- 'Trenches in Summer'
- from the book 'My First Year of the War'
- by American Correspondent Frederick Palmer
An American with the British Armies in the Field
a British trench in 1915
IT was the same trench in June, still a relatively "quiet corner," which I had seen in March ; but I would never have known it if its location had not been the same on the map. One was puzzled how a place that had been so wet could become so dry.
This time the approach was made in daylight through a long communication ditch, which brought us to a shell-wrecked farmhouse. We passed through this and stepped down at the back door into deep traverses cut among the roots of an orchard ; then behind walls of earth high above our heads to battalion headquarters in a neat little shanty, where I deposited the first of the cakes I had brought on the table beside some battalion reports. A cake is the right gift for the trenches, though less so in summer than in winter when appetites are less keen. The adjutant tried a slice while the colonel conferred with the general, who had accompanied me this far, and he glanced up at a sheet of writing with a line opposite hours of the day, pinned to a post of his dug-out.
"I wanted to see if it were time to make another report," he said. "We are always making reports. Everybody is, so that whoever is superior to someone else knows what is happening in his subordinate's department."
Then in and out in a maze, between walls with straight faces of the hard, dry earth, testifying to the beneficence of summer weather in constructing fastnesses from artillery fire, until we were in the firing-trench, where I was at home among the officers and men of a company. General Mud was "down and out." He waited on the winter rains to take command again. But winter would find an army prepared against his kind of campaign. Life in the trenches in summer was not so unpleasant but that some preferred it, with the excitement of sniping, to the boredom of billets.
"What hopes!" was the current phrase I heard among the men in these trenches. It shared honours with strafe. You have only one life to live and you may lose that any second — what hopes! Dig, dig, dig, and set off a mine that sends Germans skyward in a cloud of dust — what hopes! Bully beef from Chicago and Argentina is no food for babes, but better than "K.K." bread — what hopes! Mr. Thomas Atkins, British regular, takes things as they come — and a lot of them come — shells, bullets, asphyxiating gas, grenades, and bombs.
There is much to be thankful for. The King's Own Particular Fusiliers, as we shall call this regiment, had only three men hit yesterday. On every man's cap is a metal badge crowded with battle honours, from the storming of Quebec to the relief of Ladysmith. Heroic its history ; but no battle honours equal that of the regiment's part in the second battle of Ypres ; and no heroes of the regiment's story, whom you picture in imagination with haloes of glory in the wish that you might have met them in the flesh in their scarlet coats, are the equal of these survivors in plain khaki manning a ditch in A.D. 1915, whom anyone may meet.
But do not tell them that they are heroes. They will deny it on the evidence of themselves as eye-witnesses of the action. To remark that the K.O.P.F. are brave is like remarking that water flows down hill. It is the business of the K.O.P.F. to be brave. Why talk about it ?
One of the three men hit was killed. Well, everybody in the war rather expects to be killed. The other two "got tickets to England," as they say. My lady will take the convalescents joy-riding in her car, and afterwards seat them in easy chairs, arranging the cushions with her own hands, and feed them slices of cold chicken in place of bully beef and strawberries and cream in place of ration marmalade. Oh, my! What hopes!
Mr. Atkins does not mind being a hero for the purposes of such treatment. Then, with never a twinkle in his eye, he will tell my lady that he does not want to return to the front; he has had enough of it, he has. My lady's patriotism will be a trifle shocked, as Mr. Atkins knows it will be ; and she will wonder if the "stick it" quality of the British soldier is weakening, as Mr. Atkins knows she will. For he has more kinks in his mental equipment than mere nobility ever guesses, and he is having the time of his life in more respects than strawberries and cream. What hopes! Of course, he will return and hold on in the face of all that the Germans can give, without any pretence to bravery.
If you go as a stranger into the trenches on a sight-seeing tour and says, "How are you ?" and, "Are you going to Berlin ?" and, "Are you comfortable ?" etc., Tommy Atkins will say, "Yes, sir," and "Very well, sir," as becomes all polite regular soldier men ; and you get to know him about as well as you know the members of a club if you are shown the library and dine at a corner table with a friend.
Spend the night in the trenches and you are taken into the family, into that very human family of soldier-dom in a quiet corner ; and the old, care-free spirit of war, which some people thought had passed, is found to be no less alive in siege warfare than on a march of regulars on the Indian frontier or in the Philippines. Gaiety and laughter and comradeship and "joshing" are here among men to whom wounds and death are a part of the game. One may challenge high explosives with a smile, no less than ancient round shot. Settle down behind the parapet, and the little incongruities of a trench, paltry without the intimacy of men and locality, make for humour no less than in a shop or a factory.
Under the parapet runs the tangle of barbed wire — barbed wire from Switzerland to Belgium — to welcome visitors from that direction, which, to say the least, would be an impolitic direction of approach for any stranger.
"All sightseers should come into the trenches from the rear," says Mr. Atkins. "Put it down in the guidebooks."
