Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

One evening about a fortnight later I was down in that too familiar front-line dugout with Barton, who had just returned from leave and was unable to disguise his depression. I wasn't feeling over bright myself after tramping to and fro in the gluey trenches all day. A little rain made a big difference to life up there, and the weather had been wet enough to make the duckboards wobble when one stepped on them. I'd got sore feet and a trench-mouth and food tasted filthy. And the Boche trench-mortars had been strafing us more than usual that evening. Probably I've been smoking too much lately, I thought, knocking my pipe out against one of the wooden props which held up the cramped little den, and staring irritably at my mud-encumbered boots, for I was always trying to keep squalor at bay and the discomfort of feeling dirty and tickly all over was almost as bad as a bombardment. It certainly wasn't much of a place to be low-spirited in, so I tried reading the paper which the Company-Sergeant-Major had just delivered when he came down for the rum ration. The rum-jar lived under Barton's bed; having been poured into some tin receptacle, the rum was carried cautiously upstairs to be tipped into the men's tea-dixies.

"Fancy Kitchener being drowned in the North Sea! " I remarked, looking up from the Daily Mail which was making the most of that historic event. (It seemed a long time since I rode past his park wall in Kent when I was with the Yeomanry; it would be two years next September, though it wasn't much use looking as far ahead as that, with all these preparations going on for the "Big Push. ") Barton was scribbling away with his indelible pencil -- filling in all that bosh which made Brigade think they were busy. "If you want my opinion," he grumbled, "I believe those damned Irish had a hand in Kitchener being drowned. I'd like to see that fatuous island of theirs sunk under the sea. " Barton had an irrational dislike of the Irish, and he always blamed anything on them if he could. He wouldn't even admit that Ireland was an agricultural country, and since the Easter Rebellion in Dublin it wasn't safe to show him a bottle of Irish whisky. "I've never met an Irishman with any more sense than that mouse! " he exclaimed. A mouse was standing on its head in the sugar-basin, which was made of metal and contained soft sugar. He eyed the mouse morosely, as though accusing it of Irish ancestry. "This time three nights ago my wife and I were having dinner at the Café Royal. Upstairs at the Café Royal -- best food in London, and as good as ever even now. I tell you, Kangar, it's too much of a bloody contrast, coming back to all this. " There was a muffled Wump and both candles went out. Something heavy had burst outside our door. Lighting the candles, I thought I'd just as soon be upstairs as down in this musty limbo. In about an hour I should be out with the wiring-party, dumping concertina wire in the shell-holes along the edge of the craters. I wondered if I should ever get a Blighty wound. One of our best officers had been hit last night while out with the wirers. This was Bill Eaves, who had been a Classical Scholar at Cambridge and had won medals there for writing Greek and Latin epigrams. Now he'd got a nice bullet wound in the shoulder, with the muscles damaged enough to keep him in England several months. And two nights ago Ormand and a Sandhurst boy named Harris had been hit while on a working party. Ormand's was a "cushy" shell splinter; but Harris had got his knee smashed up, and the doctor said he would probably be out of the war for good. It was funny to think of young Harris being hit in the first twenty-four hours of his first tour of trenches.