I sit in a hole in a recent battlefield. Over my head is some tattered canvas, upheld by Fritzie shovels. In a battered bucket wood splutters, and the rain it raineth every day. To make my appearance more gipsy-like I may add that my hands are cracked with the mud. When the war is ended I shall lie in bed for a month.
We've come through some very lively times of late, and I shall have plenty of local colour to impart to you when the war is ended. My mind is packed with vivid pictures which I cannot tell. This huge silence which rests between individuals is the most terrific thing about the war. You get the terror made concrete for you when you creep to your Observation Post and spy upon the Hun country. In the foreground is a long stretch of barbed wire, shell-holes and mud. Behind that a ruined town; then gradually, greenness growing more vivid as it recedes to the horizon. Nothing stirs. You may look through your telescope all day, but nothing stirs.
Yet you know that in every hole the hidden death lurks; should you for a moment forget and raise your head unwarily, you are reminded of your folly by the crack of a rifle. I've always made the mistake of believing the best of everyone—and, as a soldier, I've never been able to credit the fact that anyone of a big nation would count himself happy to get my scalp. The actual passes belief. I recall so vividly that story of the final war, written by a German, The Human Slaughter-house. The chap never realizes the awfulness of his job until for the first time he comes face to face with the young boy he's called upon to kill. We kill by hundreds from a distance, but the destroyed and the destroyers rarely have a hint of each other's identity. I came to a dug-out the other day in a battered trench. Even the water in the shell-holes was dyed by explosives to the colour of blood. Outside lay a German, face downwards in the mud—an old man with grizzled hair. I shoved my revolver round the mouth of the dug-out and called to anyone who was there to come out. A Cockney voice answered; then followed a scrambling; two huge feet came up through the dark; they belonged to a dead German; two of his comrades grinned cheerfully at me from behind the corpse and propelled it none too reverently into the mud. Behind the party I discovered my Cockney-adventurer—a machine-gunner who, having lost his company, made amends by capturing three Fritzes and killing two others with the aid of a pal with a shattered leg. I told him to bring his pal up. Under his directions the Fritzes trotted back into the hole and brought out the wounded fellow. They were extraordinarily meek-looking and quite surprisingly gentle; when I'd told them where the dressing-station was, they made a bandy-chair of their hands, placed our fellow's arms about their necks and staggered away through the barrage—or curtain of fire, as the papers like to call it—back to safety with their wounded enemy. And yet within the hour all these people had been chucking bombs at one another.