With
smoothly braided hair they gathered round British soldiers in steel
hats and clasped their arms or leaned against their shoulders. They
had known many of those men before. They were their sweethearts. In
those foul little mining towns the British troops had liked their
billets, because of the girls there. London boys and Scots "kept
company" with pretty slatterns, who stole their badges for keepsakes,
and taught them a base patois of French, and had a smudge of tears on
their cheeks when the boys went away for a spell in the ditches of
death. They were kind-hearted little sluts with astounding courage.
"Aren't you afraid of this place?" I asked one of them in Bully-Grenay
when it was "unhealthy" there. "You might be killed here any minute."
She shrugged her shoulders.
"Je m'en fiche de la mort!" ("I don't care a damn about death.")
I had the same answer from other girls in other places.
That was the mise-en-scene of the battle of Loos--those mining towns
behind the lines, then a maze of communication trenches entered from a
place called Philosophe, leading up to the trench-lines beyond
Vermelles, and running northward to Cambrin and Givenchy, opposite
Hulluch, Haisnes, and La Bassee, where the enemy had his trenches and
earthworks among the slag heaps, the pit-heads, the corons and the
cites, all broken by gun-fire, and nowhere a sign of human life
aboveground, in which many men were hidden.
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