches in one letter is, I find, hopelessly beyond me, and would only exhaust you, even if I could bring it off. I can only hope gradually to get some sort of a picture into your mind, so that you will have a background of sorts for such news of our doings as I'm able to send you as we go on. Just now, I am going to tackle an alarming stack of uncensored letters from Nos. 1 and 2 Platoons--some of the beggars appear to be extraordinarily polygamous in the number of girls they write to; bless 'em!--and then to turn in and sleep. My goodness, it's a fine thing, sleep, out of trenches! But I'll write again, probably to-morrow.

The men are all remarkably fit and jolly. One or two old hands here have told me the line we are taking over is really pretty bad. Certainly it was a revelation to our fellows, after the beautiful, clean tuppenny-tubes of trenches we constructed on Salisbury Plain. But one hears no grousing at all, except of the definitely humorous and rather pleased kind--rather bucked about it, you know--the men are simply hungry for a chance to "get" at the Hun, and they work like tigers at trench betterment. We are all well and jolly, and even if sometimes you don't hear often, there's not the slightest need to worry in any way about your

"_Temporary 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.