Afternoon coffee time is sometimes positively cheerful. Often the N.C.O. is bidden to give one of the officers his company on these occasions. It is done with great punctiliousness. “May I permit myself?” “Most obedient thanks.” A delightful quality of the Prussian officer is this precision of politeness in all situations. It gives something firm and characteristic even to the youngest of them.
On the tablecloth of hessian there is even the glimmer of two china cups. Afterwards the batman puts a bottle and two glasses on the rickety table. Conversation proceeds more confidentially. Strange to say, here too it is the love of one’s neighbour that affords the welcome topic of conversation. A vigorous gossip of the trenches has been evolved, and this is the mainstay of these afternoon visits. It might almost be a little garrison. Superiors, comrades, and those under one’s command are subjected to a rigorous criticism. A new and engrossing rumour has just run through the platoon commanders’ dugouts of all six companies from the right flank to the left. The observation officers who traverse the regimental front with telescope and sketch-map are not guiltless of it. Indeed, the company sector is by no means a sealed compartment. Rather it is a busy thoroughfare. Staff officers appear in the quiet morning hours and diffuse activity, very much to the annoyance of the front-line swine, who has just got down to it after the last spell of trench duty, and at the horrid cry, “Divisional general in the trench!” hurls himself buttoned and buckled again up the dugout steps. Besides these there are the pioneer officer and the trench-construction officer and the drainage officer, all of whom behave as though the trenches existed only to display their special tasks. The artillery observation officer who wants to put down a trial barrage is greeted with particular coldness, for no sooner has he retreated again with his telescope and periscope than the English artillery is announced and of course the infantry meets the bill as usual. Then the officers in command of entrenching detachments roll up. They plant themselves in the platoon commander’s dugout till nightfall and drink rum and smoke and play Polish lottery, and at last leave as clean a table as the brown rats. It is late when a little fellow flits like a ghost through the trench, creeps up behind the posts and shouts “Gas attack!” in their ears, and then quietly ticks off the seconds it takes them to get their masks on. It is the gas officer. Lastly, at midnight, there’s a knocking on the plank door of the dugout. “Have you dossed down already? Here … sign on quick for twenty knife-rests and six dugout frames.” The carrying party has come. So it is that—at least in quiet times—there’s an everlasting coming and going, till at last the dwellers in the dugout are tempted to sigh, “If only they’d shell a bit and then at least there’d be some peace.”
“May I take my leave, sir? Duty in half an hour.”
Outside, the heaped-up earth of parapet and parados gleams in the last rays of the sun and the trench lies already in deep shadow. Soon the first Verey light will go up, the night guards are mounted, and the new day of the front-line soldier has begun.
Trench Warfare Day by Day
Thus it was that our days passed in a fatiguing monotony, broken only by the short spells of rest at Douchy. Yet there were many pleasant hours even in the line. I often sat at the table of my little dugout, whose roughly planked walls, hung with weapons, had a look of the Wild West, and enjoyed a pleasant feeling of being comfortably tucked away, as I drank a cup of tea, read and smoked while my batman was busy at the tiny stove and a smell of toast rose in the air. No one who has fought in the trenches has missed this mood. Outside, along the fire-bays went the stamp of heavy, regular steps; a challenge rang out in monotone when someone passed along the trench. The dulled ear scarcely detects the never-ceasing rifle-fire, or the short whack of a bullet striking, or the Verey lights that sizzle near the opening of the air-shaft. It was then I took out my notebook from my map-case and wrote down in brief the events of the day. So, as time went on, a conscientious chronicle of C sector took shape as a part of my diary, a chronicle of one tiny snippet of the long front where we were at home and where at last we knew every overgrown bit of trench, every shelter whose roof had fallen in. Around us in heaped-up mounds of earth lay the bodies of fallen comrades. On every foot’s-breadth a drama had been enacted. Behind every traverse fate lay in ambush, day and night, to snatch a victim. And yet all of us felt a strong attachment to our sector and had almost grown to be a part of it. We knew it when it ran as a black band across a landscape covered with snow, when at midday the flowery wilderness around pervaded it with drowsy scent, or when the eerie paleness of the full ghostly moon caught in its web those dark corners where the squeaking companies of rats carried on their secret existence. On the long summer evenings we sat on its fire-steps while the balmy air carried the busy hammerings or the songs of home across to the enemy; we fell over timber and broken wire when Death drummed with his steel club on the trenches and a heavy vapour crept out from their shattered walls. Often the general wanted to give us a quieter part of the regimental front. Each time the company begged as one man to stay in sector C. I am setting down here a short selection from the notes that I
