SOME TRENCH SCENES. T HIS war has been remarkable for the

vigour and humour of the letters which have been written, not by literary visitors to the front, but by soldiers and sailors themselves. Some of the most moving poems—most of those very few indeed which abide in the memory—have been written by soldiers. Extracts from soldiers' and sailors' letters—not many of the latter, unfortunately, in these recent days, when the very success of the Fleet has removed the opportunity for seeing such incidents as may be publicly recorded—have been a common feature of the newspapers. The series of scenes which are presented here are extracted from a subaltern's letters to his father, mother, and sisters. It is not suggested that they contain anything fresher, less familiar, or more clever than some other' extracts which have been published. But I think they will be found to offer as a whole a very real picture of life in and out of the trenches as observed and shared in by an alert, capable, spirited, and sensitive brain. The subaltern arrived in the trenches for the first time last May. He describes the manner of his arrival "On Sunday the whatever-the-date-was, I was in charge of a hundred or so —s doing fatigue work down at the quay in the immense storehouse, built by certain busy Teutons. It is over half a mile long, a third of that broad, and choked up to the rate* with stuff (know that picture of Little Porgie' in Just-So Stories? this place knocks that into a cooked hat)—well, I was down there and got a sudden order to return and report, which I did, and next morning a „,ereat column of us marched to the station and W entrained. o took twenty-five hours to go about as many miles, travelling, the five of us Flash Mob, in one carriage with packs and valises, which was cheery, but not good for sleeping. We had a rowdy dinner beforehand, with homards, pain d'dpioo, bully beef which isn't bad stuff—for a time—marmalade, tinned sausages, sang a lot of songs, and did the 'To-morrow comrades we' touch. When we arrived at the rail-head, a small town (ask no names), wo disembarked fooling a bit like the bottom of the proverbial parrot- cage, and wore told by the guide who mot us that we were to go straight into the trenches. Which we did after a five-mile march

by cobbled road and a mile and a half down a muddy communica- tion trench in the dark, lit by occasional star shells. I was posted

to — Company and put in charge of No. — platoon. After a cup of tea, some cake, and an Egyptian, I retired to —'s dug-out, where I slept like a top (broken only by the 'stand-to' for an hour before dawn). The trenches are palaces, dug by the French who had occupied 'em for six months, wonderful places. I wish home, was as tidy always. Clay walls, bomb-proof ceilings, pictures on the walls, straw-filled berths, stoves, tables, chairs, complete with a

piebald cat. I wasn't frightened by the guns which bang away all day and night. The noise is just like the Blaenau Festiniog slate- blasters, with the rocket-like whistle of the shells going over." He comments on soldier servants :— • "I have a servant called He is a good servant but a bad man, The worse the man in fact the better the servant. What constitutes the good servant is the faculty of coming back with more than he sets out with : mine got hold of a new Wobley revolver complete with lanyard, an excellent weapon. Some poor beggar must have cursed, but I couldn't trace ownership, so remain the possessor. No more news except that the tomatoed-sardines are good eating and I must be at 'ern."

Then for his consolation, as he reflects that he still has only one star on his sleeve, he quotes from the Hangar Herald, a journal published at the front by the A.S.O.

"Oh, deem it pride, not lack of skill

That thus forbids my sleeve's increase, The morning and the evening still have but one star apiece.'

Here is a hint of the disadvantages under which education is conducted on the disputed portions of French soil :—

Except for our spells in the trenches we are nearly always more or less in civilisation : here, for instance, in my billet there is a very nice French bourgeois family,, the --s. To-day I have dis- tinguished myself by writing out for the girl, who is in about the under-fifth of the local High School, an essay on the theory of Decimal Division. Now you didn't think I was as clever as all that, did you ? It was of course a combined feat in French and ilaths. Her question paper was full of abbreviations, which she explained as due to the quick rate at which her holy pro- fessor talked. I asked the reason of this. 'Oh, because they were beaucoup press4es.' But why pressks ? Oh, because every few minutes a shell burst quite near and the professeur had to take shelter in the cellar."

• The subaltern was particular in his choice of books, since he

could have few with him. But his choice was not apparently the traditional choice of the lonely rancher—the Bible and Shakespeare, which also traditionally serve to produce a sense of being acquainted with the best that has been written rather than an actual acquaintance. At all events, the subaltern writes :— " Erewhon is a delightful book to read in the trenches on a hot afternoon when nothing much is doing ; this is the sixth time I have tackled it, and there is always some new reading to be got out of Butler's twisted, accounts of Erewhonian customs. Many thanks also for Keats, who is about the most soothing poet going.

have the Odyssey here too ; that is my Scots blood coming out. Only a Scotsman would take his classics out to the front." • As a matter. of fact, the subaltern is more than Scotch,

and he may not have remembered that Wolfe, who was of Irish descent, wrote down certain lines from the Iliad just before his attack on Quebec. In another letter the subaltern speaks of hiding his taste in books from all but the most tolerant authorities, but records his pleasure at discovering traces of a kindred spirit in the trenches. On the back of an envelope lie found the following list of things to be bought :— " Bootlaces ; Pocket lamp refit ; Acid-drops ; Chaucer; A Semple; Keats."

