I was there a week and had a bully time. The place had been a fashionable watering place before the war, and when I was there the transient population was largely wealthy Belgians. They entertained a good deal and did all they could for the pleasure of the four thousand boys who were at the camp. The Y.M.C.A. had a huge tent and spread themselves in taking care of the soldiers. There were entertainments almost every night, moving pictures, and music. The food was awfully good and the beds comfortable, and that pretty nearly spells heaven to a man down from the front.
Best of all, the bathing was fine, and it was possible to keep the cooties under control—more or less. I went in bathing two and three times daily as the sloping shore made it just as good at low tide as at high.
I think that glorious week at the beach made the hardships of the front just left behind almost worth while. My chum, Corporal Wells, who had a quaint Cockney philosophy, used to say that he liked to have the stomach ache because it felt so good when it stopped. On the same theory I became nearly convinced that a month in the trenches was good fun because it felt so good to get out.
At the end of the week I was better but still shaky. I started pestering the M.O. to tag me for Blighty. He wouldn’t, so I sprung the same proposition on him that I had on the doctor at the base—to send me back to duty if he couldn’t send me to England. The brute took me at my word and sent me back to the battalion.
I rejoined on the Somme again just as they were going back for the second time in that most awful part of the line. Many of the old faces were gone. Some had got the wooden cross, and some had gone to Blighty.
I sure was glad when old Wellsie hopped out and grabbed me.
“Gawd lumme, Darby,” he said. “Hi sye, an’ me thinkin’ as ’ow you was back in Blighty. An’ ’ere ye are yer blinkin’ old self. Or is it yer bloomin’ ghost. I awsks ye. Strike me pink, Yank. I’m glad.”
And he was. At that I did feel more or less ghostly. I seemed to have lost some of my confidence. I expected to “go west” on the next time in. And that’s a bad way to feel out there.
XIII
Back on the Somme Again
When I rejoined the battalion they were just going into the Somme again after a two weeks’ rest. They didn’t like it a bit.
“Gawd lumme,” says Wellsie, “ ’ave we got to fight th’ ’ole blinkin’ war. Is it right? I awsks yer. Is it?”
It was all wrong. We had been told after High Wood that we would not have to go into action again in that part of the line but that we would have a month of rest and after that would be sent up to the Ypres sector. “Wipers” hadn’t been any garden of roses early in the war, but it was paradise now compared with the Somme.
It was a sad lot of men when we swung out on the road again back to the Somme, and there was less singing than usual. That first night we remained at Mametz Wood. We figured that we would get to kip while the kipping was good. There were some old Boche dugouts in fair condition, and we were in a fair way to get comfortable. No luck!
We were hardly down to a good sleep when C company was called to fall in without equipment, and we knew that meant fatigue of some sort. I have often admired the unknown who invented that word “fatigue” as applied in a military term. He used it as a disguise for just plain hard work. It means anything whatever in the way of duty that does not have to do directly with the manning of the trenches.
This time we clicked a burial fatigue. It was my first. I never want another. I took a party of ten men and we set out, armed with picks and shovels, and, of course, rifles and bandoliers (cloth pockets containing fifty rounds of ammo).
We hiked three miles up to High Wood and in the early morning began the job of getting some of the dead under ground. We were almost exactly in the same place from which we had gone over after the tanks. I kept expecting all the time to run across the bodies of some of our own men. It was a most unpleasant feeling.
Some cleaning up had already been done, so the place was not so bad as it had been, but it was bad enough. The advance had gone forward so far that we were practically out of shell range, and we were safe working.
The burial method was to dig a pit four feet deep and big enough to hold six men. Then we packed them in. The worst part of it was that most of the bodies were pretty far gone and in the falling away stage. It was hard to move them. I had to put on my gas mask to endure the stench and so did some of the other men. Some who had done this work before rather seemed to like it.
I would search a body for identification marks and jot down the data found on a piece of paper. When the man was buried under, I would stick a rifle up over him and tuck the record into the trap in the butt
