One tale was most popular, most mirth-arousing in the early days of the war.
“Where's your prisoner?” asked an Intelligence officer waiting to receive a German sent down from the trenches under escort of an honest corporal.
“I lost him on the way, sir,” said the corporal.
“Lost him?”
The corporal was embarrassed.
“Very sorry, sir. My feelings overcame me, sir. It was like this, sir. The man started talking on the way down. Said he was thinking of his poor wife. I'd been thinking of mine, and I felt sorry for him. Then he mentioned as how he had two kiddies at home. I 'ave two kiddies at 'ome, sir, and I couldn't 'elp feeling sorry for him. Then he said as how his old mother had died awhile ago and he'd never see her again. When he started cryin' I was so sorry for him I couldn't stand it any longer, sir. So I killed the poor blighter.”
Our men in the trenches, and out of them, up to the waist in water sometimes, lying in slimy dugouts, lice—eaten, rat-haunted, on the edge of mine-craters, under harassing fire, with just the fluke of luck between life and death, seized upon any kind of joke as an excuse for laughter, and many a time in ruins and in trenches and in dugouts I have heard great laughter. It was the protective armor of men's souls. They knew that if they did not laugh their courage would go and nothing would stand between them and fear.
“You know, sir,” said a sergeant-major, one day, when I walked with him down a communication trench so waterlogged that my top-boots were full of slime, “it doesn't do to take this war seriously.”
And, as though in answer to him, a soldier without breeches and with his shirt tied between his legs looked at me and remarked, in a philosophical way, with just a glint of comedy in his eyes:
“That there Grand Fleet of ours don't seem to be very active, sir. It's a pity it don't come down these blinkin' trenches and do a bit of work!”