“No officer wounded since we came out in October,” said Edwards: “we’re really awfully lucky, you know.”
“For heaven’s sake, touch wood,” I cried.
We laughed, for the whole of our establishment was wood. We were sitting on a wooden seat, leaning our hands against wooden uprights, eating off a wooden table, and resting our feet on a wooden floor. Sometimes, too, we found splinters of wood in the soup—but it was more often straw. For this dining-room in Trafalgar Square was known sometimes as the “Summer-house” and sometimes as the “Straw Palace.” It was really the maddest so-called “dug-out” in the British lines, I should think; I might further add, “in any trench in Europe.” For the French, although they presumably built it in the summer days of 1915 when the Bois Français trenches were a sort of summer-rest for tired-out soldiers, would never have tolerated the “Summer-house” since the advent of the canister-age. As for the Boche, he would have merely stared if anyone had suggested him using it as a Company Headquarters. “But,” he would have said, “it is not shell-proof.”
Exactly. It would not have stood even a whizz-bang. A rifle-grenade would almost certainly have come right through it. As for a canister or H.E., it would have gone through like a stone piercing wet paper. But it had been Company Headquarters for so long—it was so light and, being next door to the servants’ dug-out, so convenient—that we always lived in it still; though we slept in a dug-out a little way down Old Kent Road, which was certainly whizz-bang—if not canister—proof.
At any rate, here were Edwards and myself, drinking rather watery ox-tail soup out of very dinted tin-plates—the spoons were scraping noisily on the metal; overhead, a rat appeared out of the straw thatch, looked at me, blinked, turned about, and disappeared again, sending a little spill of earth on to the table.
“Hang these rats,” I exclaimed, for the tenth time that day.
Outside, it was brilliant moonlight: whenever the door opened, I saw it. It was very quiet. Then I heard voices, the sound of a lot of men, moving in the shuffling sort of way that men do move at night in a communication trench.
The door flew open, and Captain Robertson looked in.
“Hullo, Robertson; you’re early!”
It was not much past half-past seven.