"There's no accountin' for tastes, you know," said Bill. "Oh, Blimey, that's done it," he cried, stooping low as a shell exploded overhead, and drove a number of bullets into the roof. The old woman raised her head for a moment and crossed herself, then she continued her work; the daughter looked at Bill, laughed, and punched him on the shoulder. In the action there was a certain contempt, and Bill forthwith relapsed into silence and troubled the girl no further. When we got out to our work again he spoke.
"She was a fine hefty wench," he said, "I'm tip over toes in love with her."
"She's not one that I'd fancy," said Stoner.
"Her finger nails are so blunt," mumbled Pryor, "I never could stand a woman with blunt finger nails."
"What is your ideal of a perfect woman, Pryor?" I asked.
"There is no perfect woman," was his answer, "none that comes up to my ideal of beauty. Has she a fair brow? It's merely a space for wrinkles. Are her eyes bright? What years of horror when you watch them grow watery and weak with age. Are her teeth pearly white? The toothache grips them and wears them down to black and yellow stumps. Is her body graceful, her waist slender, her figure upright. She becomes a mother, and every line of her person is distorted, she becomes a nightmare to you. Ah, perfect woman! They could not fashion you in Eden! When I think of a woman washing herself! Ugh! Your divinity washes the dust from her hair and particles of boiled beef from between her teeth! Think of it, Horatio!"
"Nark it, you fool," said Bill, lifting a fag end from the bottom of the trench and lighting it at mine. "Blimey, you're balmy as nineteen maggots!"
It was a few days after this incident that, in the course of a talk with Stoner, the subject of trenches cropped up.
"There are trenches and trenches," he remarked, as we were cutting poppies from the parapet and flinging the flowers to the superior slope. "There are some as I almost like, some as I don't like, and some so bad that I almost ran away from them."
For myself I dislike the narrow trench, the one in which the left side keeps fraying the cloth of your sleeve, and the right side strives to open furrows in your hand. You get a surfeit of damp, earthy smell in your nostrils, a choking sensation in your throat, for the place is suffocating. The narrow trench is the safest, and most of the English communication trenches are narrow—so narrow, indeed, that a man with a pack often gets held, and sticks there until his comrades pull him clear.