The sight of that dead body passing chilled one a
little. There were many graves in the bosky arbors--eighteen under one
mound--but some of those who had fallen six months before still lay
where the gleaners could not reach them.

I used to peer through the leaves of Plug Street Wood at No Man's Land
between the lines, where every creature had been killed by the sweeping
flail of machine-guns and shrapnel. Along the harvest-fields there were
many barren territories like that, and up by Hooge, along the edge of
the fatal crater, and behind the stripped trees of Zouave Wood there
was no other gleaning to be had but that of broken shells and shrapnel
bullets and a litter of limbs.

XV

For some time the War Office would not allow military bands at the
front, not understanding that music was like water to parched souls.
By degrees divisional generals realized the utter need of entertainment
among men dulled and dazed by the routine of war, and encouraged
"variety" shows, organized by young officers who had been amateur actors
before the war, who searched around for likely talent. There was
plenty of it in the New Army, including professional "funny men," trick
cyclists, conjurers, and singers of all kinds. So by the summer of '15
most of the divisions had their dramatic entertainments: "The Follies,"
"The Bow Bells," "The Jocks," "The Pip-Squeaks," "The Whizz-Bangs," "The
Diamonds," "The Brass Hats," "The Verey Lights," and many others with
fancy names.

I remember going to one of the first of them in the village of Acheux,
a few miles from the German lines. It was held in an old sugar-factory,
and I shall long remember the impressions of the place, with seven or
eight hundred men sitting in the gloom of that big, broken, barn-like
building, where strange bits of machinery looked through the darkness,
and where through gashes in the walls stars twinkled.

There was a smell of clay and moist sugar and tarpaulins and damp khaki,
and chloride of lime, very pungent in one's nostrils, and when the
curtain went up on a well--fitted stage and "The Follies" began their
performance, the squalor of the place did not matter. What mattered
was the enormous whimsicality of the Bombardier at the piano, and the
outrageous comicality of a tousle-haired soldier with a red nose, who
described how he had run away from Mons "with the rest of you," and the
light--heartedness of a performance which could have gone straight to a
Lon