“Je m'en fiche de la mort!” (“I don't care a damn about death.”)
I had the same answer from other girls in other places.
That was the mise-en-scene of the battle of Loos—those mining towns behind the lines, then a maze of communication trenches entered from a place called Philosophe, leading up to the trench-lines beyond Vermelles, and running northward to Cambrin and Givenchy, opposite Hulluch, Haisnes, and La Bassee, where the enemy had his trenches and earthworks among the slag heaps, the pit-heads, the corons and the cites, all broken by gun-fire, and nowhere a sign of human life aboveground, in which many men were hidden.
Storms of gun-fire broke loose from our batteries a week before the battle. It was our first demonstration of those stores of high-explosive shells which had been made by the speeding up of munition-work in England, and of a gun-power which had been growing steadily since the coming out of the New Army. The weather was heavy with mist and a drizzle of rain. Banks of smoke made a pall over all the arena of war, and it was stabbed and torn by the incessant flash of bursting shells. I stood on the slag heap, staring at this curtain of smoke, hour after hour, dazed by the tumult of noise and by that impenetrable veil which hid all human drama. There was no movement of men to be seen, no slaughter, no heroic episode—only through rifts in the smoke the blurred edges of slag heaps and pit-heads, and smoking ruins. German trenches were being battered in, German dugouts made into the tombs of living men, German bodies tossed up with earth and stones—all that was certain but invisible.
“Very boring,” said an officer by my side. “Not a damn thing to be seen.”
“Our men ought to have a walk-over,” said an optimist. “Any living German must be a gibbering idiot with shell-shock.”
“I expect they're playing cards in their dugouts,” said the officer who was bored. “Even high explosives don't go down very deep.”
“It's stupendous, all the same. By God! hark at that! It seems more than human. It's like some convulsion of nature.”
“There's no adventure in modern war,” said the bored man. “It's a dirty scientific business. I'd kill all chemists and explosive experts.”
“Our men will have adventure enough when they go over the top at dawn. Hell must be a game compared with that.”