Beefy breathed blasphemous regrets. 'Rough on 'is missus an' the kids.
Six of 'em, weren't it?'
'Aw,' assented Jem. 'But she'll get suthin' from the Society funds.'
'Not a ha'porth,' said Beefy. 'You'll remem—no, it was just arter you left. The trades unions decided no benefits would be paid out for them as 'listed. It was Ben Shrillett engineered that. 'E was Secretary an' Treasurer an' things o' other societies as well as ours. 'E fought the War right along, an' 'e's still fightin' it. 'E's a anti-militant, 'e ses.'
'Anti-militarist,' Jem corrected. He had taken some pains himself in the old days to get the word itself and some of its meaning right.
'Anti-military-ist then,' said Beefy. 'Any'ow, 'e stuck out agin all sorts o' soldierin'. This stoppin' the Society benefits was a trump card too. It blocked a whole crowd from listin' that I know myself would ha' joined. Queered the boss's sons raisin' that Company too. They 'ad Frickers an' the B.S.L. Co. an' the works to draw from. Could ha' raised a couple hundred easy if Ben Shrillett 'adn't got at 'em. You know 'ow 'e talks the fellers round.'
'I know,' agreed Jem, sucking hard at his pipe.
The Sergeant broke in on their talk. 'Now then,' he said briskly.
'Sooner we start, sooner we're done an' off 'ome to our downy couch.
'Ere, Duffy'—and he pointed out the work Duffy was to start.
For a good two hours the Engineers laboured like slaves again. The trench was so badly wrecked that it practically had to be reconstructed. It was dangerous work because it meant moving freely up and down, both where cover was and was not. It was physically heavy work because spade work in wet ground must always be that; and when the spade constantly encounters a debris of broken beams, sandbags, rifles, and other impediments, and the work has to be performed in eye-confusing alternations of black darkness and dazzling flares, it makes the whole thing doubly hard. When you add in the constant whisk of passing bullets and the smack of their striking, the shriek and shattering burst of high-explosive shells, and the drone and whirr of flying splinters, you get labour conditions removed to the utmost limit from ideal, and, to any but the men of the Sappers, well over the edge of the impossible. The work at any other time would have been gruesome and unnerving, because the gasping and groaning of the wounded hardly ceased from end to end of the captured trench, and in digging out the collapsed sections many dead Germans and some British were found blocking the vigorous thrust of the spades.
Duffy was getting 'fair fed up,' although he still worked on mechanically. He wondered vaguely what Ben Shrillett would have said to any member of the trade union that had worked a night, a day, and a night on end. He wondered, too, how Ben Shrillett would have shaped in the Royal Engineers, and, for all his cracking muscles and the back-breaking weight and unwieldiness of the wet sandbags, he had to grin at the thought of Ben, with his podgy fat fingers and his visible rotundity of waistcoat, sweating and straining there in the wetness and darkness with Death whistling past his ear and crashing in shrapnel bursts about him. The joke was too good to keep to himself, and he passed it to Beefy next time he came near. Beefy saw the jest clearly and guffawed aloud, to the amazement of a clay-daubed infantryman who had had nothing in his mind but thoughts of death and loading and firing his rifle for hours past.
'Don't wonder Ben's agin conscription,' said Beefy; 'they might conscription 'im,' and passed on grinning.