“One so often sees them—these seemingly purposeless groups, awaiting events with the grim immobility of Sioux braves . . . . doing nothing in places where no man would be for choice. Stretcher bearers they may be, or runners, or a company that has left the sickly foetid odours of the dug outs—reminiscent of fowl houses and tramps in summer—to make room for the relief, and is now standing by in all the taciturn boredom of that condition—silent men whom you pass, with all their taciturnity, with the feeling that they have passed a verdict on you annihilating in its justice. . . . .
“It is men like myself—timid peepers into forbidden places, who look and go, who keep their virginal wonderment at what are the commonplaces of the trenches. And these silent watchers are such a commonplace. . . . Perhaps the men familiar with it are unimpressed by the statuesque quietism of these men in places of risk and great events. . . . with their perpetual air of prisoners innocent and awaiting an unjust sentence. . . . They lounge there awaiting something that will send them into the glare of that limelight again like supers in a tragedy in which the supers are greater tragedians than the heroes.”
“Hanging About.”
Down from the Ridge.
“. . . . and Brigades of the —— English division came down, fresh from those quagmires in front of Passchaendael. Officers and men, they were in the last stage of exhaustion—in that condition where every forward step is a battleground on which the desire not to take it has to be met and conquered before that step is taken. They had foot slogged it all the way from C——. W——., and had only stayed there an hour—they looked what they were, men really dead but that their hearts would not let them lie down and die . . . . They spoke with that level exhausted voice of overdone men—if they spoke at all . . . . The little subaltern to whom we told the distance to S——, groaned aloud—but refused the drink we offered—I think it was that he would not allow himself in their extremity something the men could not get . . . . It was a division against which Luck had set its face. Fortune has her favourites among the divisions, and others she pursues with the vindictiveness of an evil step-mother. Every ill circumstance contrivable by collusion between the weather, the enemy, and something we will call Mischance seems to lay in wait for the Brigades upon which the disfavour of Fate has fallen. Poor ——, it was one of them, unlucky on going in, unlucky while in, and unlucky on coming out. . . .”
Down from the Ridge.