Perhaps the surroundings had a lot to do with it, for I felt strangely unnerved. Where did the cries come from? It was impossible to say. It might have been a cat or a dog, all sounds become different in the dark. I could not wander round to seek the cause. Houses were battered down, rooms blocked up, cellars filled with rubble. There was nothing to do but to go back to bed. Maybe it was a child abandoned by a mother driven insane by fear. Terrible things happen in war.
The third fear was three cries, again in the dark, when a neighbouring battalion sent out a working party to dig a sap in front of our lines. I could hear their picks and shovels busy in front, and suddenly somebody screamed "Oh! Oh! Oh!" the first loud and piercing, the others weaker and lower. But the exclamation told of intense agony. Afterwards I heard that a boy had been shot through the belly.
"I never like the bloomin' trenches," said Bill. "It almost makes me pray every time I go up."
"They're not really so bad," said Pryor, "some of them are quite cushy (nice)."
"Cushy!" exclaimed Bill, flicking the ash from his cigarette with the tip of his little finger. "Nark it, Pryor, nark it, blimey, they are cushy if one's not caught with a shell goin' in, if one's not bombed from the sky or mined from under the ground, if a sniper doesn't snipe 'arf yer 'ead off, or gas doesn't send you to 'eaven, or flies send you to the 'orspital with disease, or rifle grenades, pipsqueaks, and whizz-bangs don't blow your brains out when you lie in the bottom of the trench with yer nose to the ground like a rat in a trap. If it wasn't for these things, and a few more, the trench wouldn't be such a bad locality."
He put a finger and a thumb into my cigarette case, drew out a fag, and lit it off the stump of his old one. He blew a puff of smoke into the air, stuck his thumbs behind his cartridge pouches, and fixed a look of pity on Pryor.
"What are the few more things that you did not mention, Bill?" I asked.
"Few! Blimey, I should say millions. There's the stink of the dead men as well as the stink of the cheese, there's the dug-outs with the rain comin' in and the muck fallin' into your tea, the vermin, the bloke snorin' as won't let you to sleep, the fatigues that come when ye're goin' to 'ave a snooze, the rations late arrivin' and 'arf poisonin' you when they come, the sweepin' and brushin' of the trenches, work for a 'ousemaid and not a soldier, and the ——"
Bill paused, sweating at every pore.
"Strike me ginger, balmy, and stony," Bill concluded, "if it were not for these few things the life in the trenches would be one of the cushiest in the world."