A note of a train of thought forced upon me hereabouts may find a place here, as it was set down.

(Feb. 4.) It was nothing more nor less than the appearance at dinner to-day of a bully stew and a sort of ration lime juice, which drove my thoughts, always willing to be driven in that direction, towards a nervous period of 1916, my initiation into trench warfare. The meal was something of a facsimile; and soon after it, by a coincidence, I was sitting under the scissors of a volunteer barber much as once after such a dinner I sat in the alleyway by company headquarters, opposite the red roofs of Auchy. The Bonadventure’s bridge, I meditated as I endured the shears of a B.E.F. man again, looked not unlike those so-called “communication trenches” in the Richebourg district, those make-believes; and, as the steam-valve suddenly made me jump with its thudding volley of minor explosions, I experienced an echo of the ancient terrors in those same scantily covered ways when cross-firing machine-guns opened upon my working-party.

The lime juice, in the present case, was of a milder disposition than that to which we were accustomed. Yet there was perceptible in it that uncivilized strength which proved it to come of the same honest origin. We were, I must confess–it is not too late–much lacking in our appreciation of that uncompromising, biting liquid which circulated in the trenches, carried in jars which should have been, it was felt, carrying rum. In itself a sort of candid friend, that lime juice lacked advancement through faults not its own. I mean, there was the chlorinated water, which for all its virtues was hardly popular, and there was the sugar, which was half-and-half, associating, very friendly, with tea dust. Moreover, this same sugar, in its nocturnal progress at the bottom of a sandbag, while its carrier now stepped into an artificial lake and now lay down for the bullets of Quinque Jimmy to pass by unimpeded, had acquired an interspersion of hairy particles; as generally did our loaves of bread, which in some cases might easily be supposed to be wearing wigs. In this manner, the germ-destroyer, the intrusion of tea dust and the moulted coat of sandbags, combined to prevent the lime juice, like crabbed poet, “from being as generally tasted as he deserved to be.”

At Company Headquarters, too, there was often in those easy times a rival beverage. Here and there a messenger might be sent back to an estaminet and return to the war with comforts within a couple of hours.

Yet I myself did my best to cultivate the “lime-juice habit,” and to me it remains an integral part of the interiors, gone but not forgotten, of many a Rotten Row in the BÉthune Sectors. I see its gloomy and mottled surface, in the aluminium tumbler, besides my platter of “meat and vegetable” or (as to-day) of bully rehabilitated by the smoky cooks; and about me the shape of the lean-to dugout rises sufficiently high for a tall man to enter without going on all fours. Here, is the earth settee, running round three sides of the table, there, the glory hole in which, one at a time, we crawl to sleep, with a fine confused bedding of British Warms and sandbags. The purple typescript of Comic Cuts,^[1] in which what imagination and telescope has striven to reveal of the “other fellow,” mind, body and soul, is set in military prose, flaps neglectedly from its nail. In their furious tints, the ladies of the late Kirchner beam sweetly upon him who sets put on patrol and him who returns; while in the convenient niches between the walls and the corrugated iron roof above, which as a protection might perhaps amount to the faith of the ostrich, Mills bombs and revolvers and ammunition nestle.

There, given the noise of shells travelling over, trench mortar bombs dropping short, machine guns firing high–or of shells alighting abruptly on the parados, trench mortar bombs thundering into the next traverse, machine guns in spitfire temper stripping the top layer of sandbags–the boyish gay P. would with his subalterns pore over the maps, receive with sinking heart the ominous “secret and confidential” and “very secret” messages brought in by those fine youths the runners; fill in, not without murmurings, those pro forma’s which at one time seemed likely to turn fighting into clerkship, or “censor” those long pages of homely scrawl in copying pencil which were to keep up yet a day more the spirits of sweethearts, mothers and wives.

Thus the particular memories of trenches and our times and seasons in them, roused by such a light matter as this which has aroused them now, pass with the greatest emotion before the mind. It is not fashionable to talk of the war. Is the counsel, then, to follow the Psalmist:

One has not to follow him very long in that.

One wonders, though, how the Psalmist himself, had he been one of us, would have found means to communicate his strange undertones of experience, according to their significance for himself? To whom would it be of interest, if he described such a particle as St. Vaast Keep on the Richebourg road, though he saw daily again in some odd way its sandbagged posts with the fine wood panels from the shell-like house beside built in?–seen once, for a lifetime. Or Port Arthur, that wreckage of a brewery near Neuve Chapelle–why should every yard of its flimsy fortification be coexistent with me? I could lead the hearer through its observation-posts, its emplacements, its warrens for human beings, its relics of other days, with practical and geographical accuracy; but the words would not contain my own sense of the place, which from the very first I never needed nor endeavoured to put into words. And yet it is intense and instant. The reflection of the crazy stronghold as it was, and with what it meant for me, comes in a second when my thoughts lie that way, and it is but one of a series of equal insistency. It is no question, this, of looking back on such a past as in any degree glorious, of shirking the anguish that overcast any adventurous gleam that these scenes awakened. Their memory is as sombre and as frightening as they were themselves in their aspect and their annals.

and when they will come, the mind is led by them as birds are said to be lured by the serpent’s eye. A tune, a breath of sighing air, an odour–and there goes the foolish ghost back to Flanders.

Even here, I suppose, in the Atlantic’s healthy blue, I am at the mercy of a coincidence in lime-juice.

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