“You will have a moist time in some of the trenches,” said the general (whose boots were finely polished). “The rain has made them rather damp … But you must get down as far as the mine craters. We’re expecting the Germans to fire one at any moment, and some of our trenches are only six yards away from the enemy. It’s an interesting place.”
The interest of it seemed to me too much of a good thing, and I uttered a pious prayer that the enemy would not explode his beastly mine under me. It makes such a mess of a man.
A staff captain came out with a report, which he read: “The sound of picks has been heard close to our saphead. The enemy will probably explode their mine in a few hours.”
“That’s the place I was telling you about,” said the general. “It’s well worth a visit … But you must make up your mind to get your feet wet.”
As long as I could keep my head dry and firmly fixed to my shoulders, I was ready to brave the perils of wet feet with any man.
It had been raining heavily for a day or two. I remember thinking that in London—which seemed a long way off—people were going about under umbrellas and looking glum when their clothes were splashed by passing omnibuses. The women had their skirts tucked up and showed their pretty ankles. (Those things used to happen in the far-off days of peace.) But in the trenches, those that lay low, rain meant something different, and hideously uncomfortable for men who lived in holes. Our soldiers, who cursed the rain—as in the old days, “they swore terribly in Flanders”—did not tuck their clothes up above their ankles. They took off their trousers.
There was something ludicrous, yet pitiable, in the sight of those hefty men coming back through the communication trenches with the tails of their shirts flapping above their bare legs, which were plastered with a yellowish mud. Shouldering their rifles or their spades, they trudged on grimly through two feet of water, and the boots which they wore without socks squelched at every step with a loud, sucking noise—“like a German drinking soup,” said an officer who preceded me.
“Why grouse?” he said, presently. “It’s better than Brighton!”
It was a queer experience, this paddling through the long communication trenches, which wound in and out like the Hampton Court maze toward the front line, and the mine craters which made a salient to our right, by a place called the “Tambour.” Shells came whining overhead and somewhere behind us iron doors were slamming in the sky, with metallic bangs, as though opening and shutting in a tempest. The sharp crack of rifle-shots showed that the snipers were busy on both sides, and once I stood in a deep pool, with the water up to my knees, listening to what sounded like the tap-tap-tap of invisible blacksmiths playing a tattoo on an anvil.
It was one of our machine-guns at work a few yards away from my head, which I ducked below the trench parapet. Splodge! went the officer in front of me, with a yell of dismay. The water was well above his top-boots. Splosh! went another man ahead, recovering from a sideslip in the oozy mud and clinging desperately to some bunches of yarrow growing up the side of the trench. Squelch! went a young gentleman whose puttees and breeches had lost their glory and were but swabs about his elegant legs.
“Clever fellows!” said the officer, as two of us climbed on to the fire-stand of the trench in order to avoid a specially deep water-hole, and with ducked heads and bodies bent double (the Germans were only two hundred yards on the other side of the parapet) walked on dry earth for at least ten paces. The officer’s laughter was loud at the corner of the next traverse, when there was an abrupt descent into a slough of despond.
“And I hope they can swim!” said an ironical voice from a dugout, as the officers passed. They were lying in wet mud in those square burrows, the men who had been working all night under their platoon commanders, and were now sleeping and resting in their trench dwellings. As I paddled on I glanced at those men lying on straw which gave out a moist smell, mixed with the pungent vapors of chloride of lime. They were not interested in the German guns, which were giving their daily dose of “hate” to the village of Bécourt-Bécordel. The noise did not interrupt their heavy, slumbrous breathing. Some of those who were awake were reading novelettes, forgetting war in the eternal plot of cheap romance. Others sat at the entrance of their burrows with their knees tucked up, staring gloomily to the opposite wall of the trench in daydreams of some places betwixt Aberdeen and Hackney Downs. I spoke to one of them, and said, “How are you getting on?” He answered, “I’m not getting on … I don’t see the fun of this.”
“Can you keep dry?”
“Dry? … I’m soaked to the skin.”
“What’s it like here?”
“It’s hell … The devils blow up mines to make things worse.”
Another boy spoke.
“Don’t you mind what he says, sir. He’s always a gloomy bastard. Doesn’t believe in his luck.”
There were mascots for luck, at the doorways of their dugouts—a woman’s face carved in chalk, the name of a girl written in pebbles, a portrait of the King in a frame of withered wild flowers.
A company of our New Army boys had respected a memento of French troops who were
