“MINNIE AND ‘FAMILY’”
When first I met her it was a lush, lovely day in June; the birds were singing, the grass was green, the earth teemed with life, vegetable and animal, and the froglets hopped around in the communication trenches. Some cheery optimist was whistling “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” and another equally cheery individual was potting German sniping plates with an accuracy worthy of a better cause. It was, in sooth, “A quiet day on the Western Front.”
And then she came. Stealing towards me silently, coming upon me like a brigand in the leafy woods. I did not see her ere she was descending upon me, but others did. There came distant yells, which I failed to interpret for a moment; then, glancing upward, I saw her bobbing through the air, her one leg waving, her round ugly head a blot on the sky’s fair face. The next thing that happened was that the trench gathered unto itself wings, rose and clasped me lovingly from the neck down in a cold, earthy embrace, the while the air was rent with an ear-splitting roar, like unto a battery of 17-inch naval guns firing a salvo. After that I respected Minnie; I feared her—nay, I was deadly scared of her.
Of all the nasty things “old Fritz” has invented, the Minenflamm is perhaps the nastiest of all. She is purely vicious, utterly destructive, and quite frightful. The very slowness with which she sails through the air is in itself awe-inspiring. I never see Minnie without longing for home, or the inside of the deepest German dug-out ever digged by those hard-working German Pioneer blighters, who must all have been moles in their respective pre-incarnations. Minnie reminds one of Mrs. Patrick Campbell in The Second Mrs. Tangueray: all fire and flame and perdition generally.
If you are a very wide-awake Johnny, absolutely on the spot, don’t-you-know—you may hear her sigh ere she leaves the (temporary) Vaterland to take flight. It is a gentle sigh, which those verblitzender English artillery-men are not meant to hear. If you do happen by chance to hear it, then the only thing to do, although it is not laid down in K. R. & O. or Divisional Orders (you see they only hear about these things), is to silently steal away; to seek the seclusion which your dug-out grants. Later, if you are a new officer, and want to impress the natives, as it were, you saunter jauntily forth, cigarette at the correct slope, cane pending vertically from the right hand, grasped firmly in the palm, little finger downwards, cap at an angle of 45°, and say: “Minnie, by Jove! Eh what? God bless my soul. Did it fall over heah or over theah?” Which is a sure way of making yourself really popular.
Fortunately Minnie has her dull days. Days when she positively refuses to bust, and sulks, figuratively speaking, in silent wrath and bitterness on the upper strata of “sunny” France, or Belgium, as the case may be. After many Agags have trodden very delicately around her, and she has proved incurably sulky and poor-spirited, some one infused with the Souvenir spirit carts her away, and pounds her softly with a cold-chisel and a mallet, until he has either dissected her interior economy, or else she has segmented his.
Minnie has her little family. The eldest male child is called by the euphonious name of Sausage, and he has brothers of various sizes, from the pure-blood Hoch-geboren down to the bourgeois little chap who makes an awful lot of fuss and clatter generally. I remember meeting little Hans one day, about the dinner hour, when he was a very naughty boy indeed. The Company was waiting to get a half-canteenful of the tannin-cum-tea-leaves, called “tea” on the Western front (contained in one large dixie placed in a fairly open spot in the front line), when suddenly little Hans poked his blunt nose into the air, and all notions of tea-drinking were banished pro tem. In other words, the Company took cover automatically, as it were, without awaiting any word of command. Personally I tripped over a bath-mat, came into close contact with an old shell-hole full of mud, and offered up a little prayer in the record time of one-fifth of a second. Instead of entering Nirvana I only heard a resounding splash, followed by a sizzling sound, like that made by an exhausted locomotive. Little Hans had fallen into the dixie, and positively refused to explode. I think the tannin (or the tea leaves) choked him!
There is also an infant—a female infant—who deserves mention. Her name is Rifle-grenade, and, according to the very latest communication from official sources, the gentleman who states with some emphasis that he is divinely kingly, refuses to sanction any further production of her species. Like many females she is one perpetual note of interrogation. She starts on her wayward course thus: “Whrr-on? Whrr-oo? Whoo? Whoo? Whe-oo? Whe-oo?” And then she goes off with a bang, just as Cleopatra may have done when Antony marked a pretty hand-maid.
To sum up: Minnie and her children are undoubtedly the product of perverted science and Kultur, aided and abetted by the very Devil!