One day a shell smashed a breakfast porridge pot, and another scattered a dinner of stew. "We cursed more about that stew than if we had been hit ourselves."
"It beats Banagher," said a jocular private in the Royal Irish, "how these Germans always disturb us at meal times. I suppose it's just the smell of the bacon that they're after. They seem to look for a blooming Ritz Hotel in the firing line."
Men can even sleep when under fire. "It is a most extraordinary thing," said an officer to The Daily Telegraph special correspondent, "to see soldiers lying on their straw soundly asleep when German shells are bursting all round them. Men keep on snoring even after a shell has burst within 5 or 6 yards over their heads and half filled their trenches with fresh earth. One gets so used to the firing, that, though it may sound incredible, it soon becomes far less noticeable than city traffic, for instance."
[CHAPTER XIII]
"I've Got It"
Sometimes a man after being under fire for a considerable time without being wounded begins to fancy that he has a charmed life and that he is "not for it," as soldiers say. Still, if he is to be a billet for a bullet the bullet will in its own time find him out. Then, he who has been seeing comrades falling on either side of him will find this a more personal matter, an affair of his only. When the end comes to a poor fellow he is generally gone to "another place" before he knows he is dead—as an Irish soldier said.
What does the average soldier say or do when wounded, how does he take it? He usually remarks casually and quietly, "I've got it," or "I'm hit." Men speak and act differently according to temperament, according to moral and physical condition. Some as they roll over give a groan and a cry to mother or wife. Some pray, some curse. An officer said, "I'm done for," but immediately thinking of his men told them to lie down. A soldier when hit said, "I've got a ticket through. I'm put out of mess," but it was not as bad as that. Another fell and said to a chum: "Good-bye, old man. I'm done for. Tell poor old dad I died at the front. I began a letter to him; you finish it."
Sometimes a soldier is too excited to feel a wound until the fight is over. A man wrote in a letter the following when describing the battle of Mons: "When the Germans attacked us we were singing 'Hitchy Koo.' Before we were half through the chorus the man next to me got a wound in the upper part of his arm. He sang the chorus to the finish, and did not seem to know he was hit till a comrade on the other side said, 'Don't you think you had better have it bound up? It's beginning to make a mess.'"