People at home, it seemed, were not much interested in the life of the
trenches; anyhow, they could not understand. The soldier listened to
excited tales of air raids. A bomb had fallen in the next street. The
windows had been broken. Many people had been killed in a house
somewhere in Hackney. It was frightful. The Germans were devils. They
ought to be torn to pieces, every one of them. The soldier on leave
saw crowds of people taking shelter in underground railways, working--
men among them, sturdy lads, panic-stricken. But for his own wife and
children he had an evil sense of satisfaction in these sights. It
would do them good. They would know what war meant--just a little.
They would not be so easy in their damned optimism. An air raid? Lord
God, did they know what a German barrage was like? Did they guess how
men walked day after day through harassing fire to the trenches? Did
they have any faint idea of life in a sector where men stood, slept,
ate, worked, under the fire of eight-inch shells, five-point--nines,
trench-mortars, rifle-grenades, machine-gun bullets, snipers, to say
nothing of poison-gas, long-range fire on the billets in small
farmsteads, and on every moonlight night air raids above wooden
hutments so closely crowded into a small space that hardly a bomb
could fall without killing a group of men.
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