Beyond the barbed wire in the open field the wheat which some farmer sowed before positions were established in this area is now in head, rippling with the breeze, making a golden sea up to the wall of sandbags which is the enemy's line. It was late June at its loveliest; no signs of war except the sound of our guns some distance away and an occasional sniper's bullet. One cracked past as I was looking through my glasses to see if there were any evidence of life in the German trenches.
"Your hat, sir!"
Another moved a sandbag slightly, but not until after the hat had come down and the head under it, most expeditiously. Up to eight hundred yards a bullet cracks ; beyond that range it whistles, sighs, even wheezes. An elevation gives snipers, who are always trained shots, an angle of advantage. In winter they had to rely for cover on buildings, which often came tumbling down with them when hit by a shell. The foliage of summer is a boon to their craft.
"Does it look to you like an opening in the branches of that tree — the big one at the right ?"
In the mass of leaves a dark spot was visible. It might be natural, or it might be a space cut away for the swing of a rifle-barrel. Perhaps sitting up there snugly behind a bullet- proof shield fastened to the limbs was a German sharpshooter, watching for a shot with the patience of a hound for a rabbit to come out of its hole.
"It's about time we gave that tree a spray good for that kind of fungus, from a machine- gun! "
A bullet coming from our side swept overhead. One of our own sharpshooters had seen something to shoot at.
"Not giving you much excitement !" said Tommy.
"I suppose I'd get a little if I stood up on the parapet ?" I asked.
"You wouldn't get a ticket for England ; you'd get a box !"
"There's a cemetery just behind the lines if you'd prefer to stay in France !"
I had passed that cemetery with its fresh wooden crosses on my way to the trench. These tenderhearted soldiers who joked with death had placed flowers on the graves of fallen comrades and bought elaborate French funeral wreaths with their meagre pay — which is another side of Mr. Thomas Atkins. There is sentiment in him. Yes, he's loaded with sentiment, but not for the "movies."
"Keep your head down there, Eames !" called a corporal. "I don't want to be taking an inventory of your kit."
Eames did not even realize that his head was above the parapet. The hardest thing to teach a soldier is not to expose himself. Officers keep iterating warnings and then forget to practise what they preach. That morning a soldier had been shot through the heart and arm sideways behind the trench. He had lain down unnoticed for a nap in the sun, it was supposed. When he awoke, presumably he sat up and yawned and Herr Schmidt, from some platform in a tree, had a bloody reward for his patience.
The next morning I saw the British take their revenge. Some German who thought that he could not be seen in the mist of dawn was walking along the German parapet. What hopes! Four or five men took careful aim and fired. That dim figure collapsed in a way that was convincing.
As I swept the line of German trenches with the glasses I saw a wisp of flag clinging to its pole in the still air far down to the left. Flags are as unusual above trenches as men standing up in full view of the enemy. Then a breeze caught the folds, and I saw that it was the tricolour of France.
"A Boche joke !" Tommy explained.
"Probably they are hating the French to-day ?"
"No, it's been there for some days. They want us to shoot at the flag of our ally. They'd get a laugh out of that — a regular Boche notion of humour."
"If it were a German flag ?" I suggested.
"What hopes! We'd make it into a lace curtain! "
Even the guns had ceased firing. The birds in their evensong had all the war to themselves. It was difficult to believe that if you stood on top of the parapet anybody would shoot at you ; no, not even if you walked down the road that ran through the wheat-field, everything was so peaceful. One grew sceptical of there being any Germans in the trenches opposite.
"There are three or four sharpshooters and a fat old Boche professor in spectacles, who moves a machine-gun up and down for a bluff," said a soldier, and another corrected him :
"No, the old professor's the one that walks along at night sending up flares !"
"Munching K.K. bread with his false teeth !"
"And singing the hymn of hate !"
Thus the talk ran on in the quiet of evening, till we heard a concussion and a quarter of a mile away, behind a screen of trees, a pillar of smoke rose to the height of two or three hundred feet.
A mine! " In front of the _th brigade! "
"Ours or the Boches' ?
"Ours, from the way the smoke went — our fuse !"
"No, theirs !"
Our colonel telephoned down to know if we knew whose mine it was, which was the question we wanted to ask him. The guns from both sides became busy under the column of smoke. Oh, yes, there were Germans in the trenches which had appeared vacant. Their shots and ours merged in the hissing medley of a tempest.
"Not enough guns — not enough noise for an attack !" said experienced Tommy, who knew what an attack was like.
The commander of the adjoining brigade telephoned to the division commander, who passed the word through to our colonel, who passed it to us that the mine was German and had burst thirty yards short of the British trench.
"After all that digging, wasting Boche powder in that fashion! The Kaiser won't like it !" said Mr. Atkins. "We exploded one under them yesterday and it made them hate so hard they couldn't wait. They've awful tempers, the Boches !" And he finished the job on which he was engaged when interrupted, eating a large piece of ration bread surmounted by all the ration jam it could hold ; while one of the company officers reminded me that it was about dinner time.
