The British soldier

by E. J. Hardy

"One of our fellows thought he would try for some eggs at a farmhouse. Naturally they couldn't understand him, so he opened his mouth, rubbed his stomach, flapped his arms and cried, 'Cock-adoodle-doo!' The eggs came promptly. Another chap tried to get some bread at a farm. After he had made all sorts of queer signs the woman seemed to understand and said, 'Oui, oui, M'sieur,' rushed back into the house and brought back a bundle of hay! There was a terrific roar of laughter from the troops. The non-plussed look on the woman's face and 'fed up' expression on the chap's made a picture."

Private Macnamara, of the Royal Fusiliers, relates that during the fighting on the Aisne a German called out to a company of Fusiliers: "Wait till we catch you in our barber's shop in London." The Fusiliers wiped out the German company with the bayonet, a private shouting: "You won't get to London again."

Another soldier wrote, probably joking: "Our trenches and the enemy's were only a couple of hundred yards apart, but we could not get the beggars to give us a chance to pot them. So at last I called out, 'Waiter!' and up went five heads at once."

At one time, when the German shells were particularly numerous, a private of the 1st Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry called out, "Fall in here for your pay, A company." There was a good laugh.

Another shell also caused a good laugh. In the rush to avoid it, two of our men fell over each other, and one actually sat upon the shell. It exploded. When the smoke cleared away the man was discovered to have escaped with very slight injuries to himself; but his trousers were torn to shreds, to the great amusement of his comrades.

A private of the Royal Irish Regiment wrote this to his mother: "There's plenty of hard fighting coming our way these days, and though we suffer cruelly once in a while, we always give them something to let them know that we have not lost our fighting powers in 'Paddy's land,' whatever else we may have lost. You could not help laughing at some of the tales the German prisoners have about us. When they knew they had been captured by an Irish regiment they wanted to know how it was we were not at home in the civil war that was going on. Says I to one of them that came off with that blarney in his queer English, 'This is the only war we know, or want to know, about for the time being, and there's mightily little that's civil about it or the way you are behaving yourselves.'"

It was the birthday of Pat Ryan, of the Connaught Rangers, and he thought that he ought to do something to celebrate it. Without telling anyone, he went out of the trenches in the afternoon, and came back after dusk with two big Germans in tow. How or where he got them nobody knows. The captain of his company asked him how he managed to catch the two. "Sure, and I surrounded them, Sorr," was the reply.

Even in the midst of a bayonet charge an Irish soldier caused laughter by calling out, "Look at thim German divils retratin' with their backs facin' us."