ruelty to put such a man into a hole in the earth, like the ape-houses
of Hagenbeck's Zoo. He had been used to comfort, the little luxuries
of court life. There, on the canal-bank, he refused to sink into the
squalor. He put on pajamas at night before sleeping in his bunk--silk
pajamas--and while waiting for his breakfast smoked his own brand of
gold-tipped cigarettes, until one morning a big shell blew out the
back of his dugout and hurled him under a heap of earth and timber. He
crawled out, cursing loudly with a nice choice of language, and then lit
another gold--tipped cigarette, and called to his servant for breakfast.
His batman was a fine lad, brought up in the old traditions of service
to an officer of the Guards, and he provided excellent little meals,
done to a turn, until something else happened, and he was buried alive
within a few yards of his master... Whenever I went to the canal-bank,
and I went there many times (when still and always hungry high
velocities came searching for a chance meal), I thought of my friend
in the Guards, and of other men I knew who had lived there in the worst
days, and some of whom had died there. They hated that canal-bank and
dreaded it, but they jested in their dugouts, and there was the laughter
of men who hid the fear in their hearts and were "game" until some
bit of steel plugged them with a gaping wound or tore their flesh to
tatters.

VI

Because the enemy was on the high ground and our men were in the low
ground, many of our trenches were wet and waterlogged, even in summer,
after heavy rain. In winter they were in bogs and swamps, up by St.-Eloi
and southward this side of Gommecourt, and in many other evil places.
The enemy drained his water into our ditches when he could, with the
cunning and the science of his way of war, and that made our men savage.

I remember going to the line this side of Fricourt on an August day in
'15. It was the seventeenth of August, as I have it in my diary, and
the episode is vivid in my mind because I saw then the New Army lads
learning one of the lessons of war in one of the foulest places. I also
learned the sense of humor of a British general, and afterward, not
enjoying the joke, the fatalistic valor of officers and men (in civil
life a year before) who lived with the knowledge that the ground beneath
them was mined and charged with high explosives, and might hurl them to
eternity between the whiffs of a cigarette.

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