gh above their wee bodies. In trench warfare they
did well--though the fire-step had to be raised to let them see over the
top--and in one raid captured a German machine-gun which I saw in
their hands, and hauled it back (a heavier weight than ours) like ants
struggling with a stick of straw. In actual battle they were hardly
strong enough and could not carry all that burden of fighting-kit--steel
helmet, rifle, hand-grenades, shovels, empty sand-bags--with which other
troops went into action. So they were used as support troops mostly,
behind the Black Watch and other battalions near Bazentin and Longueval,
and there these poor little men dug and dug like beavers and crouched in
the cover they made under damnable fire, until many of them were blown
to bits. There was no "glory" in their job, only filth and blood, but
they held the ground and suffered it all, not gladly. They had a chance
of taking prisoners at Longueval, where they rummaged in German dugouts
after the line had been taken by the 15th Scottish Division and the 3d,
and they brought back a number of enormous Bavarians who were like the
Brobdingnagians to these little men of Lilliput and disgusted with that
humiliation. I met the whole crowd of them after that adventure, as
they sat, half naked, picking the lice out of their shirts, and the
conversation I had with them remains in my memory because of its
grotesque humor and tragic comicality. They were excited and emotional,
these stunted men. They cursed the war with the foulest curses of
Scottish and Northern dialects. There was one fellow--the jester of them
all--whose language would have made the poppies blush. With ironical
laughter, outrageous blasphemy, grotesque imagery, he described the
suffering of himself and his mates under barrage fire, which smashed
many of them into bleeding pulp. He had no use for this war. He cursed
the name of "glory." He advocated a trade--unionism among soldiers
to down tools whenever there was a threat of war. He was a Bolshevist
before Bolshevism. Yet he had no liking for Germans and desired to cut
them into small bits, to slit their throats, to disembowel them. He
looked homeward to a Yorkshire town and wondered what his missus would
say if she saw him scratching himself like an ape, or lying with his
head in the earth with shells bursting around him, or prodding Germans
with a bayonet. "Oh," said that five-foot hero, "there will be a lot of
murder after this bloody war