“What if I haven’t a chill in my bones?”
“Maybe it’s there without speaking to ye and it will be speaking before an hour longer—or afther ye’re home between the sheets with the rheumatiz, and ye’ll be saying, ‘Why didn’t I take that glass?’ which I’m holding out to ye this minute, steaming its invitation to be drunk.”
Held out by a man who had been at Mons and “through it all”! It was a memorable drink. Champagne poured out by a butler at your elbow is insipid beside it. Snatches of brogue followed me from the brazier’s glow when I insisted that I must be going.
Now our breastworks took a turn and we were approaching closer to the German breastworks. Both lines remained where they had “dug in” after the counter-attacks which had followed the battle had been checked. Ground is too precious in this siege warfare to yield a foot. Soldiers become misers of soil. Where the flood is checked there you build your dam against another flood.
“We are within about sixty yards of the Germans,” said Captain P——, at length, after we had gone in and out of the traverses and left the braziers well behind.
Between the spotty, whitish wall of German sandbags, quite distinct in the moonlight, and our parapet were two mounds of sandbags about twenty feet apart. Snug behind one was a German and behind the other an Irishman, both listening. They were within easy bombing range, but the homicidal advantage of position of either resulted in a truce. Sixty yards! Pace it off. It is not far. In other places the enemies have been as close as five yards—only a wall of earth between them. Where a bombing operation ends in an attack, a German is naturally on one side of a traverse and a Briton on the other.
The Germans were as busy as beavers dam building. They had a lot of work to do before they had their new defences right. We heard them driving stakes and spading; we heard their voices with snatches of sentences intelligible and occasionally the energetic, shouted, guttural commands of their officers. All through that night I never heard a British officer speak above a conversational tone. The orders were definite enough, but given with a certain companionable kindliness. I have spoken of the genuine affection which his men showed for Captain P——, and I was beginning to appreciate that it was not a particular instance.
“What if you should shout at Tommy in the German fashion?” I asked.
“He wouldn’t have it; he’d get rebellious,” was the reply. “No, you mustn’t yell at Tommy. He’s a little temperamental about some things and he will not be treated as if he were just a human machine.”
Yet no one will question the discipline of the British soldier. Discipline means that the officer knows his men, and British discipline, which bears a retreat like that from Mons, requires that the man likes to follow his officers, believes in his officers, loves his officers. Each army and each people to its own ways.