"What do you think I am? A blooming traffic policeman ?" growled the cook to two soldiers who had found themselves in a blind alley in the maze of streets back of the firing-trench. "My word! Is His Majesty's army becoming illiterate ? Strafe that sign at the corner! What do you think we put it up for ? To show what a beautiful hand we had at printing ? "
The sign on a board fastened against the earth wall read, "No thoroughfare !" The soldier-cook, with a fork in his hand, his sleeves rolled up, his shirt open at his tanned throat, looked formidable. He was preoccupied ; he was at close quarters roasting a chicken over a small stove. Yes, they have cook-stoves in the trenches. Why not ? The line had been in the same position for six months.
"Little by little we improve our happy home," said the cook.
The latest acquisition was a lace curtain for the officers' mess hall, bought at a shop in the nearest town.
British soldiers in the trenches
When the cook was inside his kitchen there was no room to spill anything on the floor. The kitchen was about three feet square, with boarded walls, and a roof covered with tar paper and a layer of earth set level with the trench parapet. The chicken roasted and the frying potatoes sizzled as an occasional bullet passed overhead, even as flies buzz about the screen door when Mary is making cakes for tea.
The officers' mess hall, next to the kitchen and built in the same fashion, had some boards nailed on posts sunk in the ground for a table, which was proof against tipping when you climbed over it or squeezed around it to your place. The chairs were rifle- ammunition boxes, whose contents had been emptied with individual care, bullet by bullet, at the Germans in the trench on the other side of the wheat-field. Dinner was at nine in the evening, when it was still twilight in the longest days of the year in this region. The hour fits in with trench routine, when night is the time to be on guard and you sleep by day. Breakfast comes at nine in the morning. I was invited to help eat the chicken and to spend the night.
Now, the general commanding the brigade who accompanied me to the trenches had been hit twice. So had the colonel, a man about forty. From forty, ages among the regimental officers dropped into the twenties.
Many of the older men who started in the war had been killed, or were back in England wounded, or had been promoted to other commands where their experience was more useful. To youth, life is sweet and danger is life. The oldest of the officers of the proud old K.O.P.F. who gathered for dinner was about twenty-five, though when he assumed an air of authority he seemed to be forty. It was not right to ask the youngest his age. Parenthetically, let it be said that he is trying to start a moustache. They had come fresh from Sandhurst to swift tuition in gruelling, incessant warfare.
"Has anyone asked him it yet ?" one inquired, referring to some question to the guest.
"Not yet ? Then all together : When do you think that the war will be over ?"
It was the eternal question of the trenches, the army, and the world. We had it over with before the soldier-cook brought on the roast chicken, which was received with a befitting chorus of approbation.
Who would carve ? Who knew how to carve ? Modesty passed the honour to her neighbour, till a brave man said :
"I will ! I will strafe the chicken !" Gott strafe England ! Strafe has become a noun, a verb, an adjective, a cussword, and a term of greeting. Soldier asks soldier how he is strafing to-day. When the Germans are not called Boches they are called Strafers. "Won't you strafe a little for us ?" Tommy sings out to the German trenches when they are close. What hopes? That gallant youngster of the K.O.P.F. in the midst of bantering advice succeeded in separating the meat from the bones without landing a leg in anybody's lap or a wing in anybody's eye. Timid spectators who had hung back where he had dared might criticize his form, but they could not deny the efficiency of his execution. He was appointed permanent strafer of all the fowls that came to table.
Everybody talked and joked about everything, from plays in London to the Germans. There were arguments about favourite actors and military methods. The sense of danger was as absent as if we had been dining in a summer garden. It was the parents and relatives in pleasant English homes in fear of a dread telegram who were worrying, not the sons and brothers in danger. Isn't it better that way ? Would not the parents prefer it that way ? Wasn't it the way of the ancestors in the scarlet coats and the Merrie England of their day ? With the elasticity of youth my hosts adapted themselves to circumstances. In their light-heartedness they made war seem a keen sport. They lived war for all it was worth. If it gets on their nerves their efficiency is spoiled. There is no room for a jumpy, excitable man in the trenches. Youth's resources defy monotony and death at the same time.
An expedition had been planned for that night. A patrol the previous night had brought in word that the Germans had been sneaking up and piling sandbags in the wheatfield. The plan was to slip out as soon as it was really dark with a machine-gun and a dozen men, get behind the Germans' own sandbags, and give them a perfectly informal reception when they returned to go on with their work.
Before dinner, however, J------, who was to be the general of the expedition, and his subordinates made a reconnaissance. Two or more officers or men always go out together on any trip of this kind in that ticklish space between the trenches, where it is almost certain death to be seen by the enemy. If one is hit the other can help him back. If one survives he will bring back the result of his investigations.
