Part 2
_"It was our tunnellers who prepared a little show which an English battalion carried out, and the night of the touch off a battalion commander said to a tunnelling officer, 'I think I should tell you that I am given to understand that some of your men are going to attempt to go over with us to-night.' Which it is understood that the tunnellers did contrive to do, for the next day a tunneller showed 'P----' a fine Fritz watch. 'You don't get them tunnelling, sir,' he said. 'The infantry will do me after this.'"_
_Coming out on the Somme._
_". . . . The haunting memory of the Somme, those ghosts of young men treading their pale way through the substantial virility of its wheel-choked arteries . . . . moving like chain gangs dragging invisible chains._
_"They came back, these pioneers of the liberties of the world, with them still the eternal mystery of no man's land, men walking in their sleep . . . . young men bearded like unshorn Andalusians, and garbed like ragged adventurers of another age . . . . companions of a new Marco Polo returned from gazing on strange and terrible lands."_
_Labour Battalion Man._
_"He looks so like a fragment of civilian England, strayed incongruously into these warlike areas. One might say he smells of the comic paper, of the Music Hall, of the comic British workingman, were it not that there is a twist in the humour of it all that moves to other things than happy laughter . . . ._
_"It is a sorry jest that they, these unfit, the delvers of the earth, simple and twisted labourers with a Saxon faith in beer, should be the material in which war and the very great work out their soaring ambitions. . . . . But I am sometimes solaced by the feeling that their miseries are not very much grosser than those in which a grateful country found them when war made her cognisant of their civic existence."_
_Back to the Waggon Lines after Polygon Wood._
_"The quarter-master had spent a feverish day gathering what comforts he could for the returning braves, fussing about like a good housewife expecting the return of her lord. Begging and borrowing and by less legitimate means accumulating those things that would make it something of a home-coming--the return to this spot--desolate and shell shriven by the shells of three years and the bombs of last night, but at the worst a haven of effeminate ease to the home-comers._
_"The cooks had worked with an energy that is explained by the fact that love and kindness are best expressed in the primitive world by food and, sentimental though it sounds, they wanted to show both of those things. Those profane slushies were the representatives of that fundamental and admirable human instinct to comfort the stricken with food, to gorge the tired hero._
_"The strays began to arrive alter midnight, in ones and twos and threes, directed by the battalion guides posted on the route, and from then onward the groups thickened and dispersed and gathered again around the cookers that shone like lode stars in the gloom. They came down the road out of the night asking for A company, B company, C company, leaning well forward to balance the light pack on the shoulders, the silent, the garrulous, the boisterous and the grim, and presenting their dixies for stew on the right, tea on the left. . . ._
_". . . all with a tendency to group about in the sociable area of the cookers where they stood, dropping brief words in confirmation of the narratives of the garrulous few, weary to exhaustion, eager for food and for rest, but for the while content with the negative joys of being merely out of it._
_"It is now that are told stories that will perhaps never be told again, for on his return from the line slowly but surely the civilian habit of mind reasserts itself, standards that are based on the sanctity of human life and which are at variance with the grim necessities of the hop-over, assume their normal control. I assume that in many cases good soldiers will no more talk in the decencies of civil life of things they have had to do in war than they will practise them there. . . ."_
_Lightly Wounded at a Menin Road Dressing Station._
_". . . . A brush had been passed over all the faces of these wounded, wiping out differences of expression, of character and intelligence; leaving them with something of the facial sameness that we see in different races of a different colour. I suppose it is the suffering and strain, common to them all, which gives them this one-ness of look, the same strain, the same relief, the same apathy, the same unquestioning collapse into the hands of the medicine men."_
_Stretcher-bearers near Martinpuich._
