My Year of the War: Including an Account of Experiences with the Troops in France and the Record of a Visit to the Grand Fleet Which is Here Given for the First Time in its Complete FormPalmer, Frederick
History
My Year of the War: Including an Account of Experiences with the Troops in France and the Record of a Visit to the Grand Fleet Which is Here Given for the First Time in its Complete Form
Palmer, Frederick
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
I noted certain acts of fellowship of comrades who are all in the same
boat and have learned unselfishness. When they got up to let you
pass and you smiled your thanks, you received a much pleasanter
smile in return than you will from many a well-fed gentleman who has
to stand aside to let you enter a restaurant. The manners of the
trenches are good, better than in some places where good manners
are a cult.
There is no better place to send a spoiled, undisciplined, bumptious
youth than to a British trench. He will learn that there are other men in
the world besides himself and that a shell can kill a rich brute or a
selfish brute as readily as a poor man. Democracy there is in the
trenches; the democracy where all men are in the presence of death
and "hazing" parties need not be organized among the students.
But there is another and a greater element in the practical psychology
of the trenches. These good-natured men, fighting the bitterest kind
of warfare without the signs of brutality which we associate with the
prize-fighter and the bully in their faces, know why they are fighting.
They consider that their duty is in that trench, and that they could not
have a title to manhood if they were not there. After the war the men
who have been in the trenches will rule England. Their spirit and their
thinking will fashion the new trend of civilization, and the men who
have not fought will bear the worst scars from the war.
Ridiculous it is that men should be moles, perhaps; but at the same
time there is something sublime in the fellowship of their courage and
purpose, as they "sit and take it," or guard against attacks, without
the passion of battle of the old days of excited charges and quick
results, and watch the toll pass by from hour to hour. Borne by
comrades pick-a-back we saw the wounded carried along that
passage too narrow for a litter. A splash of blood, a white bandage, a
limp form!
For the second permissible--periscopes are tempting targets--I
looked through one over the top of the parapet. Another film! A big
British lyddite shell went crashing into the German parapet. The dust
from sandbags and dug-outs merged into an immense cloud of ugly,
black smoke. As the cloud rose, one saw the figure of a German dart
out of sight; then nothing was visible but the gap which the explosion
had made. No wise German would show himself. British snipers were
watching for him. At least half a dozen, perhaps a score, of men had
been put out by this single "direct hit" of an h.e. (high explosive). Yes,
the British gunners were shooting well, too. Other periscopic glimpses
proved it.
Through the periscope we learned also that the two lines of sandbags
of German and British trenches were drawing nearer together.
Another wounded man was brought by.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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