Now it can be Told by Philip Gibbs — Read

In those long days of trench warfare and stationary lines it was boredom that was the worst malady of the mind; a large, overwhelming boredom to thousands of men who were in exile from the normal interests of life and from the activities of brain-work; an intolerable, abominable boredom, sapping the willpower, the moral code, the intellect; a boredom from which there seemed no escape except by death, no relief except by vice, no probable or possible change in its dreary routine. It was bad enough in the trenches, where men looked across the parapet to the same corner of hell day by day, to the same dead bodies rotting by the edge of the same mine-crater, to the same old sandbags in the enemy's line, to the blasted tree sliced by shellfire, the upturned railway-truck of which only the metal remained, the distant fringe of trees like gallows on the skyline, the broken spire of a church which could be seen in the round O of the telescope when the weather was not too misty. In "quiet" sections of the line the only variation to the routine was the number of casualties day by day, by casual shellfire or snipers' bullets, and that became part of the boredom. "What casualties? " asked the adjutant in his dugout.

"Two killed, three wounded, sir."