J------had his own ideas about comfort in trousers in the trench in summer. He wore shorts with his knees bare. When he had to do a "crawl" he unwound his puttees and wound them over his knees. He and the others slipped over the parapet without attracting the attention of the enemy's sharpshooters. On hands and knees, like boy scouts playing Indians, they passed through a narrow avenue in the ugly barbed wire, and still not a shot at them. A matter of the commonplace to the men in the trench held the spectator in suspense. There was a fascination about the thing, too; that of the sporting chance, without a full realization that failure in this hide-and-seek game might mean a spray of bullets and death for these young men.
They entered the wheat, moving slowly like two land turtles. The grain parted in swaths over them. Surely the Germans might see the turtles' heads as they were raised to look around. No officer can be too young and supple for this kind of work. Here the company officer just out of school is in his element, with an advantage over older officers. That pair were used to crawling. They did not keep their heads up long. They knew just how far they might expose themselves. They passed out of sight, and reappeared and slipped back over the parapet again without the Germans being any the wiser.
Hard luck! It is an unaccommodating world! They found that the patrol which had examined the bags at night had failed to discern that they were old and must have been there for some time.
"I'll take the machine-gun out, anyhow, if the colonel will permit it," said J------. For the colonel puts on the brakes. Otherwise, there is no telling what risks youth might take with machine-guns.
British trenches
We were half through dinner when a corporal came to report that a soldier, on watch thought that he had seen some Germans moving in the wheat very near our barbed wire. Probably a false alarm ; but no one in a trench ever acts on the theory that any alarm is false. Eternal vigilance is the price of holding a trench. Either side is cudgelling its brains day and night to spring some new trick on the other. If one side succeeds with a trick, the other immediately adopts it. No international copyright in strategy is recognized. We rushed out of the mess hall into the firing-trench, where we found the men on the alert, rifles laid on the spot where the Germans were supposed to have been seen.
"Who are you? Answer, or we fire !" called the ranking young lieutenant.
If any persons present out in front in the face of thirty rifles knew the English language and had not lost the instinct of self-preservation, they would certainly have become articulate in response to such an unveiled hint. Not a sound came. Probably a rabbit running through the wheat had been the cause of the alarm. But you take no risks. The order was given, and the men combed the wheat with a fusillade.
"Enough! Cease fire !" said the officer. "Nobody there. If there had been we should have heard the groan of a wounded man or seen the wheat stir as the Germans hugged closer to the earth for cover."
This he knew by experience. It was not the first time he had used a fusillade in this kind of a test.
After dinner J------rolled his puttees up around his bare knees again, for the colonel had not withdrawn permission for the machine-gun expedition. J------'s knees were black and blue in spots ; they were also — well, there is not much water for washing purposes in the trenches. Great sport that, crawling through the dew-moist wheat in the faint moonlight, looking for a bunch of Germans in the hope of turning a machine-gun on them before they turn one on you!
"One man hit by a stray bullet," said J------on his return.
"I heard the bullet go th-ip into the earth after it went through his leg," said the other officer.
“Blythe was a recruit and he had asked me to take him out the first time there was anything doing. I promised that I would, and he got about the only shot fired at us."
"Need a stretcher ?"
"No."
Blythe came hobbling through the traverse to the communication trench, seeming well pleased with himself. The soft part of the leg is not a bad place to receive a bullet if one is due to hit you.
Night is always the time in the trenches when life grows more interesting and death more likely.
"It's dark enough, now," said one of the youngsters who was out on another scout. " We'll go out with the patrol."
By day, the slightest movement of the enemy is easily and instantly detected. Light keeps the combatants to the warrens which protect them from shell and bullet-fire. At night there is no telling what mischief the enemy may be up to ; you must depend upon the ear rather than the eye for watching. Then the human soldier-fox comes out of his burrow and sneaks forth on the lookout for prey ; both sides are on the prowl.
"Trained owls would be the most valuable scouts we could have," said the young officer. " They would be more useful than aeroplanes in locating the enemy's gun-positions. A properly reliable owl would come back and say that a German patrol was out in the wheatfield at such a point and a machine-gun would wipe out that patrol."
We turned into a side trench, an alley off the main street, leading out of the front trench toward the Germans.
"Anybody out ?” he asked a soldier who was on guard at the end of it.
"Yes, two."
Climbing out of the ditch, we were in the midst of a tangle of barbed wire protecting the trench front, which was faintly visible in the starlight. There was a break in the tangle, a narrow cut in the hedge, as it were, kept open for just such purposes as this. When the patrol returned it closed the gate again.
"Look out for that wire — just there! Do you see it ? We've everything to keep the Boches off our front lawn except 'Keep off the grass !' signs."
It was perfectly still, a warm summer night without a cat's-paw of breeze. Through the dark curtain of the sky in a parabola rising from the German trenches swept the brilliant sputter of red light of a German flare. It was coming as straight toward us as if it had been aimed at us. It cast a searching, uncanny glare over the tall wheat in head between the trenches.
