My feet I anointed copiously with a disgusting unguent of great virtue—it's invaluable for lighting braziers when one's only fuel is muddy coke and damp chits—called anti-frostbite grease, that is said to guard us from the disease known as "Trench Feet," rumoured prevalent in our sector by reason of the mellow quality and depth of its mud, which, whilst apparently almost liquid, yet possesses enough body and bouquet—remember how you used to laugh at our auction catalogue superlatives in cellar lots?—to rob a man of his boots at times. For my hands—chipped about a bit now—I used carbolated vaseline. (Do you remember the preternaturally slow and wall-eyed salesman, with the wart, in the Salisbury shop where we bought it?) And then, clothed most sumptuously in virginal underwear, I crawled into my flea-bag, there to revel from 10.40 P.M. to 6 A.M., as I am about to do now, less one hour in the morning. How I wish one could consciously enjoy the luxury of sleep while sleeping! Good night and God bless you! God bless all the sweet, brave waiting women of England, and France, and Russia; and I wish I could send a bit of my clean comfort to-night to as many as may be of our good chaps, and France's bon camarades, out here.
When next I write we shall have seen a bit of the trenches, I hope, and so then you should have something more like real news from your
"Temporary Gentleman."
THE TRENCHES AT LAST
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.