_"They move with their stretchers like boats on a slowly tossing sea, rising and falling with the shell riven contours of what was yesterday no man's land, slipping, sliding, with heels worn raw by the downward suck of the Somme mud. Slow and terribly sure through and over everything, like things that have got neither eyes to see terrible things nor ears to heed them . . . . The fountains that sprout roaring at their feet fall back to the earth in a lace-work of fragments--the smoke clears and they, momentarily obscured, are again moving on as they were moving on before: a piece of mechanism guiltless of the weaknesses of weak flesh, one might say. But to say this is to rob their heroism of its due--of the credit that goes to inclinations conquered and panics subdued down in the privacy of the soul. It is to make their heroism look like a thing they find easy. No man of woman born could find it that. These men and all the men precipitated into the liquescent world of the line are not heroes from choice--they are heroes because someone has got to be heroic. It is to add insult to the injury of this world war to say that the men fighting it find it agreeable or go into it with light hearts."_
_"Waiting for the Stew."_
_". . . . A dixie of stew for each company was to arrive with the machine guns at the pill box at 12.30 and then into the line. But there was a block on the corduroy--Fritz was putting salvoes onto the road and the cookers could not get past the jam at ----, so the dixies were man-handled from there across the duckboards where duckboards were and across the mud where they were not to the pill box. They arrived there at three o'clock. During the wait the innocent 'J----,' the Mule King, the Prince of the Packs, was roundly consigned to many kinds of torment, the dreadful possibility of going in without that stew began to haunt the strongest and the bravest. . . . . It was a process of sitting still in the dripping cover of that triumph of German architecture. Sexton House, and watching the appetite grow, assisted by some blood-curdling comments of the Doc's."_
_In the Tunnel--Hill 60._
_". . . . the companies staging in the tunnels were resting in every conceivable attitude of weariness in slush that was everywhere, and everywhere rising higher. The circumstances were bearable to what they would be in the line, but fatigue even here, to the unlucky forced to spend a night in the bad spots of the tunnels, is a circumstance the aching misery of which cannot be judged by any standard with which our average civilian is conversant. Fatigue at its worst is to the most articulate of our generation the least familiar of humanity's woes, but here in this world it is about us again with the torturing insistence of the troglodyte past--one of the commonplaces of the Stone Age with which war and the wonders of science have familiarised us. . . . The brutish weariness of our earliest hairy forbear, trembling in the savage morasses of an unfamiliar planet, is the daily lot of men like these--shopmen, men from the forge and factory and mine--heirs to all the amenities of the ages. It is part of the supremacy in suffering of the inarticulate infantry. Fatigue, actual brutish and insensate, is borne by them to a pitch at which mules might be heart-broken. Dull, undecorative heroism it is--that of these men of the 'S----'._
_"But the poor fabric of military glory is woven of such--of trials that seem to break down the proud partitions which separate our lot from that of the animals. . . . These heroes of ours, alas, are unsupported by a helpful consciousness of their heroism. That joy is only for the onlooker. The tragic fact is that the incomparable heroisms of this winter warfare bring no compensations to the heroes--no element of dramatic exaltation in the performance of them. They are less swift dramatic acts than long states of siege with exhaustion as the besieger."_
_Fatalist._
_". . . . The fatalist is born not made. The growing strain of the game is not producing more fatalists if ducking under shell fire is a proof of an absence of fatalism. For many who never ducked are now ducking, whether from wisdom or war strain they are taking this instinctive precaution. But there is a hardihood that persists through it all--there is a grim fatalist who is not fatalist born but is made it by a sort of savage irritation with the grossly incalculable element in the mischance of death. He does not scorn to duck out of sheer pride--to show he has not the wind up, but because he has his back up. He can't prevent the 'whiz-bangs' and the 'five-nines' but he can defy them. He invests them with a personality, a malignancy of personal enmity directed against himself, . . . and he defies them. As though he were to say, 'If you are going to hit me, you swine, you will hit me, but you can't stop me calling you bastard while you are doing it!'"_
_Outside the Pill Box._
