I was thankful for the softened condition of both. My wounded mouth was swollen and inflamed. I could hardly move my lips. I never could have broken between my torn gums a bite off a biscuit. But because they had been thoroughly wet I could suck at them and draw the bits of pasty food down and swallow them. And likewise with the chocolate.
In these clear-headed moments I well enough knew myself to be the victim of fever and I was hoping and praying that if it ever left me I might find myself with strength enough to crawl out of my black bed of mud and make at least a fight to get back to my own, to protection, to the hospital and perhaps—yes, for all my wounds, for all the terrors and horrors I had been through, I did hope I would be able eventually to get back into the big fight. And this is not heroics. It is because I am a man and no man could have seen the crimes of the Germans I have seen and not want to fight the Boches as long as he could stand.
Fortunately, thoughts of food had only come to me in my sane moments and I had therefore been able rigidly to adhere to my plan to eat sparingly—only a portion of a biscuit at a time, only a portion of a chocolate cake. On the morning of the third day I still had fragments of each left.
The mud-hole was the only fountain to slake my thirst for my water bottle had been blown away with my thumb and other fragments of my flesh by the bomb. It wasn’t drinking from a crystal spring. I would press the mud down and make a small hole that filled with stale black water that tasted even worse than it looked. But it was, for all that, delicious to my fevered, wounded mouth. Drinks of it put more life in me than ever “trench rum” did.
And I cannot help but believe that my good, old mud-hole had done more for me than conceal me from my enemies. I believe it acted as a poultice for my wounds in the three days or nearly three days in which I soaked in it. My fevers had come on at night most violently, I honestly do not remember ever having experienced a thorough chill. I was cold and clammy in my waking hours but never cold to the point of suffering acutely on that score.
But my food was gone and though my head was light and my wounded arm hurting me intensely I found myself on the night of this third day feeling that possibly I had acquired strength for the five-hundred yards journey back to our lines. In my weakened condition, I had to think of how the obstacles, quite aside from danger from the Germans, would impede me in the night. I mean the shell-holes, the sections of barbed wire left upstanding in No Man’s Land, and the countless dead bodies I might fall over, the ravenous rats which might attack me. But to have attempted to crawl away in the day-time would have meant certain death.
It may seem a strange statement, but it is true—I have the dead men of No Man’s Land to thank for the fact that I am still living.
There was a mist over the land the night I made my escape. The mist decided me that the time had come to “carry on” unless I could resign myself to rot to death in the mud-hole.
Surely the fog would last until I could stagger out of immediate German territory and merge myself into the torn and blasted waste of No Man’s Land.