Part 25 (1/2)
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 s.h.i.+rt 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.
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 pa.s.sed 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 wheatfield. 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 a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mstances. In their lightheartedness 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 s.p.a.ce between the trenches, where it is almost certain death to be seen by the enemy. If one is. .h.i.t 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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.
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.