Читать книгу A "Temporary Gentleman" in France - A. J. Dawson - Страница 6

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You must forgive my not having sent anything but those two Field Service post cards for a whole week, but, as our Canadian subaltern, Fosset, says, it really has been "some" week. My notion was to write you fully my very first impression of the trenches, but the chance didn't offer, and perhaps it's as well. It couldn't be fresher in my mind than it is now, and yet I understand it more, and see the thing more intelligently than on the first night.

We are now back in the village of B——, three miles from our trenches. We are here for three days' alleged rest, and then, as a Battalion, take over our own Battalion sub-sector of trenches. So far, we have only had forty-eight hours in, as a Battalion; though, as individuals, we have had more. When we go in again it will be as a Battalion, under our own Brigade and Divisional arrangements, to hold our own Brigade front, and be relieved later by the other two Battalions of our Brigade.

"A" Company is, I am sorry to say, in tents for these three days out; tents painted to look like mud and grass (for the benefit of the Boche airmen) and not noticeably more comfortable than mud and grass. An old fellow having the extraordinary name of Bonaparte Pinchgare, has been kind enough to lend us his kitchen and scullery for officers' mess and quarters; and we, like the men, are contriving to have a pretty good time, in despite of chill rain and all-pervading mud. We are all more or less caked in mud, but we have seen Huns, fired at 'em, been fired at by them, spent hours in glaring through rag and tin-decked barbed wire at their trenches, and generally feel that we have been blooded to trench warfare. We have only lost two men, and they will prove to be only slightly wounded, I think; one, before he had ever set foot in a trench—little Hinkson of my No. 2 section—and the other, Martin, of No. 3 Platoon, only a few hours before we came out.

Hinkson was pipped by a chance bullet in the calf of the leg, as we passed through a wood, behind the support trench. Very likely a Boche loosed that bullet off in mere idleness, a couple of thousand yards away; and I doubt if it will mean even a Blighty for Hinkson. He may be put right in the Field Ambulance or Clearing Station near here, or, at farthest, down at the Base. Or he may chance to go across to Blighty—the first casualty in the Battalion. The little chap was furiously angry over getting knocked out before he could spot a Hun through the foresight of his rifle, but his mate, Kennedy, has sworn to lay out a couple of Boches for Hinkson, before he gets back to us, and Kennedy will do it.

First impressions! Do you know, I think my first impression was of the difficulty of finding one's way about in a maze of muddy ditches which all looked exactly alike, despite a few occasional muddy notice-boards perched in odd corners: "Princes Street," "Sauchiehall Street," "Manchester Avenue," "Stinking Sap," "Carlisle Road," and the like. I had a trench map of the sector, but it seemed to me one never could possibly identify the different ways, all mud being alike, and no trench offering anything but mud to remember it by. In the front or fire-trench itself, the firing line, one can hop up on the fire-step, look round quickly between bullets, and get a bearing. But in all these interminable communication and branch trenches where one goes to and fro, at a depth varying from six to ten or twelve feet, seeing only clay and sky, how the dickens could one find the way?

And yet, do you know, so quickly are things borne in upon you in this crude, savage life of raw realities, so narrow is your world, so vital your need of knowing it; so unavoidable is your continuous alertness, and so circumscribed the field of your occupation, that I feel now I know nothing else in the world quite so well and intimately as I know that warren of stinking mud: the two sub-sectors in which I spent last week. Manchester Avenue, Carlisle Road, Princes Street, with all their side alleys and boggy by-ways! Why, they are so photographed on the lining of my brain that, if I were an artist (instead of a very muddy subaltern ex-clerk) I could paint the whole thing for you—I wish I could. Not only do I know them, but I've merely to shut my eyes to see any and every yard of them; I can smell them now; I can feel the precise texture of their mud. I know their hidden holes and traps, where the water lies deep. I know to an inch where the bad breaks are in the duck-boards that you can't see because the yellow water covers them. Find one's way! I know them far better than I know the Thames Embankment, the Strand, or Brixton Hill! That's not an exaggeration.

