I am sorry to say that another of our officers, Tony, is among the wounded, but the M.O. says he'll be back with us in a week. If only we could say that of the Infant! We are all sad about him; such a brave lad! but mighty pleased with the Company. The Brigadier says the Company has done splendidly. He was specially glad to know that the Boche collared no prisoners from us. It was our first taste, really, of bombardment, and of hand-to-hand fighting; and the men are now much keener even than they were before to get the Boche. They swear he shall pay dearly for the Infant and for six of their mates. They mean it, too, believe me. And we mean to help them get their payment. There isn't so much as a scratch on your
"Temporary Gentleman."
THE DAY'S WORK
Your letters are a great joy, and I feel that I give mighty little in return for their unfailing regularity. But I am sure you will understand that out here, where there's no writing-table to turn to, one simply cannot write half as much as one would like. It's astonishing how few moments there are in which, without neglect, one can honestly say there is nothing waiting to be done.
In your letter of the fifteenth, at this moment propped up in front of me against a condensed milk tin, you say: "When you can, I wish you'd jot down for me a sort of schedule of the ordinary, average day's work in the trenches when there is nothing special on, so that I can picture the routine of your life." Oh, for more ability as a jotter down! I know by what I used to see in the papers before leaving England there's a general idea at home that the chief characteristic of trench life is its dreary monotony, and that one of our problems is how to pass the time. How the idea ever got abroad I can't imagine. I don't see how there ever could have been a time like that in trenches. Certainly we have never had a hint of it; not the shadow of a hint. If anyone has ever tasted the boredom of idleness in the trenches—which I don't believe, mind you—there must have been something radically wrong with his Battalion; his Company Commander must have been a rotter. And I don't see how that could be.
A trench, especially in such country as this we're in, is not unlike a ship; a rather ancient and leaky wooden ship. If you don't keep busy about her she leaks like a sieve, gets unworkably encrusted and choked by barnacles, and begins to decay. If you don't keep improving her, she jolly soon begins to go to pieces. Only, I imagine the disintegrating process is a great deal quicker in a trench in this part of the world than it could be in the most unseaworthy of ships.
The daily routine? Well, it would be wrong to say there isn't any. There is. But it differs every day and every hour of the day, except in certain stable essentials. Every day brings happenings that didn't come the day before. One fixed characteristic is that it's a twenty-four day, rather than twelve hours of day and twelve hours of night. Of course, the overruling factor is strafe. But there's also something pretty bossy about the condition of your trench. Some kind of repairs simply cannot wait. The trench must continue to provide cover from observation, and some sort of cover from fire, or it ceases to be tenable, and one would not be carrying out one's fundamental duty of properly holding the sector of line to which one is detailed; which, obviously, would be unthinkable. Still, as I say, there are some elements of stable routine. Well, here goes. It won't cover the ground. I'm not a competent enough jotter down for that, but such as it is——
We think of every fresh day as beginning with "Stand-to." The main idea behind this function is that dawn is the classic moment for an attack. I'm not quite sure that this or any other classic idea holds good in trench warfare, but "Stand-to" is a pretty sound sort of an institution, anyhow. We Stand-to one hour before daylight. In some Companies the precise hour is laid down overnight or for the week. Our skipper doesn't believe in that. He likes to make a sort of a test of every Stand-to, and so gives no notice beforehand of the time at which he is going to order it. And I think he's right.