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　　CHAPTER XVI

　　It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things, of war's brutality-I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of civilian life and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all our old philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It played the “hat trick” with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought up to Christian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at mothers' knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, music, the gentle arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of half-tones, delicate scales of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in their sense of beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like ape-men; and it was abominably funny. They laughed at the most frightful episodes, which revealed this contrast between civilized ethics and the old beast law. The more revolting it was the more, sometimes, they shouted with laughter, especially in reminiscence, when the tale was told in the gilded salon of a French chateau, or at a mess-table.

　　It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, all religion had preached this gospel and this promise.

　　Now that ideal had broken like a china vase dashed to hard ground. The contrast between That and This was devastating. It was, in an enormous world-shaking way, like a highly dignified man in a silk hat, morning coat, creased trousers, spats, and patent boots suddenly slipping on a piece of orange-peel and sitting, all of a heap, with silk hat flying, in a filthy gutter. The war-time humor of the soul roared with mirth at the sight of all that dignity and elegance despoiled.

　　So we laughed merrily, I remember, when a military chaplain (Eton, Christ Church, and Christian service) described how an English sergeant stood round the traverse of a German trench, in a night raid, and as the Germans came his way, thinking to escape, he cleft one skull after another with a steel-studded bludgeon—a weapon which he had made with loving craftsmanship on the model of Blunderbore's club in the pictures of a fairy-tale.

　　So we laughed at the adventures of a young barrister (a brilliant fellow in the Oxford “Union”) whose pleasure it was to creep out o' nights into No Man's Land and lie doggo in a shell-hole close to the enemy's barbed wire, until presently, after an hour's waiting or two, a German soldier would crawl out to fetch in a corpse. The English barrister lay with his rifle ready. Where there had been one corpse there were two. Each night he made a notch on his rifle—three notches one night—to check the number of his victims. Then he came back to breakfast in his dugout with a hearty appetite.

　　In one section of trenches the men made a habit of betting upon those who would be wounded first. It had all the uncertainty of the roulette-table... One day, when the German gunners were putting over a special dose of hate, a sergeant kept coming to one dugout to inquire about a “new chum,” who had come up with the drafts.

　　“Is Private Smith all right?” he asked.

　　“Yes, Sergeant, he's all right,” answered the men crouching in the dark hole.

　　“Private Smith isn't wounded yet?” asked the, sergeant again, five minutes later.

　　“No, Sergeant.”

　　Private Smith was touched by this interest in his well-being.

　　“That sergeant seems a very kind man,” said the boy. “Seems to love me like a father!”

　　A yell of laughter answered him.

　　“You poor, bleeding fool!” said one of his comrades. “He's drawn you in a lottery! Stood to win if you'd been hit.”

　　In digging new trenches and new dugouts, bodies and bits of bodies were unearthed, and put into sand-bags with the soil that was sent back down a line of men concealing their work from German eyes waiting for any new activity in our ditches.

　　“Bit of Bill,” said the leading man, putting in a leg.

　　“Another bit of Bill,” he said, unearthing a hand.

　　“Bill's ugly mug,” he said at a later stage in the operations, when a head was found.

　　As told afterward, that little episode in the trenches seemed immensely comic. Generals chuckled over it. Chaplains treasured it.

　　How we used to guffaw at the answer of the cockney soldier who met a German soldier with his hands up, crying: “Kamerad! Kamerad! Mercy!”

　　“Not so much of your 'Mercy, Kamerad,'” said the cockney. “'And us over your bloody ticker!”

　　It was the man's watch he wanted, without sentiment.

　　One tale was most popular, most mirth-arousing in the early days of the war.

　　“Where's your prisoner?” asked an Intelligence officer waiting to receive a German sent down from the trenches under escort of an honest corporal.

　　“I lost him on the way, sir,” said the corporal.

　　“Lost him?”

　　The corporal was embarrassed.

　　“Very sorry, sir. My feelings overcame me, sir. It was like this, sir. The man started talking on the way down. Said he was thinking of his poor wife. I'd been thinking of mine, and I felt sorry for him. Then he mentioned as how he had two kiddies at home. I 'ave two kiddies at 'ome, sir, and I couldn't 'elp feeling sorry for him. Then he said as how his old mother had died awhile ago and he'd never see her again. When he started cryin' I was so sorry for him I couldn't stand it any longer, sir. So I killed the poor blighter.”

　　Our men in the trenches, and out of them, up to the waist in water sometimes, lying in slimy dugouts, lice—eaten, rat-haunted, on the edge of mine-craters, under harassing fire, with just the fluke of luck between life and death, seized upon any kind of joke as an excuse for laughter, and many a time in ruins and in trenches and in dugouts I have heard great laughter. It was the protective armor of men's souls. They knew that if they did not laugh their courage would go and nothing would stand between them and fear.

　　“You know, sir,” said a sergeant-major, one day, when I walked with him down a communication trench so waterlogged that my top-boots were full of slime, “it doesn't do to take this war seriously.”

　　And, as though in answer to him, a soldier without breeches and with his shirt tied between his legs looked at me and remarked, in a philosophical way, with just a glint of comedy in his eyes:

　　“That there Grand Fleet of ours don't seem to be very active, sir. It's a pity it don't come down these blinkin' trenches and do a bit of work!”

　　“Having a clean-up, my man?” said a brigadier to a soldier trying to wash in a basin about the size of a kitchen mug.

　　“Yes, sir,” said the man, “and I wish I was a blasted canary.”

　　One of the most remarkable battles on the front was fought by a battalion of Worcesters for the benefit of two English members of Parliament. It was not a very big battle, but most dramatic while it lasted. The colonel (who had a sense of humor) arranged it after a telephone message to his dugout telling him that two politicians were about to visit his battalion in the line, and asking him to show them something interesting.

　　“Interesting?” said the colonel. “Do they think this war is a peep-show for politicians? Do they want me to arrange a massacre to make a London holiday?” Then his voice changed and he laughed. “Show them something interesting? Oh, all right; I dare say I can do that.”

　　He did. When the two M. P.'s arrived, apparently at the front-line trenches, they were informed by the colonel that, much to his regret, for their sake, the enemy was just attacking, and that his men were defending their position desperately.

　　“We hope for the best,” he said, “and I think there is just a chance that you will escape with your lives if you stay here quite quietly.”

　　“Great God!” said one of the M. P.'s, and the other was silent, but pale.

　　Certainly there was all the noise of a big attack. The Worcesters were standing-to on the fire-step, firing rifle—grenades and throwing bombs with terrific energy. Every now and then a man fell, and the stretcher-bearers pounced on him, tied him up in bandages, and carried him away to the field dressing-station, whistling as they went, “We won't go home till morning,” in a most heroic way... The battle lasted twenty minutes, at the end of which time the colonel announced to his visitors:

　　“The attack is repulsed, and you, gentlemen, have nothing more to fear.”

　　One of the M. P.'s was thrilled with excitement. “The valor of your men was marvelous,” he said. “What impressed me most was the cheerfulness of the wounded. They were actually grinning as they came down on the stretchers.”

　　The colonel grinned, too. In fact, he stifled a fit of coughing. “Funny devils!” he said. “They are so glad to be going home.”

　　The members of Parliament went away enormously impressed, but they had not enjoyed themselves nearly as well as the Worcesters, who had fought a sham battle—not in the front-line trenches, but in the support trenches two miles back! They laughed for a week afterward. Now It Can Be Told