Energy books

And then into the trenches at Neuve Chapelle. If Santa Claus had come
that way, remembering those grown-up boys of ours, the old man with
his white beard must have lifted his red gown high--waist-high--when
he waded up some of the communication trenches to the firing-lines,
and he would have staggered and slithered, now with one top-boot deep
in sludge, now with the other slipping off the trench boards into five
feet of water, as I had to do, grasping with futile hands at slimy
sandbags to save a headlong plunge into icy water.
And this old man of peace, who loved all boys and the laughter of
youth, would have had to duck very low and make sudden bolts across
open spaces, where parapets and earthworks had silted down, in order
to avoid those sniping bullets which came snapping across the dead
ground from a row of slashed trees and a few scarred ruins on the edge
of the enemy's lines.
But sentiment of that sort was out of place in trenches less than a
hundred yards away from men lying behind rifles and waiting to kill.


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