It is owing to a higher capacity for adaptability that the human animal has defeated all the other animals on this planet; made himself in fact the “lord of creation.” For example, one need but take the Southdown Division during its winter in the “City of Fear.”
Their life—from the front-line infantry, frozen blue or blown to bits between rotting sandbags, to the drivers in the swamped horse-lines where the dumb beasts stood all day, tail to storm, fetlock-deep in mud, and whence men and beasts sallied forth every night up that road of death between the scarred poplars—was indescribably foul, a reversion to conditions at which an aristocratic caveman might well have jibbed.
In the fighting-zone itself, boredom followed fear, fear boredom, with monotonous and unending regularity. There were some days when never a rifle cracked, never a gun barked: others—as that Sunday which saw Stark’s headquarters moved to the Ramparts—when unanswered salvos rained on ruined streets, on gun-positions, and cross-roads, on stumbling fatigue-parties and sentries acrouch behind sandbags; when the very breastworks heaved and blew skyward, crashing down in mud and mine-débris on the corpses of the men who had inhabited them.
Still, the human animal endured. More, he learned to adapt himself to this condition and that; avoiding danger by instinct; finding his needed relaxation in petty amusements; making to himself, even, some social order out of the chaos wherein he dwelt. And since none, sallying forth, might know if he would come back alive, a certain careless spirit,—more hysteria than the “war humour” stay-at-homes christened it,—stiffened endurance, irradiated relaxation.
In the Ramparts, vast catacombe of old brickwork impervious to any artillery, were pianos, gramophones, picture-galleries selected from coloured supplements of the _Sketch_ or _La Vie Parisienne_; cheery Messes whereto came mud-soaked men out of the noisy night, eager for whisky, always ready to break into song. Some of those men died; some were wounded; some sickness took: but always other men replaced them—and life went on. Moreover, since the human animal cannot now exist without the written word, he even discovered, buried away among the ruins of the City, a printing-press, and type, and paper, from which evolved itself the semblance of a news-sheet—which he called _The Wipers Times_.