There's a lot in it. You bring a man out from a tight corner where he's been in hourly contact with death; he's apt to think, “What's the use of taking pride in myself. I'm likely to be 'done in' any day. It'll be all the same when I'm dead.” But if he doesn't keep clean in his body, he won't keep clean in his mind. The man who has his buttons shining brightly and his leather polished, is usually the man who is brightly polished inside. Spit and polish teaches a man to come out of the trenches from seeing his pals killed, and to carry on as though nothing abnormal had happened. It educates him in an impersonal attitude towards calamity which makes it bearable. It forces him not to regard anything too tragically. If you can stand aside from yourself and poke fun at your own tragedy—and tragedy always has its humorous aspect—that helps. The songs which have been inspired by the trenches are examples of this tendency.
The last thing you find anybody singing “out there” is something patriotic; the last thing you find anybody reading is Rupert Brooke's poems. When men sing among the shell-holes they prefer a song which belittles their own heroism. Please picture to yourself a company of mud-stained scarecrows in steel-helmets, plodding their way under intermittent shelling through a battered trench, whistling and humming the following splendid sentiments from The Plea of The Conscientious Objector:—
“Send us the Army and the Navy. Send us the rank and file.
Send us the grand old Territorials—they'll face the danger with a smile.
Where are the boys of the Old Brigade who made old England free?
You may send my mother, my sister or my brother,
But for Gawd's sake don't send me.”
They leave off whistling and humming to shout the last line. A shell falls near them—then another, then another. They crouch for a minute against the sticky walls to escape the flying spray of death. Then they plod onward again through the mud whistling and humming, “But for Gawd's sake don't send me.” They're probably a carrying party, taking up the rations to their pals. It's quite likely they'll have a bad time to-night—there's the smell of gas in the air. Good luck to them. They disappear round the next traverse.
Our men sing many mad burlesques on their own splendour—parodies on their daily fineness. Here's a last example—a take-off on “A Little Bit of Heaven:”
“Oh a little bit of shrapnel fell from out the sky one day
And it landed on a soldier in a field not far away;
But when they went to find him he was bust beyond repair,
So they pulled his legs and arms off and they left him lying there.
Then they buried him in Flanders just to make the new crops grow.
He'll make the best manure, they say, and sure they ought to know.
And they put a little cross up which bore his name so grand,
On the day he took his farewell for a better Promised Land.”
One learns to laugh—one has to—just as he has to learn to believe in immortality. The Front affords plenty of occasions for humour if a man has only learnt to laugh at himself. I had been sent forward to report at a battalion headquarters as liaison officer for an attack. The headquarters were in a captured dug-out somewhere under a ruined house. Just as I got there and was searching among the fallen walls for an entrance, the Hun barrage came down. It was like the Yellowstone Park when all the geysers are angry at the same time. Roofs, beams, chips of stone commenced to fly in every direction. In the middle of the hubbub a small dump of bombs was struck by a shell and started to explode behind me. The blast of the explosion caught me up and hurled me down fifteen stairs of the dug-out I had been trying to discover. I landed on all fours in a place full of darkness; a door banged behind me. I don't know how long I lay there. Something was squirming under me. A voice said plaintively, “I don't know who you are, but I wish you'd get off. I'm the adjutant.”
It's a queer country, that place we call “out there.” You approach our front-line, as it is to-day, across anywhere from five to twenty miles of battlefields. Nothing in the way of habitation is left. Everything has been beaten into pulp by hurricanes of shell-fire. First you come to a metropolis of horse-lines, which makes you think that a mammoth circus has arrived. Then you come to plank roads and little light railways, running out like veins across the mud. Far away there's a ridge and a row of charred trees, which stand out gloomily etched against the sky. The sky is grey and damp and sickly; fleecy balls of smoke burst against it—shrapnel. You wonder whether they've caught anybody. Overhead you hear the purr of engines—a flight of aeroplanes breasting the clouds. Behind you observation balloons hang stationary, like gigantic tethered sausages.
If you're riding, you dismount before you reach the ridge and send your horse back; the Hun country is in sight on the other side. You creep up cautiously, taking careful note of where the shells are falling. There's nothing to be gained by walking into a barrage; you make up your mind to wait. The rate of fire has slackened; you make a dash for it. From the ridge there's a pathway which runs down through the blackened wood; two men going alone are not likely to be spotted. Not likely, but—. There's an old cement Hun gun-pit to the right; you take cover in it. “Pretty wide awake,” you say to your companion, “to have picked us out as quickly as that.”
From this sheltered hiding you have time to gaze about you. The roof of the gun-pit is smashed in at one corner. Our heavies did that when the Hun held the ridge. It was good shooting. A perfect warren of tunnels and dug-outs leads off in every direction. They were built by the forced labour of captive French civilians. We have found requests from them scrawled in pencil on the boards: “I, Jean Ribeau, was alive and well on May 12th, 1915. If this meets the eye of a friend, I beg that he will inform my wife,” etc.; after which follows the wife's address. These underground fortifications proved as much a snare as a protection to our enemies. I smile to remember how after our infantry had advanced three miles, they captured a Hun major busily shaving himself in his dug-out, quite unaware that anything unusual was happening. He was very angry because he had been calling in vain for his man to bring his hot water. When he heard the footsteps of our infantry on the stairs, he thought it was his servant and started strafing. He got the surprise of his venerable life when he saw the khaki.