THE YPRES TIMES
235
So, I imagine, will one feel on the Day of Judgment, acutely conscious of every
fault and every weakness; and the Great Judge will smile as those English girls
and women smiled, and send us on to the next job of work with the feeling that
there is a lot to be doneand we can do it
Other contrasts came when we detrained some days later. We had had some
vague idea that we were being rushed into battle again, and that the mud and shells
would all be waiting for us. It was utterly wrong. I know that Italy in
December isn't always a land of sunshine, but it seemed so in 1917. We marched
over broad white roads with the sun shining brilliantly. In France one rarely got
away from some signs of war, even when well out of the line, and mostly our
memories would be of mud and shells, and shattered buildings and gaunt skeletons
of trees, and of waste and ruin everywhere.
Here, in that blessed month of December, we saw nothing but the peace and
quiet of the countryside, or somnolent towns where the inhabitants came slowly
out to look at us in a rather bored way, as though they were not quite sure whether
we were a circus and therefore amusing, or a crowd of cheap trippers who had
buns in paper bags and would spoil the cleanliness of their streets.
That was the impression. Very probably-it was not quite a fair one. But if
you have lived in filthy dug-outs and shell holes and broken trenches, or barns
swarming with rats, and have always walked over muddy roads or duckboards or
dodged shell holes and barbed wire, and are then, quite suddenly and unexpectedly,
planted down on broad white roads, and sleep in clean schools or town halls and
never see a rat and waken up at night wondering at the strange stillness, you
would be inclined to exaggerate the peacefulness of the place and the seeming
apathy of its people.
We rested over Christmas at a place called Ramon, and actually sat down to
table for dinner, with turkey and roast pork on the menu! The war was already
a long way off. Bullecourt, Mory, Ecoust, Polygon Wood, Passchendaele,
Gheluvelt, were queer figments of an evil dream that had passed with the mud and
the booming of the guns.
A good deal more than half the battalion at this stage were, I fancy, new
comersolder men and youngsters, and a fair number from the 1st Battalion at
British Headquarters in France. Some of the veterans talked among themselves,
horribly suspicious that this good time was altogether too good to be true. We
asked joking questions (with a serious note underlying them): Which is the way
to this war they're talking about in the papers?" When are .they going to start
those cheap excursions to the trenches, sergeant?" Is it true they can't find
the front line and the referee won't blow the whistle till it's marked out?" Or
definite assertions: "This war's over! The next starts a week next Tuesday, so
you fellows have got out in nice time!"
I am not so very sure that there was not a certain amount of truth in some of
the jests. Anyway, somebody must have found some sort of front line, and we
went up once again. We were billeted one evening in a fair-sized house, and in
the morning marched half a mile or so along a very ordinary lane to a long row of
smaller houses. There was never a sound of a gun or sign of war yet, but some
body had been at work trying to make a wreck of the inside of these houses and
part of the foundations had been dug up. We grasped the fact presently that the
idea was to make a line of trenches through the houses
We also learned that this was the front lineSomebody had found it, after
all, though the next war had evidently not begun, because nobody was trying tó
shoot anybody. Not very far away was a river, and we learned that it was the
Piave, which didn't impress us very muchbut does now! I had transferred from
