Hendecourt proved a posh camp; memories of it and of the men who laughed the heavy days away are pleasant. The Army, despite the grousings that rise steadily to Tommy's lips, is a fine institution, and those who have emerged safely from the Great Undertaking cannot but look back with regretful pleasure upon those great days of the open, of bonne camaraderie, of willing sacrifice.
Nightly the 29th Divisional troupe performed before an over-crowded house of the most appreciative audience in the world. A cinema also threw its ardent cowboy lovers and pig-tailed heroines upon a screen whose far distant days may have been spotless and white. Tubby awaited outside the "stage-door" for an hour to interview Tootsie (of the Troupe) after the first night and found "she" wore Army boots, trousers, and chewed plug.
Old theatre house of memory! There on Sunday row on row of mute khaki forms bowed together in unspoken player or sang with quiet, earnest harmony the hymn that tells home every time on the rough warriors' heart: "Holy Father, in Thy keeping ... hear our anxious prayer," etc. God, how they sang it! Some knew, perhaps, what awaited.
The short November days sent the mud-clogged lads into their huts with the last pale glimmer of a weakly sun. Constructed of sloping corrugated iron, in which no outlet for fire-smoke had been cut, these huts were lined at the top with some substance of felt and through which the rain trickled into puddles and miniature lakes on the ground floor. Clarke had adjusted a tin like a sword of Damocles over his bed to catch the drops—and it certainly conveyed, after falling twice when full upon Stumpy, an apprehension akin to that wrought by the weapon. Over one of these puddles near—TOO near—his bed Ginger was wont to sit with melancholy mien, a rifle held out before him and from the muzzle a string hanging over the water with a mess-tin attached.
"Wot's doin', Gin?"
"Fishin'."
"What for?"
"Me ticket!" (Discharge).
Braziers were rampant in every Company, swelling and overflowing throughout the entire hutments in belching clouds of noxious smoke that permeated an atmosphere impenetrable by human eyes with an odour of smouldering wood, empty milk-tins and tobacco. Those nights!
Those nights of song and laughter, of anticipations, hope, and the yearning for LIFE: of long-drawn-out confabs over the glowing embers of a red-hot brazier, the crimson glow shining upon faces that showed so little of aches, fears, longings, masked behind the curling smoke from screening pipes. Silence fall oft-times upon the khaki figures clustered round the genial warmth. Each man to his own dire thoughts ... home, wife, or girl.