Told in gallant deeds

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

As to what trench life was like during the long Battle of the Aisne, it was in some ways like playing at keeping house.

When I was a little girl I often played at keeping house with my brother, but as we were very fond of soldiers, and lived in a stretch of beautiful country which was very suitable for la petite guerre, as military manœuvres were then called in France, our house was always a tent.

In those days we knew nothing of trenches, or it would have been a trench. Into our little house—we always called it a house though it was really a tent, for the roof was always made with a sheet, and the door was a big towel—we used to bring all the sort of things that we thought soldiers would want. But in these days a soldier’s requirements have grown, if only because he has to live in his trench for far longer than the soldier of long ago used to live in his tent.

I think it may interest some of you to know both what an officer generally has, and what he would like to have, with him, when he is in a trench. He generally has a canteen containing a knife, fork, and spoon; also a sponge, a tooth-brush, a piece of soap, and an extra pair of socks. As to a change of clothes, boots, and sleeping bag, they form part of his equipment. He also has a water-bottle, a revolver, a pair of field-glasses, and a compass. Only if he is lucky does he possess as extras a waterproof sheet, a torch with re-fills (many on the Aisne preferred candles), a canvas bucket, notepaper and envelopes, and an air pillow. There should be six thick pairs of socks made of good wool, twelve coloured handkerchiefs, four thick flannel shirts (khaki colour), a good wide comforter, and two sleeping caps (in case one gets wet). Any pencils sent to a man on active service ought to be indelible. Valuable, too, is a tiny medicine chest.

Very few people realise what an important part food—good, hot, and plenty of it—plays in war. Napoleon, who was the first great general to study closely the comfort of his troops, would have admired and envied the British commissariat.

However fierce the fighting during the Battle of the Aisne, there was in each trench or dug-out “the dinner ’ush from twelve to one.” The shells might continue to roar, and men be hit by bullets, but out fifty yards behind the trench the battalion reserves had their fires alight and were cooking dinner. Fifty yards of shell-swept ground behind men in trenches is, however, a long way off.

There were, however, always plenty of volunteers ready to rush to the belt of trees and return triumphant with mess-tins riddled with shrapnel bullets and some of their number on the ground, but with dinner safe for the famished battalion.

I wonder if you can guess what is the worst thing connected with life in the trenches? It is not the cold or the heat. It is not the damp or the wet. It is not even the fact that the soldier, however cleverly he may be entrenched, is in perpetual danger of death, or if not of death itself, then of some terrible and painful wound.

No, the worst thing about life in the trenches is the noise! All day long, and very often all night too, the boom of the great guns, and the long drawn-out screaming whistle of the shells, went on, backwards and forwards, across that narrow valley of the Aisne. Who can wonder that many of our brave soldiers were made temporarily deaf?

And yet, in spite of the distracting noise, a good deal of reading was done, for quite a number of books had been brought to the trenches.