GRIM HUMOR OF THE TRENCHES
As Seen by Patrick Corcoran, of the Royal Engineers
Patrick Corcoran, of the Royal Engineers, on leave in New York, gives a picture in which the monotony of slaughter is relieved by wagers among the men and pranks with a football as the charge begins. Told in the New York World.
I—AN IRISHMAN TELLS HIS TALE
"To the German soldier war is a serious business. To the Frenchman it is sublime devotion. To the Englishman it is bully sport."
This from Capt. Patrick Corcoran of the Royal Engineers, hero of a dozen "Somewheres" in France, twice wounded and on permanent leave in New York City.
"And to the Irishman?" I asked.
"Fighting always was the Irishman's great amusement," he said. "The English are good sports, but they never did get the fun out of their fun that the Irish do."
Fun in the trenches! With shells dropping all around and blowing the bodies of your comrades into red fragments! What do the soldiers do, I wondered, when this is happening?
The Frenchmen sing, this captain told me. Not to keep up their courage, but joyously, exultantly.
"And the British?"
"Sure, they lay bets on what the next shell will do."
"The 'sausages' are the fine toys," the captain went on. "The Boche call 'em minnewieffers, but they look like sausages. They always come with a series of whoops, and you can tell almost exactly where they're going to hit. Then they sit down and rest five seconds before they explode; they muss things up a little sometimes, but they're decent about it.
"But the whizz-bangs—nobody loves a whizz-bang. You can't even hear them coming. You never have time to place a bet. They just whizz and bang in the same breath; and if you happen to be conscious after that, you help to bandage."
Capt. Corcoran enlisted as a private. I wondered how he came to get his commission.
"So did I," he said. "I was carrying despatches to different places within our sector; couldn't go to another sector without special orders. But one day I was asked to take a despatch to another sector and I took it. When I came back, they made me a lieutenant. Nothing at all had happened, and I couldn't understand it. I didn't have any pull that I knew of; and besides, pulls don't count nowadays.
"They told me a while later," he added, "that I was the seventh man sent out with that despatch. The first six were killed."
II—"I WAS IN A CAVE ON CHRISTMAS EVE"
It was nearing Christmas when I met Capt. Corcoran. He is a genial and, I felt sure, a rather sentimental soul; but his matter-of-fact conversation about matter-of-fact human slaughter was altogether chilling. So I asked him about Christmas in the trenches.
"I spent last Christmas at Loos," he said. Loos, one of the worst of slaughter pens! I grew expectant.
"I was sapping," he said. "Part of an engineer's duties are the extension of deep underground passages toward the enemy's lines, laying mines under 'No Man's Land' and listening, if possible, for signs of activity on the other side.
"I was sapping—Christmas Eve. We were down thirty-five feet, in a little cave about nine by four. There were three of us. Along toward midnight a big shell landed right, and we were buried. We were buried thirteen hours. One of the boys lost his mind, but they dug us out Christmas afternoon."
"It wouldn't have been so bad," he added, "if we had only had to wait. But we could hear the Boche sapping just a few feet away and we hated like everything to be mined and blown up down there. You don't mind it when you're out in the open air, but you get nervous in a fix like that."
"It must have been a merry Christmas after all—just to get out," I remarked.
"No," he said. "Something happened that got on my nerves. I went as soon as I could to get my Christmas mail—wanted to see what Santa Claus had brought—and he didn't bring me a blessed thing but a bill for thirty pounds."
I have hoped for a reaction against war on the part of the troops—a psychological revulsion, in time, against the long-drawn-out killing. I tried to present my theory to the captain, but he didn't seem to grasp it.
"Everybody's nervous," he said, "for the first day or two—like a horse just in from the quiet country being driven through your city streets. But, sure, if he was going to shy at the 'Elevated,' he'd do it the first week. After that, he gets used to the noise and he'd be nervous without it. 'Tis so with a soldier. He's glad to get wounded for a change, and be sent back home; but then he gets to missing the noise of the whizz-bangs and the coal boxes and the darling little sausages, and he isn't easy until he gets into the game again."
"But the horrors of hand-to-hand fighting," I protested. "How can anybody go through that and come out sane?"
"'Tis simple," he said. "You know you've got to get your man, or he'll get you."
