"I dunno."
"We wouldn't do it," said Kore, who was of a rather religious turn of mind. "But they, the bounders, would do anything. Are they the brutes the papers make them out to be? Do they use dum-dum bullets?"
"This is war, and men do things that they'd not do in the ordinary way," was the noncommittal answer of the Engineer.
"Have you seen many killed?" asked Mervin.
"Killed!" said the man on the parapet. "I think I have! You don't go through this and not see sights. I never even saw a dead man before this war. Now!" he paused. "That what we saw just now," he continued, alluding to the death of the two soldiers in the trench, "never moves me. You'll feel it a bit being just new out, but when you're a while in the trenches you'll get used to it."
In front a concussion shell blew in a part of the trench, filling it up to the parapet. That afternoon we cleared up the mess and put down a flooring of bricks in a newly opened corner. When night came we went back to the village in the rear. "The Town of the Last Woman" our men called it. Slept in cellars and cooked our food, our bully stew, our potatoes, and tea in the open. Shells came our way continually, but for four days we followed up our work and none of our battalion "stopped a packet."
CHAPTER VI
In the Trenches
Up for days in the trenches,
Working and working away;
Eight days up in the trenches
And back again to-day.
Working with pick and shovel,
On traverse, banquette, and slope,
And now we are back and working
With tooth-brush, razor, and soap.
We had been at work since five o'clock in the morning, digging away at the new communication trench. It was nearly noon now, and rations had not come; the cook's waggons were delayed on the road.