But again I heard their laughter and an old song whistled vilely out of tune, but cheerful to the tramp of their feet. They were going back to the trenches after a spell in a rest-camp, to the same old business of whizz-bangs and pip-squeaks, and dugouts, and the smell of wet clay and chloride of lime, and the life of earth-men who once belonged to a civilization which had passed. And they went whistling on their way, because it was the very best thing to do.
One picked up the old landmarks again, and got back into the “feel” of the war zone. There were the five old windmills of Cassel that wave their arms up the hill road, and the estaminets by which one found one's way down country lanes—“The Veritable Cuckoo” and “The Lost Corner” and “The Flower of the Fields”—and the first smashed roofs and broken barns which led to the area of constant shell-fire. Ugh!
So it was still going on, this bloody murder! There were some more cottages down in the village, where we had tea a month before. And in the market-place of a sleepy old town the windows were mostly broken and some shops had gone into dust and ashes. That was new since we last passed this way.
London was only seven hours away, but the hours on leave there seemed a year ago already. The men who had come back, after sleeping in civilization with a blessed sense of safety, had a few minutes of queer surprise that, after all, this business of war was something more real than a fantastic nightmare, and then put on their moral cloaks against the chill and grim reality, for another long spell of it. Very quickly the familiarity of it all came back to them and became the normal instead of the abnormal. They were back again to the settled state of war, as boys go back to public schools after the wrench from home, and find that the holiday is only the incident and school the more enduring experience.
There were no new impressions, only the repetition of old impressions. So I found when I heard the guns again and watched the shells bursting about Ypres and over Kemmel Ridge and Messines church tower.
Two German airplanes passed overhead, and the hum of their engines was loud in my ears as I lay in the grass. Our shrapnel burst about them, but did not touch their wings. All around there was the slamming of great guns, and I sat chewing a bit of straw by the side of a shell-hole, thinking in the same old way of the utter senselessness of all this noise and hate and sudden death which encircled me for miles. No amount of meditation would screw a new meaning out of it all. It was just the commonplace of life out here.
The routine of it went on. The officer who came back from home stepped into his old place, and after the first greeting of, “Hullo, old man! Had a good time?” found his old job waiting for him. So there was a new brigadier-general? Quick promotion, by Jove!
Four men had got knocked out that morning at D4, and it was rotten bad luck that the sergeant-major should have been among them. A real good fellow. However, there's that court martial for this afternoon, and, by the by, when is that timber coming up? Can't build the new dugout if there's no decent wood to be got by stealing or otherwise. You heard how the men got strafed in their billets the other day? Dirty work!
The man who had come back went into the trenches and had a word or two with the N.C.O.'s. Then he went into his own dugout. The mice had been getting at his papers. Oh yes, that's where he left his pipe! It was lying under the trestle-table, just where he dropped it before going on leave. The clay walls were a bit wet after the rains. He stood with a chilled feeling in this little hole of his, staring at every familiar thing in it.
Tacked to the wall was the portrait of a woman. He said good-by to her at Victoria Station. How long ago? Surely more than seven hours, or seven years... Outside there were the old noises. The guns were at it again. That was a trench-mortar. The enemy's eight-inch howitzers were plugging away. What a beastly row that machine-gun was making! Playing on the same old spot. Why couldn't they leave it alone, the asses?... Anyhow, there was no doubt about it—he had come back again. Back to the trenches and the same old business.