Then one of them played the violin
and drew the soul out of soldiers who seemed mere animals, and after
another fight Willie Woodbine stepped up and talked of God, and war,
and the weakness of men, and the meaning of courage. He held all those
fellows in his hand, put a spell on them, kept them excited by a new
revelation, gave them, poor devils, an extra touch of courage to face
the menace that was ahead of them when they went to the trenches
again.
XI
Our men were not always in the trenches. As the New Army grew in
numbers reliefs were more frequent than in the old days, when
battalions held the line for long spells, until their souls as well as
their bodies were sunk in squalor. Now in the summer of 1915 it was
not usual for men to stay in the line for more than three weeks at a
stretch, and they came back to camps and billets, where there was more
sense of life, though still the chance of death from long-range guns.
Farther back still, as far back as the coast, and all the way between
the sea and the edge of war, there were new battalions quartered in
French and Flemish villages, so that every cottage and farmstead,
villa, and chateau was inhabited by men in khaki, who made themselves
at home and established friendly relations with civilians there unless
they were too flagrant in their robbery, or too sour in their temper,
or too filthy in their habits.
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