“No. We just held on. We are the lot that just stuck to A, and weren’t shifted out of B.”
And the response will be a disappointed and belittling “Oh yes!”
But, when it is understood, this long endurance will be seen to be something very notable in itself, and, more than that, an essential element in the slow and great victory. Movements are picturesque, but in order that something should move it was necessary that something should stand still. The ends of a lever move effectively only when it is based on an unmoving fulcrum. If the rivet of a scissors did not stand fast, the blades would cut little. And the tale of the units to whom it came merely to hold the line is the great tale.
In the trenches it is the day-by-dayness that tells and tries. It is always the same tone of duty: certain days in billets, certain days in reserve, certain days in the front trench. One is reminded of those endless chains by which some well-buckets are worked, except that nothing or very little ever seems to come up in the bucket to pay the labour of turning. General Joffre as grignotard is one of the phrase-makers of the war. But this nibbling process works both ways. We nibble; they nibble. They are nibbled; we are nibbled. A few casualties every turn, another grating of the saw-teeth of death and disease, and before very long a strong unit is weak. And, of course, the nerve-strain is not slight. Everybody going up to the trenches from the C. O. down to the last arrival in the last draft knows it to be moral certainty that there are two or three that will not march back. Everybody knows that it may be anybody. In the trenches death is random, illogical, devoid of principle. One is shot not on sight, but on blindness, out of sight. You feel that a man who is hit has had worse luck than a golfer whose opponent holes out in one at a blind hole. Yet these things do happen. Very few people are hit by lightning, and in a storm it is a comfort to remember this. But some people are hit by lightning. Here one is in a place where a very trivial piece of geographical bad luck may be fatal. There is much to nibble the nerves.
One likes to image this whole task of holding the line under the image of a sentry-group. This is not to depreciate any other man or any other function. From colonel down all the world here has the same job. The sentry-group is the symbol. A figure in khaki stands on the shelf of fire-bag, his steel helmet forming a serious bulge over the parapet as he peers through the night towards the German lines. His comrade sits on the shelf beside him waiting to help, to report, to carry the gas-alarm, the alarm of an attack. Over there in front across No Man’s Land there are shell-holes and unburied men. Strange things happen there. Patrols and counter-patrols come and go. There are two sinister fences of barbed wire, on the barbs of which blood-stained strips of uniform and fragments more sinister have been known to hang uncollected for a long time. The air is shaken with diabolical reverberations; it is stabbed with malign illumination as the Véry lights shoot up, broaden to a blaze, and go out. This contrast of night and light and gloom is trying to the eyes. The rifle-grenades and trench-mortars, flung at short range, that scream through the air are trying to the ears. They may drop a traverse away, and other men not charged for the moment with his duty may seek shelter. But not he. Strange things issue from No Man’s Land, and the eyes of the army never close or flinch. And so, strained, tense and immovable he leans and looks forward into the night of menace.
But the trench has not fallen. As for him, he carried his pack for Ireland and Europe, and now pack-carrying is over.
He has held the line.
III.—Rhapsody on Rats
What first strikes one in a trench is, contrary to report, not the Rat but the Slat. A trench-board is a sort of ladder, laid horizontally along a ditch of ill repute, and the rungs of this ladder are the slats. It is true that if this ladder were set upright it would be impossible to climb it, for the slats are too close together. Nevertheless, it has the form and aspirations of a ladder, and yearns towards the vertical. To follow the windings of the trench, this board is of necessity made in short sections. Now, one often enters a trench in the dark. Certain short boards have been displaced by the outgoing unit. An incautious foot, with, say, fifteen stone avoirdupois behind it, is set on one end, and the perpendicular ambition of the trench-board manifests itself in a jarring wallop of the other end on one’s tin hat. The slat decidedly strikes you.
It is unpleasant to walk on, as anybody who has ever laboriously evaded coal-cellar gratings will realise. It exists in numbers that have never been counted. You can walk from the North Sea to the foot-hills of the Alps with the soles of your boots continuously beslatted, save where there is an odd broken board which there has not been time to repair. At the end of the war there will probably be slat-excursions organised by American tourist companies—they are said to have already purchased the ground—with the privilege to each pilgrim of removing one slat as a souvenir. What is to be said for them is that they stand between you and a flounder along the bottom mud. In winter, when the drainage improvisations prove false, and the fighting ditches run hip-high, the foothold is to be valued. And now as to the rats.