CHRISTMAS NIGHT IN "NO MAN'S LAND."
The setting is not a Biblical one. If, indeed, this cursed spot can possibly recall the Book of Books, we must search the chapter of immortal horrors in the Book of Revelation.
No vegetation will grow there within the next ten years; no ghost of a tree or shadow of a house; the moon reveals the troubled earth whose chalky mud is as a festering sore.
There is universal destruction, as though a huge tidal-wave, overrunning the plain and the valley, had been struck by God's anger and checked in the full force of its rolling waters. The evening of the last day could bring no greater melancholy. Three horrors rule this strip of land—Fright, Death and Frost. A bitter cold night with a starry sky—such was Christmas in "No Man's Land."
And what of "man"? Here we have a Scotsman from the mountains, gaunt, dour, wiry, with lynx-like eyes, the lusty chest of a woodman and the soul of a hermit. Like hundreds of thousands and tens of hundreds of thousands of his brother-soldiers, he had held the line in front of Ypres, Loos and Arras. Like the soldiers of England, Ireland and Wales, he had known the mist of Flanders, the marshes of the mine country, the mossy peat of Artois. Like his fellows, he is weary. With his grey-steel helmet, the leathern, fleece-lined waistcoat and the leggings of buffalo-hide which show up the muscles of his legs, you might think he was a centurion of the Roman Empire. Like all the others, his name is Tommy.
15. NEAR THE Y RAVINE.
This Christmas Night Tommy has a care. The "bonnie Highland lassie" whom he was courting in the good old days, when Highlanders had not yet earned the ferocious nick-name of the "square-jawed," had written to him that morning asking for a souvenir. A souvenir!
Those of you who have not seen Tommy, notwithstanding the certainty of punishment, bartering his regimental badges or buttons in exchange for a kiss from some village beauty, can hardly understand this superstitious worship of "a souvenir." That word sums up all the dangers, hardships and glories of war, and is considered the surest of love tokens. But for soldiers of His Majesty's Guards the real souvenir is the one snatched from the enemy in mortal combat. The day after the Battle of the Ancre—that is, the day after the attack and victory—I saw little groups of men scattered over the battlefield indifferent to hostile barrages and machine-gun fire. These men, crawling from shell-hole to shell-hole, looked only on the ground. They were souvenir hunting.
Now for our story. Tommy is in a listening post—a crump-hole between the two trenches surrounded with barbed wire. The Germans are 30 yards in front and the British 10 yards behind him. He hears the enemy's observers behind their loopholes stamping their feet to keep them warm. Small clouds shade the moon. A heavy silence pervades the frozen earth. This Highlander is alone in "No Man's Land."