They leave off whistling and humming to shout the last line. A shell
falls near them--then another, then another. They crouch for a minute
against the sticky walls to escape the flying spray of death. Then
they plod onward again through the mud whistling and humming, “But for
Gawd's sake don't send me.” They're probably a carrying party, taking
up the rations to their pals. It's quite likely they'll have a bad
time to-night--there's the smell of gas in the air. Good luck to
them. They disappear round the next traverse.
Our men sing many mad burlesques on their own splendour--parodies on
their daily fineness. Here's a last example--a take-off on _“A Little
Bit of Heaven_:”
“Oh a little bit of shrapnel fell from out the sky one day
And it landed on a soldier in a field not far away;
But when they went to find him he was bust beyond repair,
So they pulled his legs and arms off and they left him lying there.
Then they buried him in Flanders just to make the new crops grow.
He'll make the best manure, they say, and sure they ought to know.
And they put a little cross up which bore his name so grand,
On the day he took his farewell for a better Promised Land.”
One learns to laugh--one has to--just as he has to learn to believe in
immortality. The Front affords plenty of occasions for humour if a man
has only learnt to laugh at himself. I had been sent forward to report
at a battalion headquarters as liaison officer for an attack. The
headquarters were in a captured dug-out somewhere under a ruined
house. Just as I got there and was searching among the fallen walls
for an entrance, the Hun barrage came down. It was like the
Yellowstone Park when all the geysers are angry at the same
time. Roofs, beams, chips of stone commenced to fly in every
direction. In the middle of the hubbub a small dump of bombs was
struck by a shell and started to explode behind me. The blast of the
explosion caught me up and hurled me down fifteen stairs of the
dug-out I had been trying to discover. I landed on all fours in a
place full of darkness; a door banged behind me. I don't know how long
I lay there. Something was squirming under me. A voice said
plaintively, “I don't know who you are, but I wish you'd get off. I'm
the adjutant.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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