"Down flat !" whispered the officer. It seemed foolish to grovel before a piece of fireworks. There was no firing in our neighbourhood ; nothing to indicate a state of war between the British Empire and Germany ; no visual evidence of any German army in France except that flare. However, if a guide who knows as much about war as this one says you are to prostrate yourself when you are out between two lines of machine-guns and rifles — between the fighting powers of England and Germany — you take the hint.
The flare sank into earth a few yards away, after a last insulting, ugly fling of sparks in our faces. "What if we had been seen ?"
"They'd have combed the wheat in this part thoroughly, and they might have got us."
"It's hard to believe," I said. So it was, he agreed. That was the exasperating thing. Always hard to believe, perhaps, until after all the cries of wolf the wolf came ; until after nineteen harmless flares the twentieth revealed to the watching enemy the figure of a man above the wheat, when a crackling chorus of bullets would suddenly break the silence of night by concentrating on a target. Keeping cover from German flares is a part of the minute, painstaking economy of war.
We crawled on slowly, taking care to make no noise, till we brought up behind two soldiers hugging the earth, rifles in hand ready to fire instantly. It was their business not only to see the enemy first, but to shoot first, and to capture or kill any German patrol. The officer spoke to them and they answered. It was unnecessary for them to say that they had seen nothing. If they had we should have known it. He was out there less to scout himself than to make sure that they were on the job ; that they knew how to watch. The visit was part of his routine. We did not even whisper. Preferably, all whispering would be done by any German patrol out to have a look at our barbed wire and overheard by us.
Silence and the starlight and the damp wheat; but, yes, there was war. You heard gun- fire half a mile, perhaps a mile, away ; and raising your head you saw auroras from bursting shells. We heard at our backs faintly snatches of talk from our trenches and faintly in front the talk from theirs. It sounded rather inviting and friendly from both sides, like that around some camp-fire on the plains.
It seemed quite within the bounds of possibility that you might have crawled on up to the Germans and said, "Howdy !" But by the time you reached the edge of their barbed wire and before you could present your visiting-card, if not sooner, you would have been full of holes. That was just the kind of diversion from trench monotony for which the Germans were looking.
"Well, shall we go back ?" asked the officer.
There seemed no particular purpose in spending the night prone in the wheat with your ears cocked like a pointer-dog's. Besides, he had other duties, exacting duties laid down by the colonel as the result of trench experience in his responsibility for the command of a company of men.
It happened as we crawled back into the trench, that a fury of shots broke out from a point along the line two or three hundred yards away; sharp, vicious shots on the still night air, stabbing, merciless death in their sound. Oh, yes, there was war in France ; unrelenting, shrewd, tireless war. A touch of suspicion anywhere and the hornets swarmed.
in the British lines
It was two a.m. From the dug-outs came unmistakable sounds of slumber. Men off duty were not kept awake by cold and moisture in summer. They had fashioned for themselves comfortable dormitories in the hard earth walls. A cot in an officer's bedchamber was indicated as mine. The walls had been hung with cuts from illustrated papers and bagging spread on the floor to make it " home-like." He lay down on the floor because he was nearer the door in case he had to respond to an alarm ; besides, he said I would soon appreciate that I was not the object of favouritism. So I did. It was a trench-made cot, fashioned by some private of engineers, I fancy, who had Germans rather than the American cousin in mind.
"The wall side of the rib that runs down the middle is the comfortable side, I have found," said my host. "It may not appear so at first, but you will find it works out that way."
Nevertheless, I slept, my last recollection that of sniping shots, to be awakened with the first streaks of day by the sound of a fusillade — the " morning hate " or the " morning strafe " as it is called. After the vigil of darkness it breaks the monotony to salute the dawn with a burst of rifle-shots. Eyes strained through the mist over the wheat-field watching for some one of the enemy who may be exposing himself, unconscious that it is light enough for him to be visible. Objects which are not men but look as if they might be in the hazy distance, called for attention on the chance. For ten minutes, perhaps, the serenade lasted, and then things settled down to the normal. The men were yawning and stirring from their dug-outs. After the muster they would take the places of those who had been "on the bridge" through the night.
"It's a case of how little water you can wash with, isn't it ?" I said to the cook, who appreciated my thoughtfulness when I made shift with a dipperful, as I had done on desert journeys. We were in a trench that was inundated with water in winter, and not more than two miles from a town which had water laid on. But bringing a water supply in pails along narrow trenches is a poor pastime, though better than bringing it up under the rifle-sights of snipers across the fields back of the trenches.
"Don't expect much for breakfast," said the strafer of the chicken. But it was eggs and bacon, the British stand-by in all weathers, at home and abroad.
