“Without any anÆsthetic”—Tea at a dugout—Over the wires “German West Africa fallen”—Playing with death—A tragedy—Travelling the “narrow cut of earth”—Good manners of the trenches—And democracy—“The men who will rule England”—A periscope glance at the German trench—A “direct hit” for the British—“Bombing up ahead!”—A gas shell—Under heavy fire—“Like beating up grouse to the guns and we are the birds”—Crash!—And safe again!—A “dead heat” to cover—A touch of “nerves”—Back to the dead land behind the trenches.

At battalion headquarters in the front trenches the battalion surgeon had just amputated an arm which had been mauled by a shell.

“Without any anÆsthetic,” he explained. “No chance if we sent him back to the hospital. He would die on the way. Stood it very well. Already chirking up.”

A family practitioner at home, the doctor, when the war began, had left his practice to go with his Territorial battalion. He retains the family practitioner’s cheery, assuring manner. He is the kind of man who makes you feel better immediately he comes into the sick-room; who has already made you forget yourself when he puts his finger on your pulse. There are thousands of that kind at home. Probably you have sent a hurry telephone call for his like more than once.

“The same thing that we might have done in the Crimea,” he continued, “only we have antiseptics now. It’s wonderful how little you can work with and how excellent the results. Strong, healthy men, these, with great recuperative power and discipline and resolution—very different patients from those we usually operate on.”

Tea was served inside the battalion commander’s dugout. Tea is as essential every afternoon to the British as ice to the average American in summer. They don’t think of getting on without it if they can possibly have it, and it is part of the rations. As well take cigarettes away from those who smoke as tea from the British soldier.

It was very much like tea outside the trenches, so far as any signs of perturbation about shells and casualties were concerned. In that the battalion commander had to answer telegrams, it had the aspect of a busy man’s sandwich at his desk for luncheon. Good news to cheer the function had just come over the network of wires which connects up the whole army, from trenches to headquarters—good news in the midst of the shells.

German West Africa had fallen. Botha, who was fighting against the British fifteen years ago, had taken it fighting for the British. A suggestive thought that. It is British character that brings enemies like Botha into the fold; the old, good-natured, sportsmanlike, live-and-let-live idea, which has something to do with keeping the United States intact. A board with the news on it in German was put up over the British trenches. Naturally, the board was shot full of holes; for it is clear that the Germans are not yet ready to come into the British Empire.

“Hans and Jacob we have named them,” said the colonel, referring to two Germans who were buried back of his dugout. “It’s dull up here when the Boches are not shelling, so we let our imaginations play. We hold conversations with Hans and Jacob in our long watches. Hans is fat and cheerful and trusting. He believes everything that the Kaiser tells him and has a cheerful disposition. But Jacob is a professor and a fearful ‘strafer.’ It seems a little gruesome, doesn’t it, but not after you have been in the trenches for a while.”

A little gruesome—true! Not in the trenches—true, too! Where all is satire, no incongruity seems out of place. Life plays in and out with death; they intermingle; they look each other in the face and say, “I know you. We dwell together. Let us smile when we may, at what we may, to hide the character of our comradeship; for to-morrow—”

Only half an hour before one of the officers had been shot through the head by a sniper. He was a popular officer. The others had messed with him and marched with him and known him in the fulness of affection of comradeship in arms and dangers shared. A heartbreak for some home in England. No one dwelt on the incident. What was there to say? The trembling lip, trembling in spite of itself, was the only outward sign of the depth of feeling that words could not reflect, at tea in the dugout. The subject was changed to something about the living. One must carry on cheerfully; one must be on the alert; one must play his part serenely, unflinchingly, for the sake of the nerves around him and for his own sake. Such fortitude becomes automatic, it would seem. Please, I must not hesitate about having a slice of cake. They managed cake without any difficulty up there in the trenches. And who if not men in the trenches was entitled to cake, I should like to know?

