“He looks so like a fragment of civilian England, strayed incongruously into these warlike areas. One might say he smells of the comic paper, of the Music Hall, of the comic British workingman, were it not that there is a twist in the humour of it all that moves to other things than happy laughter . . . .
“It is a sorry jest that they, these unfit, the delvers of the earth, simple and twisted labourers with a Saxon faith in beer, should be the material in which war and the very great work out their soaring ambitions. . . . . But I am sometimes solaced by the feeling that their miseries are not very much grosser than those in which a grateful country found them when war made her cognisant of their civic existence.”
Labour Battalion Man.
Back to the Waggon Lines after Polygon Wood.
“The quarter-master had spent a feverish day gathering what comforts he could for the returning braves, fussing about like a good housewife expecting the return of her lord. Begging and borrowing and by less legitimate means accumulating those things that would make it something of a home-coming—the return to this spot—desolate and shell shriven by the shells of three years and the bombs of last night, but at the worst a haven of effeminate ease to the home-comers.
“The cooks had worked with an energy that is explained by the fact that love and kindness are best expressed in the primitive world by food and, sentimental though it sounds, they wanted to show both of those things. Those profane slushies were the representatives of that fundamental and admirable human instinct to comfort the stricken with food, to gorge the tired hero.
“The strays began to arrive alter midnight, in ones and twos and threes, directed by the battalion guides posted on the route, and from then onward the groups thickened and dispersed and gathered again around the cookers that shone like lode stars in the gloom. They came down the road out of the night asking for A company, B company, C company, leaning well forward to balance the light pack on the shoulders, the silent, the garrulous, the boisterous and the grim, and presenting their dixies for stew on the right, tea on the left. . . .