I was going to turn in and sleep. These youngsters could sleep at any time; for one hour, or two hours, or five, or ten, if they had a chance. A sudden burst of rifle-fire was the alarm clock which always promptly awakened them. The recollection of cheery hospitality and their fine, buoyant spirit is even clearer now than when I left the trench.
reading in the trenches - see 'Magazines in the Front Lines'
Trenches in Winter
- from the book 'My First Year of the War'
- by American Correspondent Frederick Palmer
An American with the British Armies in the Field
two coverpages depicting the hrdships of life in the trenches during winter
THE difference between trench warfare in winter and in summer is that between sleeping on the lawn in March and in July. It was in the mud and winds of March that I first saw the British front. The winds were much like the seasonal winds at home; but the Flanders mud is like no other mud, in the judgment of the British soldier. It is mixed with glue. When I returned to the front in June for a longer stay, the mud had become clouds of dust that trailed behind the motor-car.
In March my eagerness to see a trench was that of one from the Western prairies to get his first glimpse of the ocean. Once I might go into a trench as often as I pleased I became "fed up" with trenches, as the British say. They did not mean much more than an alley or a railway cutting. One came to think of the average peaceful trench as a ditch where some men were eating marmalade and bully beef and looking across a field at some more men who were eating sausage and "K.K." bread, each party taking care that the other did not see him.
Writers have served us trenches in every possible literary style that censorship will permit. Whoever "tours" them is convinced that none of the descriptions published heretofore has been adequate and writes one of his own which will be final. All agree that it is not like what they thought it was. But, despite all the descriptions, the public still fails to visualize a trench. You do not see a trench with your eyes so much as with your mind and imagination. That long line where all the powers of destruction within man's command are in deadlock has become a symbol for something which cannot be expressed by words. No one has yet really described a shell-burst, or a flash of lightning, or Niagara Falls ; and no one will ever describe a trench. He cannot put anyone else there. He can only be there himself.
The first time that I looked over a British parapet was in the edge of a wood. Board walks ran across the spongy earth here and there; the doors of little shanties with earth roofs opened on to those streets, which were called Piccadilly and the Strand. I was reminded of a pleasant prospector's camp in Alaska. Only, everybody was in uniform and occasionally something whished through the branches of the trees. One looked up to see what it was and where it was going, this stray bullet, without being any wiser.
We passed along one of the walks until we came to a wall of sandbags — simply white bags about three-quarters of the size of an ordinary pillowslip, filled with earth and laid one on top of another like bags of grain. You stood beside a man who had a rifle laid across the top of the pile. Of course, you did not wear a white hat or wave a handkerchief. One does not do that when he plays hide-and-seek.
Or, if you preferred, you might look into a chip of glass, with your head wholly screened by the wall of sandbags, which got a reflection from another chip of glass above the parapet. This is the trench periscope ; the principle of all of them is the same. They have no more variety than the fashion in knives, forks and spoons on the dinner table.
One hundred and fifty yards away across a dead field was another wall of sandbags. The distance is important. It is always stated in all descriptions. One hundred and fifty yards is not much. Only when you get within forty or fifty yards have you something to brag about. Yet three hundred yards may be more dangerous than fifteen, if an artillery "hate" is on.
Look for an hour, and all you see is the wall of sand-bags. Not even a rabbit runs across that dead space. The situation gets its power of suggestion from the fact that there are Germans behind the other wall — real, live Germans. They are trying to kill the British on our side and we are trying to kill them ; and they are as coyly unaccommodating about putting up their heads as we are. The emotion of the situation is in the fact that a sharpshooter might send a shot at your cap ; he might smash a periscope ; a shell might come. A rifle cracks — that is all. Nearly everyone has heard the sound, which is no different at the front than elsewhere. And the sound is the only information you get. It is not so interesting as shooting at a deer, for you can tell whether you hit him or not. The man who fires from a trench is not even certain whether he saw a German or not. He shot at some shadow or object along the crest which might have been a German head.
Thus, one must take the word of those present that there is any more life behind than in front of the sand-bags. However, if you are sceptical you may have conviction by starting to crawl over the top of the British parapet. After dark the soldiers will slip over and bring back your body. It is this something you do not see, this something visualized by the imagination, which convinces you that you ought to be considerate enough of posterity to write the real description of a trench. Look for an hour at that wall of sandbags and your imagination sees more and more, while your eye sees only sandbags. What does this war mean to you ? There it is : only you can describe what this war means to you.
Many a soldier who has spent months in trenches has not seen a German. I boast that I have seen real Germans through my glasses. They were walking along a road back of their trenches. It was most fascinating. All the Germans I had ever seen in Germany were not half so interesting. I strained my eyes watching those wonderful beings as I might strain them at the first visiting party from Mars to earth. There must have been at least ten out of the Kaiser's millions.
In summer that wood had become a sylvan bower, or a pastoral paradise, or a leafy nook, as you please. The sun played through the branches in a patchwork; flowers bloomed on the dirt roofs of the shanties, and a swallow had a nest — famous swallow! — on one of the parapets. True, it was not on the front parapet; it was on the reserve. The swallow knew what he was about. He was taking a reasonable amount of risk and playing reasonably secure to get a front seat, according to the ethics of the war correspondent. The two walls of sand-bags were in the same place that they had been six months previously. A little patching had been done after some shells had hit the mark, though not many had come.
