Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front

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Hornung Ernest William. Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front

AN ARK IN THE MUD

UNDER WAY

A HANDFUL OF MEN

SUNDAY ON BOARD

CHRISTMAS UP THE LINE

UNDER FIRE

CASUALTIES

AN INTERRUPTED LUNCH

CHRISTMAS DAY

THE BABES IN THE TRENCHES

DETAILS

ORDERLY MEN

THE JOCKS

GUNNERS

THE GUARDS

A BOY'S GRAVE

THE REST HUT

FRESH GROUND

OPENING DAY

THE HUT IN BEING

WRITERS AND READERS

WAR AND THE MAN

'WE FALL TO RISE'

BEFORE THE STORM

ANOTHER OPENING DAY

THE END OF A BEGINNING

THE ROAD BACK

IN THE DAY OF BATTLE

OTHER OLD FELLOWS

THE REST CAMP – AND AFTER

Отрывок из книги

'There's our hut!' said the young hut-leader, pointing through iron palings at a couple of toy Noah's Arks built large. 'No – that's the nth Division's cinema. The Y.M.C.A. is the one beyond.'

The enclosure behind the palings had been a parade-ground in piping times; and British squads, from the pink French barracks outside the gates, still drilled there between banks of sterilised rubbish and lagoons of unmedicated mud. The place was to become familiar to me under many aspects. I have known it more than presentable in a clean suit of snow, and really picturesque with a sharp moon cocked upon some towering trees, as yet strangely intact. It was at its best, perhaps, as a nocturne pricked out by a swarm of electric torches, going and coming along the duck-boards in a grand chain of sparks and flashes. But its true colours were the wet browns and drabs of that first glimpse in the December dusk, with the Ark hull down in the mud, and the cinema a sister ship across her bows.

.....

'Had my hair parted by a whizz-bang,' says he, 'up in that O.P. we were in last night.'

And, as he replenished a modest cup, the curtain might have fallen on the only line I remember in the whole impromptu piece, which could not have played quicker as a music-hall sketch, or held a packed audience more entranced than the two civilian supers who had the luck to be on the stage.

.....