Part 9 (1/2)

A staff captain came out with a report, which he read: ”The sound of picks has been heard close to our sap-head. 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 pa.s.sing 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 s.h.i.+rts 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.” Sh.e.l.ls 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. Splos.h.!.+ went another man ahead, recovering from a side-slip 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 pa.s.sed. 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 Becourt-Becordel. 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 day-dreams 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 h.e.l.l... 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d. 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 once in this section of trenches. It was an altar built into the side of the trench, where ma.s.s was said each morning by a soldier-priest. It was decorated with vases and candlesticks, and above the altar-table was a statue, crudely modeled, upon the base of which I read the words Notre Dame des Tranchees (”Our Lady of the Trenches”). A tablet fastened in the earth-wall recorded in French the desire of those who wors.h.i.+ped here:

”This altar, dedicated to Our Lady of the Trenches, was blessed by the chaplain of the French regiment. The 9th Squadron of the 6th Company recommends its care and preservation to their successors. Please do not touch the fragile statue in trench-clay.”

”Our Lady of the Trenches!” It was the first time I had heard of this new t.i.tle of the Madonna, whose spirit, if she visited those ditches of death, must have wept with pity for all those poor children of mankind whose faith was so unlike the work they had to do.

From a dugout near the altar there came tinkling music. A young soldier was playing the mandolin to two comrades. ”All the latest ragtime,” said one of them with a grin.

So we paddled on our way, glimpsing every now and then over the parapets at the German lines a few hundred yards away, and at a village in which the enemy was intrenched, quiet and sinister there. The water through which we waded was alive with a mult.i.tude of swimming frogs. Red slugs crawled up the sides of the trenches, and queer beetles with dangerous-looking horns wriggled along dry ledges and invaded the dugouts in search of the vermin which infested them.

”Rats are the worst plague,” said a colonel, coming out of the battalion headquarters, where he had a hole large enough for a bed and table. ”There are thousands of rats in this part of the line, and they're audacious devils. In the dugout next door the straw at night writhes with them... I don't mind the mice so much. One of them comes to dinner on my table every evening, a friendly little beggar who is very pally with me.”

We looked out above the mine-craters, a chaos of tumbled earth, where our trenches ran so close to the enemy's that it was forbidden to smoke or talk, and where our sappers listened with all their souls in their ears to any little tapping or picking which might signal approaching upheaval. The coats of some French soldiers, blown up long ago by some of these mines, looked like the blue of the chicory flower growing in the churned-up soil... The new mine was not fired that afternoon, up to the time of my going away. But it was fired next day, and I wondered whether the gloomy boy had gone up with it. There was a foreknowledge of death in his eyes.

One of the officers had spoken to me privately.