For this was a quiet corner. Neither side was interested in stirring up the hornets' nest. If a member of Parliament wished to see what trench life was like he was brought here, because it was one of the safest places for a few minutes' look at the sandbags which Mr. Atkins stared at week in and week out. Some Conservatives, however, in the case of Radical members, would have chosen a different kind of trench to show ; for example, that one which was suggested to me by the staff officer with the twinkle in his eye on my best day at the front.
In want of an army pass to the front in order to write your own description, then, put up a wall of sandbags in a vacant lot and another one hundred and fifty yards away and fire a rifle occasionally from your wall at the head of a man on the opposite side, who will shoot at yours — and there you are. If you prefer the realistic to the romantic school and wish to appreciate the nature of trench life in winter, find a piece of wet, flat country, dig a ditch seven or eight feet deep, stand in icy water looking across at another ditch, and sleep in a cellar that you have dug in the wall, and you are near understanding what Mr. Atkins has been doing for his country. The ditch should be cut zigzag in and out, like the lines dividing the squares of a checker-board ; that makes more work and localizes the burst of shells.
Of course, the moist walls will be continually falling in and require mending in a drenching, freezing rain of the kind that the Lord visits on all who wage war underground in Flanders. Incidentally, you must look after the pumps, lest the water rise to your neck. For all the while you are fighting Flanders mud as well as the Germans.
To carry realism to the limit of the Grand Guignol school, then, 'arrange some bags of bullets with dynamite charges on a wire, which will do for shrapnel; plant some dynamite in the parapet, which will do for high explosive shells that burst on contact; sink heavier charges of dynamite under your feet, which will do for mines, and set them off, while you engage someone to toss grenades and bombs at you.
Though scores of officers' letters had given their account of trench life with the vividness of personal experience, I must mention my first trench in Flanders in winter when, with other correspondents, I saw the real thing under the guidance of the commanding officer of that particular section, a slight, wiry man who wore the ribbon of the Victoria Cross won in another war for helping to "save the guns." He made seeing trenches in the mud seem a pleasure trip. He was the kind who would walk up to his ball as if he knew how to play golf, send out a clean, fair, long drive, and then use his iron as if he knew how to use an iron, without talking about his game on the way around or when he returned to the club-house. Men could go into danger behind him without realizing that they were in danger ; they could share hardship without realizing that there were any hard-ships. Such as he put faith and backbone into a soldier by their very manner ; and if their professional training equal their talents, when war comes they win victories.
We had rubber boots, electric torches, and wore British warms, those short, thick coats which collect a modicum of mud for you to carry besides what you are carrying on your boots. We walked along a hard road in the dark toward an aurora borealis of German flares, which popped into the sky like Roman candles and burst in circles of light. They seemed to be saying: "Come on! Try to crawl up on us and play us a trick and our eyes will find you and our marksmen will stop you. Come on! We make the night into day, and watching never ceases from our parapet."
Occasional rifle-shots and a machine-gun's ter-rut were audible from the direction of the jumping red glare, which stretched right and left as far as the eye could see. We broke off the road into a morass of mud, as one might cross fields when he had lost his way, and plunged on till the commanding officer said, "We go in here !" and we descended into a black chasm in the earth. The wonder was that any ditch could be cut in soil which the rains had turned into syrup. Mud oozed from the sandbags, through the wire netting, and between the wooden supports which held the walls in place. It was just as bad over in the German trenches. General Mud laid siege to both armies. The field of battle where he gathered his gay knights was a slough. His tug of war was strife against landslides, rheumatism, pneumonia, and frozen feet.
The soldier tries to kill his adversary ; he tries to prevent his adversary from killing him. He is as busy in safeguarding as in taking life. While he breathes, thinks, fights mud, he blesses as well as curses mud. Mother Earth is still unconquerable. In her bosom man still finds security ; such security that "dug in" he can defy at a hundred yards' distance rifles that carry death three thousand yards. She it is that has made the deadlock in the trenches and plastered their occupants with her miry hands.
The C.O. lifted a curtain of bagging as you might lift a hanging over an alcove bookcase, and a young officer, rising from his blankets in his house in the trench wall to a stooping posture, said that all was quiet. His uniform seemed fleckless. Was it possible that he wore some kind of cloth which shed mud spatters ? He was another of the type of Captain Q — — , my host at Neuve Chapelle ; a type formed on the type of seniors such as his C.O. Unanalysable this quality, but there is something distinguished about it and delightfully appealing. A man who can be the same in a trench in Flanders in mid-winter as in a drawing-room has my admiration. They never lose their manner, these English officers, They carry it into the charge and back in the ambulance with them to England, where they wish nothing so much as that their friends will "cut out the hero stuff," as our own officers say.
