Energy books

There was plenty of it in the New Army, including professional "funny
men," trick cyclists, conjurers, and singers of all kinds. So by the
summer of '15 most of the divisions had their dramatic entertainments:
"The Follies," "The Bow Bells," "The Jocks," "The Pip-Squeaks," "The
Whizz-Bangs," "The Diamonds," "The Brass Hats," "The Verey Lights,"
and many others with fancy names.
I remember going to one of the first of them in the village of Acheux,
a few miles from the German lines. It was held in an old sugar-
factory, and I shall long remember the impressions of the place, with
seven or eight hundred men sitting in the gloom of that big, broken,
barn-like building, where strange bits of machinery looked through the
darkness, and where through gashes in the walls stars twinkled.
There was a smell of clay and moist sugar and tarpaulins and damp
khaki, and chloride of lime, very pungent in one's nostrils, and when
the curtain went up on a well--fitted stage and "The Follies" began
their performance, the squalor of the place did not matter.


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