"Don't try!" said the captain. "Lie down and pull your boots off in the doorway. Perhaps you will get some sleep before daybreak."
Sleep! Does a débutante go to sleep at her first ball? Sleep in such good company, the company of this captain who was smiling all the while with his eyes; smiling at his mud house, at the hardships in the trenches, and, I hope, at having a guest who had been with armies before!
It was the first time that I had been in the trenches all night; the first time, indeed, when I had not been taken into them by an escort in a kind of promenade. On this account I was in the family. If it is the right kind of a family, that is the way to get a good impression. There would be plenty of time to sleep when I returned to London.
So Captain P——— and I lay there talking. I felt the dampness of the earth under my body and the walls exuded moisture. The average cellar was dry by comparison. "You will get your death of cold!" any mother would cry in alarm if her boy were found even sitting on such cold, wet ground. For it was a clammy night of early spring. Yet, peculiarly enough, few men get colds from this exposure. One gets colds from draughts in overheated rooms much oftener. Luckily, it was not raining; it had been raining most of the winter in the flat country of Northern France and Flanders.
"It is very horrible, this kind of warfare," said the captain. He was thinking of the method of it, rather than of the discomforts. "All war is very horrible, of course." Regular soldiers rarely take any other view. They know war.
"With your wounded arm you might be back in England on leave," I suggested.
"Oh, that arm is all right!" he replied. "This is what I am paid for"— which I had heard regulars say before. "And it is for England!" he added, in his quiet way. "Sometimes I think we should fight better if we officers could hate the Germans," he went on. "The German idea is that you must hate if you are going to fight well. But we can't hate."
Sound views he had about the war; sounder than I have heard from the lips of Cabinet ministers. For these regular officers are specialists in war.
"Do you think that we shall starve the Germans out?"
"No. We must win by fighting," he replied. This was in March, 1915.
"You know," he went on, taking another tack, "when one gets back to
England out of this muck he wants good linen and everything very
nice."