Chapter XVI: In the Trenches

"Punch" represents a soldier newly arrived at the front asking, "What's the programme?" An old hand in the trenches answers, "Well, you lie down in this water, and you get peppered all day and night, and you have the time of your life!" The new arrival remarks, "Sounds like a bit of all right; I'm on it!"

This was a joke, but it was very like what our soldiers seem to have felt. One of them, for instance, in the Durham Light Infantry, wrote: "We are in the thick of it, and enjoying it. We had an engagement on Sunday, and managed to drive back the enemy. We are still at it, but as happy as sand-boys. When I read in books of the coolness of men under fire I thought somebody was blathering, but after eight weeks of it I can say that no book has ever done justice to the coolness of British soldiers under conditions that would try anybody. The night I was hit we were just leaving the trenches for an interview with some Germans who were trying some of their fancy tricks about our left. As we stood up there was a ghastly shower of bullets and shells bursting all round. Into it we had to go, and as we looked ahead one of our chaps said, 'I think we'll have to get our great coats, boys; it's raining bullets to-night, and we'll get wet to the skin if we're not careful.' Men of C company started laughing, and then they took to singing, 'Put up your umbrella when it comes on wet.' The song was taken up all along as we went into the thick of it, and some of us were humming it as we dashed into the German trenches. The Germans must have thought us a mad crew. Another day there was an officer of the Cheshire Regiment who was a bit of a cricketer in his day. He got uncomfortable after lying in the trenches for so long, and he raised his leg in shifting his position. He was hit in the thigh, and as he fell back all he said was, 'Out, by George! leg-before-the-wicket, as the umpire would say, Better luck next innings.'"

A trooper of the 15th Hussars wrote: "The horror of the nights spent in the trenches in our soaking wet clothes will never leave me while life lasts. The bare thought of it sends rheumatic pains all through me. We minded that more than the German fire, but you must understand that this isn't a grouse. Soldiers know that they have to put up with that sort of thing in war time, and our officers were no better off. Some of them were worse. There was an officer of the artillery who gave up his blanket to a poor devil who had the shivers something awful. The officer caught pneumonia and died a week later at the base hospital. One night, when it was unusually wet and miserable, and some of us had got all the humps that were ever seen on a camel's back, the assembly sounded, and we were paraded at midnight. We fell in, glad to have something to take us away from our miserable surroundings. Talk about fight? Why, we fought like demons. We had all got the 'get at 'em' fever."

A private of the West Kent Regiment wrote to his brother: "We have been living the life of rabbits, for we burrowed ourselves in trenches at ----, and here we remained for over fifty hours. It was an exciting and not unpleasant experience. The bursting of shells overhead was continuous, and it became monotonous. One chap used to raise a cheer each time shrapnel and shell spoke, making such remarks as 'There's another rocket, John.'"

Another when hit in the knee calmly remarked, "I can't play now on Christmas Day for Maidstone United."

"If all goes well we are going to have a football match to-morrow, as I have selected a team from our lot to play the Borderers, who are always swanking what they can do."

"There's a corporal of a regiment, that I won't name, that was a ticket collector on the railway before the war, and when he was called back to the colours he wasn't able to forget his old trade. One day he was in charge of a patrol that surprised a party of Germans in a wood, and, instead of the usual call to surrender, he sang out, 'Tickets, please!' The Germans seemed to understand what he was driving at, for they surrendered at once, but that chap will never hear the end of the story, for when everything else ceases to amuse in the trenches you have only to shout out 'Tickets, please!' to set everybody in fits."

An officer wrote: "We did seventy-eight hours on end in the trenches last spell. This morning we had a football match. Football is the only thing that takes the stiffness out of the men after being long in the trenches. They are such sportsmen."

A Scottish Borderer described life in the trenches in the following extract from a letter: "To kill time we played banker with cigarette cards. We become rather like schoolboys over food. One of our mess had a small tin of biscuits sent through the post yesterday; we all crowed over it just like youngsters. One's joys are of the primitive type when, like our ancestors, we turn to live in the fields and woods again. A padre turned up yesterday, and at night (it was not safe to begin earlier) we held a service at which a great number of our men attended. We are a light-hearted lot and so are our officers. We dug out for them a kind of a subterranean mess-room where they took their meals. One fellow decorated it with a few cigarette cards and some pictures he had cut out of a French paper. Their grub was not exactly what they would get at the Cecil. A jollier and kinder lot of officers you would not meet in a day's march. One officer who was well stocked with cigarettes divided them among his men, and we were able to repay him for his kindness by digging him out from his mess-room. A number of shells tore up the turf, and the roof and sides collapsed like a castle built of cards, burying him and two others. They were in a nice pickle, but we got them out safe and sound. There are apple trees over our trench, and we have to wait till the Germans knock them down for us. You ought to see us scramble down our holes when we hear a shell coming."

The experience of ten days in the trenches was thus described: "We dig ourselves deeper and deeper into the earth, till we are completely sheltered from above, coming out now and then, when things are quiet, to cook and eat, making any moves that may be necessary under cover of darkness. Ammunition, food, and drinking water are brought in by night; the wounded are sent away to the hospital. We do not wash, we do not change our clothes; we sleep at odd intervals whenever we can get the chance, and daily we get more accustomed to our lot. It is rather an odd existence. Little holes dug beneath the parapet just big enough to sit in are our homes, with straw and perhaps a sack or two for warmth. The cold is intense at night, and those good ladies who have made us woollen caps and comforters have earned our thanks; also, we are getting used to it. The coldest moments are those when there is an alarm of a night attack, and we spring from our sleep to stand shivering behind the parapet peering over the wall to see our enemies, and firing at the flashes of their rifles. It is exciting. Every time you put as much as your little finger over a trench there is a hail of bullets."

