The visualising of unstinted civilian meals is a prevalent pastime. Men sit at the mouths of their dug-outs and relate the minutiæ of the first dinner at home. Some men excel in this. They do it with a carnal power of graphic description which makes one fairly pine. One has heard a colonel-chaplain talk for two hours of nothing but grub, and at the end convincingly exempt himself from any charge of carnal-mindedness. Truly we are a people whose god is their belly. But that we never admitted until this period of enforced deprivation.
Those comforts embraced by the use of good tobacco and deliverance from vermin at night are the most desired; both hard to procure. There is somehow a great gulf fixed between the civilian quality of any tobacco and the make-up of the same brand for the Army. Once in six months a friend in Australia dispatches a parcel of cigars. Therein lies the entrance to a fleeting paradise—fleeting indeed when one’s comrades have sniffed or ferreted out the key. After all, the pipe, given reasonably good tobacco, gives the entrée to the paradise farthest removed from that of the fool.
Of the plague of nocturnal vermin little need be said explicitly. The locomotion of the day almost dissipates the evil. But it makes night hideous.
The tendency is to retire late and thus abridge the period of persecution. One’s friends drop in for a yarn or a smoke after tea, and the dreaded hour of turning-in is postponed by reminiscent chit-chat and the late preparation of supper. One renews, here, a surprising bulk of old acquaintance. Old college chums are dug out, and one talks back and lives a couple of hours in the glory of days that have passed. Believe it not that there is no deliverance possible from the hardness of active service. The retrospect, and the prospect, and the ever-present faculty of visualisation are ministering angels sent to minister.
Mails, too, are an anodyne. Their arrival eclipses considerations of life and death—of fighting and the landing of rations. The mail-barge coming in somehow looms larger than a barge of supplies. Mails have been arriving weekly for six months, yet no one is callous to them.
Of incoming mail, letters stand inevitably first. They put a man at home for an hour.
But so does the local newspaper. Perusing that, he is back at the old matutinal habit of picking at the news over his eggs and coffee, racing against the suburban business train. Intimate associations hang about the reading of the local sheet—domestic and parochial associations almost as powerful as are brought by letters.
And what shall be said of parcels from home? The boarding-school home-hamper is at last superseded. No son, away at Grammar School, ever pursued his voyage of discovery through tarts, cakes and preserves, sweets, pies and fruit with the intensity of gloating expectation in which a man on Gallipoli discloses the contents of his “parcel.”
“AT THE LANDING, AND HERE EVER SINCE”