_". . . . Men of the Company that had been in occupation of the Pill Box awaiting in no very amiable frame of mind the completion of some detail of the relief . . . . I could not tell what they had to be discontented with in that happy land. Around them was all the pomp and pageantry of war--a landscape the like of which man has never gazed upon since early chaos brooded over all. For Westhoek and Flers--the Somme and the Salient--as they were when they were war areas and it was winter--were landscapes that betrayed to the observant all the material content of war. They were the finished product--the perfection towards which that vast Teutonised industry of war is working. Landscapes without colour as of an evil earth in the throes of its dissolution--an earth torn and mangled with its ghost half given up and hanging over-head like a palpable emanation, half agony, half guilt . . . ."_
_Coming out at Hill 60._
_"Little groups of men burdened with the appliances of their trades file slowly across the hummocks of Flanders mud. They come out of endless holes and go into endless holes like lonely ants bent on some ant-like service. . . . . Ant-like in the distance, they loom upon a nearer vision things elemental and Homeric, big with destiny. They are merely soldiers at the base, perhaps shopmen at Brisbane, but they are things of mystery in the line. I feel that here all soldiers of all ranks tend to have the baffling profundity of the peasant, that sense of the nearness to the beginning of things which makes the artist see in the peasant the simple, unsolvable mystery of life reduced to its least common multiple--man shorn of all his vast cultures, which are not mysterious, and left simple man, which is."_
_"Hanging About."_
_"One so often sees them--these seemingly purposeless groups, awaiting events with the grim immobility of Sioux braves . . . . doing nothing in places where no man would be for choice. Stretcher bearers they may be, or runners, or a company that has left the sickly foetid odours of the dug outs--reminiscent of fowl houses and tramps in summer--to make room for the relief, and is now standing by in all the taciturn boredom of that condition--silent men whom you pass, with all their taciturnity, with the feeling that they have passed a verdict on you annihilating in its justice. . . . ._
_"It is men like myself--timid peepers into forbidden places, who look and go, who keep their virginal wonderment at what are the commonplaces of the trenches. And these silent watchers are such a commonplace. . . . Perhaps the men familiar with it are unimpressed by the statuesque quietism of these men in places of risk and great events. . . . with their perpetual air of prisoners innocent and awaiting an unjust sentence. . . . They lounge there awaiting something that will send them into the glare of that limelight again like supers in a tragedy in which the supers are greater tragedians than the heroes."_
_Down from the Ridge._
_". . . . and Brigades of the ---- English division came down, fresh from those quagmires in front of Passchaendael. Officers and men, they were in the last stage of exhaustion--in that condition where every forward step is a battleground on which the desire not to take it has to be met and conquered before that step is taken. They had foot slogged it all the way from C----. W----., and had only stayed there an hour--they looked what they were, men really dead but that their hearts would not let them lie down and die . . . . They spoke with that level exhausted voice of overdone men--if they spoke at all . . . . The little subaltern to whom we told the distance to S----, groaned aloud--but refused the drink we offered--I think it was that he would not allow himself in their extremity something the men could not get . . . . It was a division against which Luck had set its face. Fortune has her favourites among the divisions, and others she pursues with the vindictiveness of an evil step-mother. Every ill circumstance contrivable by collusion between the weather, the enemy, and something we will call Mischance seems to lay in wait for the Brigades upon which the disfavour of Fate has fallen. Poor ----, it was one of them, unlucky on going in, unlucky while in, and unlucky on coming out. . . . "_
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Transcriber's Note:
The only known changes made to the original publication are as follows:
Artist's note In the spirit of Dernancourt and of Villa-Brettoneur _changed to_ In the spirit of Dernancourt and of Villers-Bretonneux
Introduction: _The accented letters have been used in the poem written in French, instead of:_
"Il n'est pas triste; il n'est pas fier; il n'est pas beau; Il n'est pas meme troublant; il n'est pas ambigu; Il est laid; il est lache; est gros, il est sot; Et il pue!"
Page 34 they will practice them there. . . ." _changed to_ they will practise them there. . . ."