"Get him? How?"
"With whatever you've got. Maybe your bayonet. Maybe your knife. Maybe nothing but your fists and teeth."
I tried to picture youths advancing under the smoke of artillery, through fields mowed by machine guns, dropping a moment into craters ploughed out by giant shells, creeping out under other curtains of smoke and reaching at last that other line of youths—then the thrust, the stab or the fight to the death with teeth and claws. I tried to picture young husbands and fathers and lovers, and even jolly good fellows, getting used to this—but I failed. I am an incorrigible mollycoddle.
"What is the war doing to the soldiers?" I asked. "How is it changing them most?"
"Making men of them," said the captain. "They came out little pasty-faced clerks with no lungs, no muscle, no nerve and no vision. Now they've seen life—and death—and aren't afraid of either. They have muscles and nerves of iron, and a man's outlook on life. They'll never be mere clerks or mere Londoners again."
Capt. Corcoran doesn't reminisce. He doesn't romance. Getting a war story from him is hard newspaper work; not that he isn't willing to give information, but war conditions are no longer a novelty in Europe, and heroes are so common that their stories are no longer interesting. Little by little, I learned the following facts about his record, which did not seem at all extraordinary to him:
He fought in the battles of the Aisne, Pepereign, Festubert, Hooge, St. Eloi, Neuve Chapelle, Loos and Pommier. He was wounded at Neuve Chapelle, sent to England, recovered and insisted on going back. He was wounded again at Pommier last February, two miles back of the line, when a stray shell fragment struck him in the back. The force of it hurled him to the ground in the midst of some barbed wire entanglements that caught in his forehead and tore back his scalp to the crown. A comrade clapped a cap upon his head to hold the scalp in place while he was carried to the hospital. His recovery amazed the surgeons.
Once he broke military rules by staying away from his billet all night. That night a shell struck the billet and killed his partner with whom he had been sleeping for months.
At another time, a shell split a house in which he was installing signal apparatus and killed half a dozen telegraph clerks with whom he had just been talking. He was uninjured.
III—"EVERYBODY IS A HERO"
"Heroes," he mused. "I suppose everybody is a hero after he has got on to the knack of heroism. You don't call a man a hero because he rushes fearlessly across Fifth Avenue; but to a person who has never seen anything busier than a country road, the act looks heroic. It's something the same with No Man's Land. I have a friend, a doctor, who got a D.S.O. for going out on No Man's Land to bandage up some wounded comrades. He didn't know he was doing anything heroic. They needed care; they couldn't come in, so he went out—that's all.
"It was different with O'Leary. He went out for the fun of the thing and got eighteen Germans."
The captain spoke of Private Michael O'Leary, V. C., who won the coveted decorations for this particular joke. It happened in the sector where Capt. Corcoran was stationed and he was well acquainted with the details.
"O'Leary had been betting on the 'sausages' for several days," he said, "and he was bored. He wanted some real fun and let everybody know he was in the mood.
"Betcha can't go across and bring back a Boche," somebody suggested. O'Leary sprung from the trench and went. In a second he was lost in the darkness and in half a minute the boys heard him yelling like a demon for help. Nobody could ever figure out how he did it—he must have brained the sentinel and disarmed the others while they were asleep. But there he was, with the arms of eighteen of them piled up before him, yelling back to the British trenches to come over and get the men. Of course, the boys answered his call and brought the whole eighteen back to the British lines.
"You see, the Germans, with all their efficiency, aren't used to that kind of fighting. They're always so darn serious about it. They're good soldiers but they don't have any fun. When they see us come over kicking a football ahead of the charge, they don't seem to know what to make of it. We do it sometimes, don't you know, just to add a little novelty to the sport.
"The war is just beginning. The Germans have a great machine and it'll take a long while to break it.
"As much as you people in the States have heard about German efficiency, there has been little overestimating of it. Only one who has seen the Germans in action can appreciate what a well-regulated business organization they have made of war.
"I don't know what our boys will do when it's all over; they're so used to war that peace will probably come hard for a while.
"Seriously, now, I don't know a soldier who is even dreaming of peace. They didn't want war, but now that it is here, they're going to carry it through. And they're going to have all the fun they can out of it while it lasts."