They were excited and
emotional, these stunted men. They cursed the war with the foulest
curses of Scottish and Northern dialects. There was one fellow--the
jester of them all--whose language would have made the poppies blush.
With ironical laughter, outrageous blasphemy, grotesque imagery, he
described the suffering of himself and his mates under barrage fire,
which smashed many of them into bleeding pulp. He had no use for this
war. He cursed the name of "glory." He advocated a trade--unionism
among soldiers to down tools whenever there was a threat of war. He
was a Bolshevist before Bolshevism. Yet he had no liking for Germans
and desired to cut them into small bits, to slit their throats, to
disembowel them. He looked homeward to a Yorkshire town and wondered
what his missus would say if she saw him scratching himself like an
ape, or lying with his head in the earth with shells bursting around
him, or prodding Germans with a bayonet. "Oh," said that five-foot
hero, "there will be a lot of murder after this bloody war.
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