Stretcher-bearers near Martinpuich.
“They move with their stretchers like boats on a slowly tossing sea, rising and falling with the shell riven contours of what was yesterday no man’s land, slipping, sliding, with heels worn raw by the downward suck of the Somme mud. Slow and terribly sure through and over everything, like things that have got neither eyes to see terrible things nor ears to heed them . . . . The fountains that sprout roaring at their feet fall back to the earth in a lace-work of fragments—the smoke clears and they, momentarily obscured, are again moving on as they were moving on before: a piece of mechanism guiltless of the weaknesses of weak flesh, one might say. But to say this is to rob their heroism of its due—of the credit that goes to inclinations conquered and panics subdued down in the privacy of the soul. It is to make their heroism look like a thing they find easy. No man of woman born could find it that. These men and all the men precipitated into the liquescent world of the line are not heroes from choice—they are heroes because someone has got to be heroic. It is to add insult to the injury of this world war to say that the men fighting it find it agreeable or go into it with light hearts.”
Stretcher-bearers near Martinpuich.
“Waiting for the Stew.”
“. . . . A dixie of stew for each company was to arrive with the machine guns at the pill box at 12.30 and then into the line. But there was a block on the corduroy—Fritz was putting salvoes onto the road and the cookers could not get past the jam at ——, so the dixies were man-handled from there across the duckboards where duckboards were and across the mud where they were not to the pill box. They arrived there at three o’clock. During the wait the innocent ‘J——,’ the Mule King, the Prince of the Packs, was roundly consigned to many kinds of torment, the dreadful possibility of going in without that stew began to haunt the strongest and the bravest. . . . . It was a process of sitting still in the dripping cover of that triumph of German architecture. Sexton House, and watching the appetite grow, assisted by some blood-curdling comments of the Doc’s.”