This was told of "wee Hecky MacAlister" by Private T. McDougall, of the Highland Light Infantry. Hecky went into a burn for a swim, and suddenly found the attentions of the Germans were directed to him. "You know what a fine mark he is with his red head," says the writer to his correspondent, "and so they just hailed bullets at him." Hecky, however, "dooked and dooked," and emerged from his bath happy but breathless.
A sergeant wrote: "I happened to find a bit of looking-glass. It made a rare bit of fun. As it was passed from comrade to comrade we said, 'Have a last look at yourself, my boy, and bid yourself good-bye.' The laugh went round; then 'Advance!' and we were all at it again."
"One man of the Life Guards was very particular about his appearance (says Trooper Walter Dale, now at Newcastle-upon-Tyne), and even in war-time always carried a little hand mirror about in order to take occasional peeps at himself to see that all was right. I happened to pass him on the field when he had been badly wounded. There he lay, with the glass in his hand, curling his moustache. I suppose he was anxious that when death found him he should be a credit to a smart regiment. I had to pass on that time, but the next journey we intended to take him to hospital. It was too late. He was dead, and his glass was still clutched in his hand. His 'quiff' had been curled till it was a beauty."
A Times correspondent wrote: "Within sight of the spot where these words are being penned the chauffeur of the General Staff motor-car is completing his morning toilet in the open. After washing hands and face in a saucepan, minus the handle, which is balanced on an empty petrol can, he carefully brushes his hair with an old nailbrush, using the window of the car in which he has slept as a looking-glass."
Another man had his toilet completed in a French hospital without any trouble to himself. After being sent to England because of a wound in his left thigh he told a friend that his finger nails had been manicured. "'Shocking fingers,' the French nurse said, 'for a young man to go about with,' so she brought a bowl of soapy water and a box of tools and manicured (that is what she called it) my finger nails."
A corporal of the Coldstream Guards wrote:
"There was a chap of the Grenadier Guards who was always mighty particular about his appearance, and persisted in wearing a tie all the time, whereas most of us reduced our needs to the simplest possible. One day, under heavy rifle fire, he was seen to be in a frightful fluster. 'Are you hit?' he was asked. 'No,' he said. 'What is it, then?'
"'This —— tie is not straight,' he replied, and proceeded to adjust it."
A motor-cycle despatch-rider wrote: "I have just had a hot bath and shave, and complete change of underclothing; the shock may kill me, but it is a glorious feeling, and I am glad to say I have by the use of iodoform kept free from vermin, which so many fellows suffer from out here."
"I hung my shirt out all night to dry on a tree," writes Lance-Corporal Laird, Royal Army Medical Corps. "At daylight I found that a piece of shell had taken the elbow of it. Good job I wasn't in it."