Of course, I was telling you about trench duty. But one loves these digressions; it’s an easy matter to start nattering, to fill up a dark night and the slow hours. I would many times stop and listen to the tales of some character from the front, or a fellow NCO, and take in his chatter with rapt attention. As an ensign, I am often engaged in conversation by a kindly duty officer, who suffers equally from the boredom. Yes, the man even gets to be quite pally, talks in a soft, low voice, reveals secrets and desires. And I attend, because I too feel oppressed by the heavy black walls of the trenches; I too am yearning for warmth, for something human in this eerie desolation. At night, the landscape emanates a curious cold; a sort of emotional cold. It makes you start to shiver when you cross an unoccupied part of the trench that is reserved for sentries; and if you cross the wire entanglements, and set foot in no man’s land, the shivering intensifies to a faint, teeth-rattling unease. The novelists haven’t done justice to this teeth-chattering; there’s nothing dramatic about it, it’s more like having a feeble electric current applied to you. Most of the time you’re just as unaware of it as you are of talking in your sleep at night. And, for another thing, it stops the moment anything actually happens.
The conversation winds down. We are tired. Sleepily we stand in a fire-bay, propped against the trench, and stare at our cigarettes glimmering in the dark.
When there’s frost, you stomp up and down so hard that the earth echoes. The sound of incessant coughing carries for miles through the cold air. Often enough, if you’re creeping forward in no man’s land, that coughing is your first warning that you’re nearing enemy lines. Or a sentry will be whistling or humming to himself, in contrast to yourself, creeping up on him with murderous intent. Or again it’s raining, in which case you stand sadly with your collar turned up under the eaves of the dugout entrance, listening to the regular drip drip drip. But if you hear the footfall of a superior on the duckboards, you step out smartly, walk on, suddenly swing about, click your heels together, and report: ‘NCO on duty. Sector all quiet, sir!’ because standing in doorways is not permitted.
Your thoughts drift. You look at the moon, and think of lovely, cosy days at home, or of the big city miles to the rear, where people are just now streaming out of the cafes, and big arc lamps light up the lively commotion of the city centre. It feels like something in a dream – incredibly remote.
Something rustles in front of the trench, a couple of wires clink together. Straightaway all your dreams are out the window, your senses are stretched to the point of pain. You climb on to the fire-step, fire off a tracer round: nothing stirs. It must have been a rabbit or a pheasant, nothing more. Often you can hear the enemy working on his wire entanglements. Then you empty your magazine in his direction. Not only because those are the standing instructions, but also because you feel some pleasure as you do it. ‘Let them feel the pressure for a change. Who knows, perhaps you even managed to hit one of them.’ We too go unspooling wire most nights, and take a lot of casualties. Then we curse those mean British bastards.
On some sectors of the line, say at the sap heads, the sentries are barely thirty yards apart. Here you sometimes get personally acquainted with your opposite numbers; you get to know Tommy or Fritz or Wilhelm by his cough or his whistle or his singing voice. Shouts are exchanged, often with an edge of rough humour.
‘Hey, Tommy, you still there?’
‘Yup!’
‘Then get your head down, I’m about to start shooting at you!’
Sometimes you hear a whistling, fluttering sound, following a dull discharge. ‘Watch out, trench mortar!’ You rush to the nearest dugout steps and hold your breath. The mortars explode differently, altogether more excitingly than common-or-garden shells. There’s something violent and devious about them, something of personal vitriol. They are treacherous things. Rifle-grenades are a scaled-down version of them. One rises like an arrow out of the opposite lines, with its reddish-brown metal head scored into squares like chocolate, to make it splinter better. If the horizon lights up at night in certain places, all the sentries leap up from their posts, and take cover. They know from long experience where the mortars trained on C Sector are.
At last the luminous dial shows that two hours are up. Now wake up the relief, and head for the dugout. Maybe the ration party will have brought post, or a parcel, or a newspaper. It’s a strange feeling to read news from home, and their peacetime anxieties, while the shadows cast by a flickering candle flame brush over the rough low beams. After scraping off the worst of the mud from my boots with a piece of stick, and giving them a finishing touch against a leg of the crudely fashioned table, I lie down on my pallet, and pull the blanket over my head for a quick four-hour ‘gargle’, as the slang has it. Outside, the shots monotonously ring against the parapet, a mouse scrabbles over my face and hands, nothing disturbs my sleep. Even the ‘wee-er beasties’ don’t bother me, it’s only a few days since we thoroughly fumigated the dugout.
Twice more, I am torn from my sleep to do my duty. During the last watch, a bright streak behind the sky to the east announces the coming day. The contours of the trench are sharpened; in the flat light, it makes an impression of unspeakable dreariness. A lark ascends; its trilling gets on my wick. Leaning against the parapet, I stare out at the dead, wire-scarred vista with a feeling of tremendous disillusion. These last twenty minutes seem to go on for ever. At last there’s the clatter of the coffee-bringers coming down the communication trench: it’s seven o’clock in the morning. The night-watch is over.
I head for the dugout and drink coffee, and wash in an old herring can. That freshens me up; I no longer want to lie down. At nine o’clock, after all, I need to go to my platoon and give them the day’s tasks. We’re real Renaissance men who can turn our hands to anything, and the trenches make their thousandfold demands of us every day. We sink deep shafts, construct dugouts and concrete pillboxes, rig up wire entanglements, devise drainage systems, revet, support, level, raise and smooth, fill in latrines; in a word, we do all possible tasks ourselves. And why wouldn’t we, given that we have representatives of every rank and calling in our midst? If one man doesn’t know, then another will. Only lately a miner took the pick out of my hand as I was working on our platoon dugout, and remarked: ‘Keep cutting at the bottom, the dirt at the top will come down by itself!’ Strange not to have thought of something so elementary oneself. But here, stood in the middle of the bleak landscape, suddenly compelled to take cover, to wrap up against wind and weather, to knock together beds and tables, to improvise stoves and steps, we soon learn to use our hands. The value of skills and crafts is there for all to see.