"Temporary Gentleman."
A DISSERTATION ON MUD
The second of our rest days is over, and to-morrow night we shall go into the firing line and relieve the ——s. We shall march back the way we came out, down the sad-looking green valley round the lips of which some of our batteries are hidden; through the deserted streets of ——, with its boarded-up shops and houses; on over the weed-grown railway track, through a little village whose church is still unbroken; though few of its cottage windows have any glass left in them; across the busy little river to Ambulance Corner—a favourite target for Boche shells, that bit of road—and so through the wooded hollow where the German gas lies deadly thick when it comes, into the foot of Manchester Avenue, the long communication trench leading up to the Battalion's trench headquarters in the support line, where "A" Company will branch off to the right, "B" to the left, and "C" to the extreme left of our sub-sector.
That town I mentioned—not the little village close to Ambulance Corner, where most roofs and walls show shell-torn rents and a few are smashed to dust—is rather like a city of the dead. It has a cathedral which the gentle Hun has ranged on with thoughtful frightfulness. But though, under the guidance of his aerial observers, the Boche has smashed up that cathedral pretty thoroughly, and its tower has great gaping chunks riven out of its sides by shells, yet, as folk say miraculously, its crowning attraction, a monstrous gilt figure of the Madonna and Child, thirty to fifty feet high, remains intact. But this remarkable gilt statue has been undermined at its base by H.E. shell, and now hangs over at right angles to the street far below it—a most extraordinary sight. The devout naturally claim that no German projectile will prove powerful enough to lower the sacred emblem any farther. Boche savagery in France has not weakened anyone's faith, I think; possibly the reverse.
A foundry or factory near by is now a tangled mass of scrap iron, and as one marches through the town one has queer intimate glimpses of deserted bedroom interiors, with homely furnishings exposed to all the weather, where a shell has sliced one wall clean down from a first or second storey and left the ground floor intact.
But I was going to tell you about trenches. When I first began to walk up Manchester Avenue, my thought was, "There's nothing much to grumble at here. I call this pretty good. A little sloppy under foot perhaps, but really nothing to write home about." I've often laughed at that since. For several hundred yards it cuts through a ridge of chalk. It is wide enough to enable one to pass a man in it anywhere with comfort. Its parapet and parados tower white, clean, and unbroken a foot or so over your head. Its sides are like the sides of a house or a tunnel; good, dry, solid chalk, like our Salisbury trenches, with never a sign of caving in about them. And on the hard bottom under foot-perhaps two or three inches of nice clean chalky slime and water. It has a gentle gradient which makes it self-draining.
You could easily go right up it to Battalion Headquarters in the support trench in ordinary marching boots, and be none the worse. And since then I've known what it means to get a bootful of muddy water, when wearing trench boots; rubber thigh-boots, you know, with straps buckling to your belt. The change begins a little way above the Battalion Headquarters dug-out, in support line. You leave the chalk behind you and get into clay, and then you leave the clay behind you and get into yellow porridge and treacle. And then you come to a nice restful stretch of a couple of hundred yards or so, in which you pray for more porridge; and it seems you're never coming to any more. This is a vein of glue in the section which "A" will go to-morrow night.