“It was here that he was hit,” another officer said, as we moved on in the trench. “He was saying that the sandbags were a little weak there and a bullet might go through and catch a man, who thought himself safely under cover as he walked along. He had started to fix the sandbags himself when he got it. The bullet came right through the top of one of the bags in front of him.”

A bullet makes the merciful wound; and a bullet through the head is a simple way of going. The bad wounds come mostly from shells; but there is something about seeing any one hit by a sniper which is more horrible. It is a cold-blooded kind of killing, more suggestive of murder, this single shot from a sharpshooter waiting as patiently as a cat for a mouse, aimed definitely to take the life of one man.

Again we move on in that narrow cut of earth with its waiting soldiers, which the world knows so well from reading tours of the trenches. No one not on watch might show his head on an afternoon like this. The men were prisoners between those walls of earth; not even spectators of what the guns were doing; simply moles. They took it all as a part of the day’s work, with that singular, redoubtable combination of British phlegm and cheerfulness.

Of course, some of them were eating bread and marmalade and making tea. Where all the marmalade goes which Mr. Atkins uses for his personal munition in fighting the Germans puzzles the Army Service Corps, whose business it is to see that he is never without it. How could he sit so calmly under shell-fire without marmalade? Never! He would get fidgetty and forget his lesson, I am sure, like the boy who had the button which he was used to fingering removed before he went to recite.

Any minute a shell may come. Mr. Atkins does not think of that. Time enough to think after it has arrived. Then perhaps the burial party will be doing your thinking for you; or if not, the doctors and the nurses who look after you will.

I noted certain acts of fellowship of comrades who are all in the same boat and have learned unselfishness. When they got up to let you pass and you smiled your thanks, you received a much pleasanter smile in return than you will from many a well-fed gentleman, who has to stand aside to let you enter a restaurant. The manners of the trenches are good, better than in many places where good manners are a cult.

There is no better place to send a spoiled, undisciplined, bumptious youth than to a British trench. He would learn that there are other men in the world besides himself and that a shell can kill a rich brute or a selfish brute as readily as a poor man. Democracy there is in the trenches; the democracy where all men are in the presence of death and “hazing” parties need not be organised among the students.

But there is another and a greater element in the practical psychology of the trenches. These good-natured men, fighting the bitterest kind of warfare, without the signs of brutality which we associate with the prize fighter and the bully in their faces, know why they are fighting. They consider that their duty is in that trench, and that they could not have a title to manhood if they were not there. After the war the men who have been in the trenches will rule England. Their spirit and their thinking will fashion the new trend of civilisation, and the men who have not fought will bear the worst scars from the war.

Ridiculous it is that men should be moles, perhaps; but at the same time there is something sublime in the fellowship of their courage and purpose, as they “sit and take it,” or guard against attacks, without the passion of battle of the old days of excited charges and quick results, and watch the toll pass by from hour to hour. Borne by comrades pickaback we saw the wounded carried along that passage too narrow for a litter. A splash of blood, a white bandage, a limp form!

For the second permissible—periscopes are tempting targets—I looked through one over the top of the parapet. Another film! A big British lyddite shell went crashing into the German parapet. The dust from sandbags and dugouts merged into an immense cloud of ugly, black smoke. As the cloud rose, one saw the figure of a German dart out of sight; then nothing was visible but the gap which the explosion has made. No wise German would show himself there. British snipers were watching for him. At least half a dozen, perhaps a score, of men had been put out by this single “direct hit” of an h.e. (high explosive). Yes, the British gunners were shooting well, too. Other periscopic glimpses proved it.

Through the periscope we learned also that the two lines of sandbags of German and British trenches were drawing nearer together. Another wounded man was brought by.