A regiment was in trenches under fire and returning it. Two privates noticed that the French interpreter was placed at a spot where the trench was not wide enough to enable him to make proper use of his rifle. "The Frenchman isn't comfortable," said one, and both left the trench, spade in hand, knowing well that they were serving the enemy as targets, dug out the trench in front of their French comrade, and returned with unbroken calm to their own places and their rifles.

There was a humorous attempt to be homelike. A sergeant-major by the name of Kenilworth put outside his bivouac "Kenilworth Lodge. Tradesmen's entrance at the back. Beware of the dog." The dog was picked up at Rouen.

Other shelters were named Hotel Cecil, Ritz Hotel, Billet Doux, Villa De Dug Out, etc. Soldiers called the ordinary trenches, "Little wet homes in a sewer."

Lieut. H.J.S. Shields, R.A.M.C., described his experiences in the trenches in a letter to his father. "The Germans have a battery of four guns six miles off, firing a 90lb. shell very accurately. It makes a terrible bang, a miniature earthquake, and leaves a hole 4ft. deep and 20ft. in circumference. We had about 40 within 100 yards of us this afternoon, the nearest about five yards off. Two of them have been christened 'Weeping Willy' and 'Calamity Jane.' You can hear the shell screaming towards you. With a cry of 'Here comes Jane!' all dive into their respective holes. As a matter of fact, except for two occasions, when it killed and wounded about eighty men altogether, it is less dangerous than the shrapnel, which hails once or twice an hour. Two medical officers have been killed up here, and two wounded; one had his leg blown off by 'Jane.' I make a point of entirely disregarding fire when it comes to the point of seeing to a wounded man, and pay no attention to it. I don't believe precautions, beyond the ordinary one of not exposing yourself more than can be helped, do any good, and I am rather a fatalist. After all, I always think if one is killed doing one's duty one can't help it, and it is the best way of coming to an end. I mentally repeat that to myself when I am getting plugged at. Somehow, I don't feel that God means me to get killed, though before I came out I had a conviction I should not come back alive."

Quartermaster-Sergeant A.W. Harrison, 1st Battalion King's Liverpool Regiment, wrote: "Of course we are ready to move forward at short notice, but I am afraid the first three months have played havoc with one's nerves. No description of mine could give you even a faint impression of the present war. Can you imagine one living, day in day out, for three or four weeks in a trench 6ft. deep by 3ft. wide, with such cover as one can make with a few branches and a little straw, not daring to leave it except for counter-attack, smuggling in your food and ammunition under cover of darkness, and perhaps being shelled hours at a time without seeing a single foe? Fancy not shaving nor even washing for this length of time! If you can imagine all that you will have just an inkling of what not only the private but the officer as well has to undergo. Certainly there has never been less than three to one against us. Yet, thank God! the Liverpools' line has never been broken. Compliments from our General have been showered on us, but I have seen very little mention of us in the British Press. Our men laugh and say, 'What! Do you want jam on it?' They refer to the way some of the favourite battalions have been lauded for events which have been almost everyday occurrences with us."

A private of the Royal Scots wrote to his wife: "We were thirteen days in the trenches at one place, where we only had to stand up a minute to bring a battery of German artillery on the top of us, and for hours we had to lie still or be blown to atoms. But never mind, the sun will shine again."

A British soldier described in a letter a curious Sunday morning occurrence: "While the shells were flying we heard the most impressive music. There were strains like hymns, several hundred voices evidently taking part. We listened, missing not a bar except when a shell fell and deafened us for a moment, and then we discovered that it was a big body of Germans holding some sort of Sabbath festival at the other side of the little village, hardly two hundred yards away. One section of them was firing shells; the other was singing hymns; and we were playing nap!"

Sergeant Harlow, of the Connaught Rangers, wrote the following in a letter: "When we were in the trenches a chum of mine, Johnnie Salmon, said that we would be the better of a cup of tea. At the time there was a heavy artillery fusilade from the enemy's lines. To make the tea Salmon had to enter a deserted house close to the trenches. The water in the kettle had reached boiling point, and he was about to make the tea, when crash came a 'Jack Johnson' and whipped the roof from the house. Fortunately Salmon when he extricated himself from the debris found he was uninjured, and walking over to me he nonchalantly remarked, 'The next time you want tea, Harlow, you can go and make it yourself.' He was apparently more annoyed at having lost the tea than startled at his narrow escape."

Rifleman Edward Strong wrote to his mother: "Since I served my apprenticeship as a bootmaker I have had many strange jobs, but I don't think I've ever had anything to equal my experience last week, when I had to mend the boots of my chums in the trenches under fire. It was exciting work. Just when I was heeling one boot a shell dropped near by, and I had to run for it. When I came back the boot had disappeared, and you can bet the chap it belonged to was very cross over it. I offered to get him a new pair of boots from one of the Germans lying dead over the way, but he wouldn't be pacified. As you may imagine, there is great difficulty in getting leather for work of this kind, but we solve it by collecting the boots from the dead and cutting them up for making necessary repairs."