"What about the Cup Final?" It was then the finish of the English football season.
"Chelsea lost," said Bill, who was a staunch supporter of that team.
"Hard luck!" came the answer from the German trench and firing was resumed. But Bill used his rifle no more until we changed into a new locality. "A blurry supporter of blurry Chelsea," he said. "'E must be a damned good sort of sausage-eater, that feller. If ever I meet 'im in Lunnon after the war, I'm goin' to make 'im as drunk as a public-'ouse fly."
"What are you going to do after the war?" I asked.
He rubbed his eyes which many sleepless nights in a shell-harried trench had made red and watery.
"What will I do?" he repeated. "I'll get two beds," he said, "and have a six months' snooze, and I'll sleep in one bed while the other's being made, matey."
In trench life many new friends are made and many old friendships renewed. We were nursing a contingent of Camerons, men new to the grind of trench work, and most of them hailing from Glasgow and the West of Scotland. On the morning of the second day one of them said to me, "Big Jock MacGregor wants to see you."
"Who's Big Jock?" I asked.
"He used to work on the railway at Greenock," I was told, and off I went to seek the man.
I found him eating bully beef and biscuit on the parapet. He was spotlessly clean, he had not yet stuck his spoon down the rim of his stocking where his skein should have been, he had a table knife and fork (things that we, old soldiers, had dispensed with ages ago), in short, he was a hat-box fellow, togged up to the nines, and as yet, green to the grind of war.