“They’re bombing up ahead. He has just been hit by a bomb.” As we drew aside to make room for him to pass, once more the civilian realised his helplessness and unimportance. One soldier was worth ten Prime Ministers in that place. We were as conspicuously mal À propos as an outsider at a bank directors’ meeting or in a football scrimmage. The officer politely reminded us of the necessity of elbow room in the narrow quarters for the bombers, who were hidden from view by the zigzag traverses, and I was not sorry, though perhaps my companions were. If so, they did not say so, not being talkative men. We were not going to see that two hundred yards of captured trench that was beyond the bombing action, after all. Oh, the twinkle in that staff officer’s eye!

“A Boche gas shell!” we were told, as we passed an informal excavation in the communication trench on our way back. “Asphyxiating effect. No time to put on respirators when one explodes. Laid out half a dozen men like fish, gasping for air, but they will recover.”

“The Boches want us to hurry!” exclaimed L——.

They were giving the communication trench a turn at “strafing,” now, and shells were urgently dropping behind us. There was no use of trying to respond to one’s natural inclination to run away from the pursuing shower when you had to squeeze past soldiers as you went.

“But look at what we are going into! This is like beating up grouse to the guns, and we are the birds! I am wondering if I like it.”

We could tell what had happened in our absence in the support trench by the litter of branches and leaves and by the excavations made by shells. It was still happening, too. Another nine-inch, with your only view of your surroundings the wall of earth which you hugged. Crash—and safe again!

“Pretty!” L—— said, smiling. He was referring to the cloud of black smoke from the burst. Pretty is a favourite word of his. I find that men use habitual exclamations on such occasions. R——, also smiling, had said, “A black business, this!” a favourite expression with him.

“Yet—pretty!” R—— and I exclaimed together.

L—— took a sliver off his coat and offered it to us as a souvenir. He did not know that he had said “Pretty!” or R—— that he had said “A black business!” several times that afternoon; nor did I know that I had exclaimed “For the love of Mike!” Psychologists take notice; and golfers are reminded that their favourite expletives when they foozle will come perfectly natural to them when the Germans are “strafing.” Then another nine-inch, when we were out of the gallery in front of the warrens. My companions happened to be near a dugout. They did not go in tandem, but abreast. It was a “dead heat.” All that I could see in the way of cover was a wall of sandbags, which looked about as comforting as tissue paper in such a crisis.

At least, one faintly realised what it meant to be in the support trenches, where the men were still huddled in their caves. They never get a shot at the enemy or a chance to throw a bomb, unless they are sent forward to assist the front trenches in resisting an attack. It is for this purpose that they are kept within easy reach of the front trenches. They are like the prisoner tied to a chair-back, facing a gun.

“Yes, this was pretty heavy shell-fire,” said an officer, who ought to know. “Not so bad as on the trenches which the infantry are to attack—that is the first degree. You might call this the second.”

It was heavy enough to keep any writer from being bored. The second degree will do. We will leave the first till another time.

Later, when we were walking along a paved road, I heard what seemed the siren call of another nine-inch. Once, in another war, I had been on a paved road when—well, I did not care to be on this one if a nine-inch hit it and turned fragments of paving-stones into projectiles. An effort to “run out the bunt”—CÆsar’s ghost! It was one of our own shells! Nerves! Shame! Two stretcher-bearers with a wounded man looked up in surprise, wondering what kind of a hide-and-seek game we were playing. They made a picture of imperturbability of the kind that is a cure for nerves under fire. If the other fellow is not scared it does not do for you to be scared.

“Did you get any shells in your neighbourhood?” we asked the chauffeur—also British and imperturbable—whom we found waiting at a clearing station for wounded.

“Yes, sir, I saw several, but none hit the car.”

As we came to the first cross-roads in that dead land back of the trenches which was still being shelled by shrapnel, though not another car was in sight and ours had no business there (as we were told afterward), that chauffeur, as he slowed up before turning, held out his hand from habit as he would have done in Piccadilly.

Two or three days later things were normal along the front again, with Mr. Atkins still stuffing himself with marmalade in that two hundred yards of trench.