In digging new trenches and new dugouts, bodies and bits of bodies were unearthed, and put into sand-bags with the soil that was sent back down a line of men concealing their work from German eyes waiting for any new activity in our ditches.
"Bit of Bill," said the leading man, putting in a leg.
"Another bit of Bill," he said, unearthing a hand.
"Bill's ugly mug," he said at a later stage in the operations, when a head was found.
As told afterward, that little episode in the trenches seemed immensely comic. Generals chuckled over it. Chaplains treasured it.
How we used to guffaw at the answer of the cockney soldier who met a German soldier with his hands up, crying: "Kamerad! Kamerad! Mercy!"
"Not so much of your 'Mercy, Kamerad,'" said the cockney. "'And us over your bloody ticker!"
It was the man's watch he wanted, without sentiment.
One tale was most popular, most mirth-arousing in the early days of the war.
"Where's your prisoner?" asked an Intelligence officer waiting to receive a German sent down from the trenches under escort of an honest corporal.
"I lost him on the way, sir," said the corporal.
"Very sorry, sir. My feelings overcame me, sir. It was like this, sir. The man started talking on the way down. Said he was thinking of his poor wife. I'd been thinking of mine, and I felt sorry for him. Then he mentioned as how he had two kiddies at home. I 'ave two kiddies at 'ome, sir, and I couldn't 'elp feeling sorry for him. Then he said as how his old mother had died awhile ago and he'd never see her again. When he started cryin' I was so sorry for him I couldn't stand it any longer, sir. So I killed the poor blighter."
Our men in the trenches, and out of them, up to the waist in water sometimes, lying in slimy dugouts, lice--eaten, rat-haunted, on the edge of mine-craters, under harassing fire, with just the fluke of luck between life and death, seized upon any kind of joke as an excuse for laughter, and many a time in ruins and in trenches and in dugouts I have heard great laughter. It was the protective armor of men's souls. They knew that if they did not laugh their courage would go and nothing would stand between them and fear.
"You know, sir," said a sergeant-major, one day, when I walked with him down a communication trench so waterlogged that my top-boots were full of slime, "it doesn't do to take this war seriously."