In other dank cellars soldiers who were off guard were lying or sitting. The radiance of the flares lighted the profiles of those on guard, whose faces were half-hidden by coat-collars or ear-flaps — imperturbable, silent, marooned and marooning, watchful and fearless. The thing had to be done and they were doing it; and they were going to keep on doing it.
There was nothing dry in that trench, unless it was the bowl of a man's pipe. There were not even any braziers. In your nostrils was the odour of the soil of Flanders cultivated by many generations through many wars. As night wore on the sky was brightened by cold, winter stars and their soft light became noticeable between the disagreeable flashes of the flares.
winter's wet and cold in the front lines
We walked on and on. It was like walking in a winding ditch ; that was all. The same kind of walls at every turn ; the same kind of dim figures in saturated, heavy army overcoats. Slipping off the board walk into the ooze, one was thrown against the mud wall as his foot sank. Then he held fast to his boot-straps lest the boot remain in the mud while his foot came out. Only the C.O. never slipped. He knew how to tour trenches. Beside him the others were as clumsy as if they were trying to walk a tight-rope.
"Good-night !" he said to each group of men as he passed, with the cheer of one who brings a confident spirit to vigils in the mud and with that note of affection of the commander who has learned to love his men by the token of ordeals when he saw them hold fast against odds.
"Good-night, sir !" they answered; and in their tone was something which you liked to hear — a finer tribute to the C.O. than medals which kings can bestow. It was affection and trust. They were ready to follow him, for they knew that he knew how to lead. I was not surprised when I heard of his promotion, later. I shall not be surprised when I hear of it again. For he had brain and heart and the gift of command.
"Shall we go on or shall we go back ?" he asked when we had gone about a mile. "Have you had enough ?"
We had, without a dissenting voice. A ditch in the mud, that was all, no matter how much farther we went. So we passed out of the trench into a soapy, slippery mud which had been ploughed ground in the autumn, now become lathery with the beat of men's steps. Our party became separated when some foundered and tried to hoist themselves with both boot-straps at once. The C.O. called out in order to locate us in the darkness, and the voice of an officer in the trenches cut in, "Keep still! The Germans are only a hundred yards away !"
"Sorry !" whispered the C.O. " I ought to have known better."
Then one of the German searchlights that had been swinging its stream of light across the paths of the flares lay its fierce, comet eye on us, glistening on the froth-streaked mud and showing each mud-splashed figure in heavy coat in weird silhouette.
"Standstill !"
That is the order whenever the searchlights come spying in your direction. So we stood still in the mud, looking at one another and wondering. It was the one tense second of the night, which lifted our thoughts out of the mud with the elation of risk. That searchlight was the eye of death looking for a target. With the first crack of a bullet we should have known that we were discovered and that it was no longer good tactics to stand still. We should have dropped on all fours into the porridge. The searchlight swept on. Perhaps Hans at the machine-gun was nodding or perhaps he did not think us worth while. Either supposition was equally agreeable to us.
We kept moving our mud-poulticed feet forward, with the flares at our backs, till we came to a road where we saw dimly a silent company of soldiers drawn up and behind them the supplies for the trench. Through the mud and under cover of darkness every bit of barbed wire, every board, every ounce of food, must go up to the moles in the ditch. The searchlights and the flares and the machine-guns waited for the relief. They must be fooled. But in this operation most of the casualties in the average trenches, both British and German, occurred. Without a chance to strike back, the soldier was shot at by an assassin in the night.
When the men who had been serving their turn of duty in the trenches came out, a magnet drew their weary steps — cleanliness. They thought of nothing except soap and water. For a week they need not fight mud or Germans or parasites, which, like General Mud, waged war against both British and Germans. Standing on the slats of the concrete floor of a factory, they peeled off the filthy, saturated outer skin of clothing with its hideous, crawling inhabitants and, naked, leapt into great steaming vats, where they scrubbed and gurgled and gurgled and scrubbed. When they sprang out to apply the towels, they were men with the feel of new bodies in another world.
Waiting for them were clean clothes, which had been boiled and disinfected; and waiting, too, was the shelter of their billets in the houses of French towns and villages, and rest and food and food arid rest, and newspapers and tobacco and gossip — but chiefly rest and the joy of lethargy as tissue was rebuilt after the first long sleep, often twelve hours at a stretch. They knew all the sensations of physical man, man battling with nature, in contrasts of exhaustion and danger and recuperation and security, as the pendulum swung slowly back from fatigue to the glow of strength.
Those who came out of the trenches quite "done up," Colonel Bate, Irish and genial, fatherly and not lean, claimed for his own. After the washing they lay on cots under a glass roof, and they might play dominoes and read the papers when they were well enough to sit up. They had the food which Colonel Bate knew was good for them, just as he knew what was deadly for the inhabitants whom they brought into that isolated room which every man must pass through before he was admitted to the full radiance of the colonel's curative smile. When they were able to return to the trenches, each was written down as one unit more in the colonel's weekly statistical reports. In summer he entertained al fresco in an open-air camp.
goatskin wintercoats
trenches in the rain
