He looked at me in contempt, and grunted, "'Ow's it a'goin' ter rain with the bloomin' sun a 'shinin'?" I looked guilty.
"Them's the guns up the line, me lad, and you'll get enough of 'em before you gets back to Blighty."
My knees seemed to wilt, and I squeaked out a weak "Oh!"
Then we started our march up to the line in ten kilo treks. After the first day's march we arrived at our rest billets. In France they call them rest billets, because while in them, Tommy works seven days a week and on the eighth day of the week he is given twenty-four hours "on his own."
Our billet was a spacious affair, a large barn on the left side of the road, which had one hundred entrances, ninety-nine for shells, rats, wind, and rain, and the hundredth one for Tommy. I was tired out, and using my shrapnel-proof helmet, (shrapnel proof until a piece of shrapnel hits it), or tin hat, for a pillow, lay down in the straw, and was soon fast asleep. I must have slept about two hours, when I awoke with a prickling sensation all over me. As I thought, the straw had worked through my uniform. I woke up the fellow lying on my left, who had been up the line before, and asked him.
"Does the straw bother you, mate? It's worked through my uniform and I can't sleep."
In a sleepy voice, he answered, "That ain't straw, them's cooties."
From that time on my friends the "cooties" were constantly with me.
"Cooties," or body lice, are the bane of Tommy's existence.
The aristocracy of the trenches very seldom call them "cooties," they speak of them as fleas.