This was the distribution of the company in the front line. Every morning from 9 to 12 all men not on sentry worked at repairing and improving the trenches; and the same for four hours during the night. Work done to strengthen the parapet can only be done by night. Every night wire was put out. Every night a patrol went out. Every day one “stood to” arms for an hour before dawn, and an hour after dusk. And day and night there was an intermittent stinging and buzzing of black-winged instruments between the opposing trenches. Of shells I have already spoken; next in deadliness were rifle-grenades, which are bombs with a rod attachment that is put down the barrel of an ordinary rifle. Four of these rifles are stood in a rack fixed to the ground, and fired by a string from a few yards away, at a very high trajectory. They are a very deadly weapon, as you cannot see them dropping on to you. Then there is a multiform genus called “trench-mortar,” being projectiles of all kinds and shapes lobbed over from close range. The canister was the most loathed. It was simply a tin oil-can, the size of a lady’s muff (large); one heard a thud, and watched the beast rising, rising, then stationary, it seemed, in mid-air, and then come toppling down, down, down on top of one with a crash—three seconds’ silence—and then a most colossal explosion, blowing everything in its vicinity to atoms. These canisters were loathed by the men with a most personal and intense aversion. Yet they were really not nearly so dangerous as rifle-grenades, as one had time to dodge them very often, unless enfiladed in a communication trench. They were, moreover, very local in their effects. A shell has splinters that spread far and wide; a trench-mortar is a clumsy monster with a thin skin, no splinters, and an abominable, noisy, vulgar way of making the most of itself. “Sausages” were another but milder form of the vulgar trench-mortar; aerial torpedoes were daintier people with wings, who looked so cherubic as they came sailing over, that one almost forgot their deadly stinging powers; they, too, were a species of trench-mortar.
It is natural to write lightly of these things; yet they were no light matters. They were the instruments of death that took their daily toll of lives. In this chapter describing the system and routine of ordinary trench warfare, I have tried to prepare the canvas for several pictures I have drawn in bold bare lines; now I am putting in a wash of colour, the atmosphere of Death.
Sometimes we forgot it in the interest of the present activity; sometimes we saw it face to face, without a qualm; but always it was there with its relentless overhanging presence, dulling our spirits, wearing out our lives. The papers are always full of Tommy smiling: Bairnsfather has immortalised his indomitable humour. Yes, it is true. We laugh, we smile. But for an hour of laughter, there are how many hours of weariness, strain, and grim agony! It is great that Tommy’s laughter has been immortalised; but do not forget that its greatness lies in this, that it was uttered beneath the canopy of ever-impending Death.
CHAPTER VII
MORE FIRST IMPRESSIONS
It must not be imagined that I at once grasped all the essential details of our trench system, as I have tried to put them concisely in the preceding chapter. On the contrary, it was only very gradually that I accumulated my intimate knowledge of our maze of trenches, only by degrees that I learnt the lie of the land, and only by personal patrolling that I learnt the interior economy of the craters. At first the front line, with its loops and bombing-posts, and portions “patrolled only,” its sand-bag dumps, its unexpected visions of R.E.’s scurrying like bolted rabbits from mine-shafts, its sudden jerk round a corner that brought you in full view of the German parapet across a crater that made you gaze fascinated several seconds before you realised that you should be stooping low, as here was a bad bit of trench that wanted deepening at once and had not been cleared properly after being blown in last night—all this, I say, was at first a most perplexing labyrinth. It was only gradually that I solved its mysteries, and discovered an order in its complexity.
I will give a few more extracts from my diary, some of which seem to me now delightfully naïve! Here they are, though.
“2nd Feb., 1916. In the trenches. Everything very quiet. We are in support, in a place called Maple Redoubt, on the reverse slope of a big ridge. Good dug-outs (sic), and a view behind, over a big expanse of chalk-downs, which is most exhilarating. A day with blue sky and a tingle of frost. Being on the reverse slope, you can walk about anywhere, and so can see everything. Have just been up in the front trenches, which are over the ridge, and a regular, or rather very irregular, rabbit-warren. The Boche generally only about thirty to forty yards away. The trenches are dry, that is the glorious thing. Dry. Just off to pow-wow to the new members of my platoon.”