“Look!... they’re like statues.”
“One would think it was a party ... there are the lights and the orchestra.”
The time for supplying the company in the lines comes. The men of the field kitchens come by groups of three or four from the trenches just behind us.
The first two have a long rod on their shoulders and rolls of bread on this. Others carry in canvas pails and kettles come from nowhere the coveted wine and the aromatic brandy. Others bend under the weight of pots which hold lumpy black bean soup, which splashes out at every jolt in the path. It is already cold and greasy. Finally, the mess corporal reaches the end of his trip and draws out of his sack the desserts bought with the mess balance and the commissions given to him the day before by the men in the trenches. The pockets of his jackets are full of letters he has just received from the officer with the mail, and which he delivers to the men who have been waiting for them hungrily.
When he gets as far as the fatigue party he stops and hesitates. He must go over a space of fifty yards, absolutely exposed, to the edge of a group of trees where there is a first-line trench taken from the Boches in the last attack and not yet connected with the communication trench.
He has reason for his hesitation, for the last two days the Boche trench on our left has been firing on it heavily.
Day before yesterday an entire fatigue party was killed. We can see there in front of us the abandoned sacks and scattered packages. Five men out of eight were killed yesterday. The others were able to get over some of the provisions and the bad news by crawling, and at the price of a thousand risks. They also took the rest of the provisions from the bodies of their comrades who carried them. To-day they advanced the time of bringing the supplies an hour in order to foil the enemy’s vigilance. This time the mess corporal accompanied the fatigue party himself to discover, if possible, a less perilous mode of communication. But the Boches must have been on the watch, or guessed or got wind of it somehow. The star shells now follow each other with no let-up, lighting up the road so that one can’t venture on it. Under this too persistent light the Territorials abandon their simulation of corpses and seek shelter in the trench to which we are getting ready to return.
It is necessary for the supplies to go on. The company in the front line has had only insufficient provisions for two days.
The mess corporal is a brave man and makes several attempts to venture outside, but each time he is received by a fusillade and only has time to throw himself backward in the trench.