Duck-boards, by the way, or duck-walks, are a kindly invention (of the R.E., I suspect) to save soldiers from the bottomless pit, and to enable officers on duty to cover rather more than a hundred yards an hour in getting along their line of trench. Take two six-or eight-feet lengths of two inches by four inches' scantling; nail two or three inch bits of batten across these with two or three inch gaps between, the width of the frame being, say, eighteen inches. Thus you have a grating six or eight feet long and narrow enough to lie easily in the bottom of a trench. If these gratings rest on trestles driven deep down into the mud, and your trenches are covered by them throughout—well, then you may thank God for all His mercies and proceed to the more interesting consideration of strafing Boches, and avoiding being strafed by them. If you haven't got these beneficent inventions of the R.E., and you are in trenches like ours, then you will devote most of your energies to strafing the R.E., or some other unseen power for good, through your own headquarters, for a supply of duck-walks, and you will (if you are wise) work night and day without check, in well and truly laying every single length you can acquire.

("Acquire" is a good, sound word. I would never blame a man for stealing duck-walks from any source whatsoever—providing, of course, he is not so far lost to all sense of decency as to steal 'em from "A" Company; and even then, if he could manage it, his cleverness would almost deserve forgiveness; and, equally, of course, that he's going to use 'em for their legitimate purpose, and not just to squat on in a dug-out; least of all for the absolutely criminal purpose of using as fuel.)

"What a fuss you make about mere things to walk on!" perhaps you'll say. "I thought the one thing really important was getting to grips with the enemy." Mmmf! Yes. Quite so. It is. But, madam, how to do it? "There be ways and means to consider, look you, whateffer," as Billy Morgan says. (Billy was the commander of No. 2 Platoon, you remember, and now, as reserve Machine-Gun officer, swanks insufferably about "the M.G. Section," shoves most of his Platoon work upon me, and will have a dug-out of his own. We rot him by pretending to attribute these things to the influence of his exalted compatriot, the Minister of Munitions. As a fact, they are due to his own jolly hard work, and really first-rate abilities.)

This trench warfare isn't by any means the simple business you might suppose, and neither, of course, is any other kind of warfare. There can be no question of just going for the enemy bald-headed. He wishes you would, of course; just as we wish to goodness he would. You have to understand that up there about the front line, the surrounding air and country can at any moment be converted into a zone of living fire—gas, projectiles, H.E. (High Explosive, you know) flame, bullets, bursting shrapnel. If you raise a finger out of trenches by daylight, you present Fritz with a target, which he will very promptly and gratefully take, and blow to smithereens. That's understood, isn't it? Right. To be able to fight, in any sort of old way at all, you must continue to live—you and your men. To continue to live you must have cover. Hence, nothing is more important than to make your trenches habitable, and feasible; admitting, that is, of fairly easy and quick communication.

To live, you see, you must eat and drink. The trenches contain no A B C's. Every crumb of bread, every drop of tea or water, like every cartridge you fire, must be carried up from the rear on men's shoulders, along many hundreds of yards of communicating trenches. Also, in case you are suddenly attacked, or have to attack, quick movement is vital. Nature apparently abhors a trench, which is a kind of a vacuum, and not precisely lovable, anyhow; and, in this part of the world, she proceeds wherever possible to fill it with water. Pumps? Why, certainly. But clay and slush sides cave in. Whizz-bangs and H.E. descend from on high displacing much porridge-like soil. Men hurrying to and fro day and night, disturb and mash up much earth in these ditches. And, no matter how or why, there is mud; mud unspeakable and past all computation. Consider it quietly for a moment, and you will feel as we do about duck-walks—I trust the inventor has been given a dukedom—and realise the pressing importance of various material details leading up to that all-important strafing of Boches.

But there, the notion of trying to tell you about trenches in one letter is, I find, hopelessly beyond me, and would only exhaust you, even if I could bring it off. I can only hope gradually to get some sort of a picture into your mind, so that you will have a background of sorts for such news of our doings as I'm able to send you as we go on. Just now, I am going to tackle an alarming stack of uncensored letters from Nos. 1 and 2 Platoons—some of the beggars appear to be extraordinarily polygamous in the number of girls they write to; bless 'em!—and then to turn in and sleep. My goodness, it's a fine thing, sleep, out of trenches! But I'll write again, probably to-morrow.

The men are all remarkably fit and jolly. One or two old hands here have told me the line we are taking over is really pretty bad. Certainly it was a revelation to our fellows, after the beautiful, clean tuppenny-tubes of trenches we constructed on Salisbury Plain. But one hears no grousing at all, except of the definitely humorous and rather pleased kind—rather bucked about it, you know—the men are simply hungry for a chance to "get" at the Hun, and they work like tigers at trench betterment. We are all well and jolly, and even if sometimes you don't hear often, there's not the slightest need to worry in any way about your

"Temporary Gentleman."