III
Suppose those first eight days in the front and support trenches to be the beginning of a divisional tour of sixteen days’ duty in the line. For four days now the weary men would be in reserve, under enemy fire, but not in trenches; probably in the cellars of ruined houses. But these were not times of rest. Each day or night every man would make one or more journeys back to the trenches that they had left carrying some load of food, water, or munitions up to the three companies in trenches, or perhaps leading a pack-mule over land to some point near the front line, under cover of night. Even to lead a laden mule in the dark over waste ground confusingly wired and trenched is work; to get him back on to his feet when fallen and wriggling, in wild consternation, among a tangle of old barbed wire may be quite hard work.
In intervals between these journeys most men would lie in the straw in the cellars or hobble weakly about the outside of the premises, looking as boys sometimes do when stiff with many hearty hacks sustained in a hard game of football, with a chill after it. They crawled in and out of their billets like late autumn bees, feebly scraping the eight days’ plating of mud off their clothes and cleaning their jackknives after meals with the languor of the elders in the Bible to whom the grasshopper was a burden. A few robust spirits, armed with craft and subtlety more fully than the rest, would strike out, whenever released, for some “just-a-minute,” or estaminet, not too far off, nor yet too near, and there lie perdus, lest the Company Orderly Sergeant warn them for some new liturgy. This defensive policy did not lighten the work of their brethren.
After four days of their labours as sumpter mules, or muleteers, the company would plod back for another four days of duty in trenches, come out yet more universally tired at their end, and drift back to rest-billets, out of ordinary shellfire, for their sixteen days or so of “divisional rest.” Here their work was really lighter, but still it was work and not rest. It did not wholly wind up in most of the men the spring that had run down while they were in the line. And then the division would go again into the line, and the old cycle be worked through once more. So most of the privates were tired the whole of the time; sometimes to the point of torment, sometimes much less, but always more or less tired.
IV
Many, of course, lost health and drifted “down the line,” as it was called, to the base, where work might be light, but much of the company rather more blighting than any work to the spirit. Hither, to all the divisional base depots and into the ultimate dust-hole or sink that was called “Base Details,” there gravitated most of the walking wreckage and wastage, physical and moral, of active warfare: convalescent, sick and wounded from hospital, men found too old or too young for trench work, broken-nerved men smuggled out of the way before disaster should come, and malingerers triumphant and chuckling, or only semi-successful, suspect, and tediously overacting.
There was the good man fretting and raging to get back to his friends and the fight, away from this tainted backwater in which the swelling flotillas of the unfit and the unwilling were left to rot at their moorings. There was the pallid and bent London clerk, faintly disguised in khaki but too blind to fight, now working furiously fifteen hours each day of his seven-day week in the orderly room—no Sunday here, no Saturday afternoon—for pure love of international right. There was the dugout, the Grenadier Guards sergeant-major of sixty, the handsome and melancholy old boy, a Victorian survivor into our little vulgar age, with a careful and dignified manner and mighty memories of a radiant past in London, when all parades, for a good-conduct-man well up in his drill, were over by half-past ten in the morning and he had a permanent midnight pass into barracks and so could act as a super at one of the theatres every night except when doing a guard, and see life and move among genius and beauty, making good money. Oh, yes, he had acted with Irving and Booth, and lived the life, and heard the chimes at midnight.
But also the veteran crooks, old dregs of the Regular Army, Queen Victoria’s worst bargains, N.C.O.’s who would boast that they had not been once on parade in the last twenty years, waiters and caterers for the whole of their martial careers till the liquor fairly lipped over the edge of their eyelids and bleached the blue of their eyes. You would hear one of them boast that no doctor on earth could find him out to be fit when he, the tactician, wished otherwise. Another had made pathological