The letters contain several descriptions of dug-outs, and in one of them I find the following anecdote:—

" Talking of dug-outs, a curious thing happened the other day. There were seven men in a dug-out and so tightly packed that when they go to sleep and the N.C.O. in charge wants to turn over on his other side he gives the word Dug-out, on the other side, .tarti ' Into this dug-out came a 60-pounder shell during tea ; for some whim of its own it did not explode, but crushed one man into unrecognizability and the others began grousing that they had spilt half their tea: this is true."

As for the sensations of being under fire, lie says :— " Wo go back to-morrow into some rather sensational trenches, but I hope not for long : the first excitement of the baptism of fire 000n wears off and the joys of sniping fat Germans, though sweet, are seldom long-lived. There is a ripple of machine-gun fire to and fro like a garden spray and the snippy sniper gets snapped. You can't imagine how dull everything is here : nothing but a perpetual field day, mostly aimless pottering. . . . And when we leave the trenches and go back to billets there is always cursing at people who put their marmalade knife from the sardines into the ration jam. They have been dropping long-range shells quite near us in the big town where I am billeted and bag a few civilians every day, but, really, nobody troubles to cross the road to avoid them. London will be equally nonchalant after a short Zopp. course, I hope."

Yet the subaltern is by no means without such feelings as, to the credit of humanity, distinguish the quality of a man's bravery from that of the brute :— "About your advice about staving off approaching senility—of course I always make for the nursery whenever I go into billets, and the French children and I got on splendidly : I do their home- work for them. But even this relaxation cannot alter the fact that I am for fifty men, many of them old enough to be my father, a Sort of combined schoolmaster, doctor, parson, foreman, general, lawyer, official newsagent, and tyrant, with genuinely despotic powers when we are in the trenches : and this is rather a strain on my youth. . . . I can't stick those horrid fellows who write home to say war• is adorable. Let me explain what I mean. Last night—we had seventeen casualties yesterday from bombs and grenades—I went round the fire-trench, which averages fifteen yards from the Germans' and at one point is only ton yards off, to sea if all was correct, and turning a traverse sharply almost stepped on a Horrible Thing lying in the parodos. We can afford to laugh at corpses, if we did not know them when alive, because with them it is a case of what the men call "happoo fineesh'; wo can joke with men badly wounded who are going to recover : but when a German bullet—and a reversed one at that—strikes a man on the head and takes the scalp and a lot of his brains clean away, and still lets him live for two hours, the joke is there no more. An R.E. Sergeant met me there and told me that his sap bad just come through into an old crater where a mine had been exploded, and that the time was ripe for bomb-throwers. So with this Horrid Thing still lying there the bombers filed past, and creeping down the sap lobbed the bombs over into the German trenches : they threw twenty over, and now doubtless the Prussian subaltern opposite, if he is a decent fellow, is being sickened by more than one Horrid Thing in his parodos."

It should be explained that the subaltern's battalion con- tained many Welshmen, and we are treated to a special disquisition on their curious songs and sayings. The songs plainly belong to the family of chanties 0—

"These fellows are groat singers and I have hoard a lot of weird war chants already, One runs to the tune of "The Milky Cocoanut,' which you may know Coo.00.00iness under fire,

Coo-oo-oolnees under fire,

Mentioned in despatches for Drinking the Company ram,

Coo-oomese under fire I

. The mon sing :—

I shoved my finger in a woodpecker's hole And the woodpecker screamed GOD STRAFE YOUR SOUL.

Take it out I Take it out I Take it ont I

REMOVE IT.'

I think I told you before of the little chanson du cccur I want to go home.' No, I think it was some one olso I told, so you must have it

I want to go home : Ws)

The coal box and shrapnel they whistle and roar, I don't want to go to the trenches no more. I want to go over the sea,

Where the Kaiser can't throw bombs at me, r00000h! aye I

I don't want to die,

I want to go home.'

There are dozens of topical verses all composed by the machine- gun section There is another song called Ee-ayeese-ayo-oh,' really one of those cumulative farmyard songs, but these Welsh- men sing other verses besides to it. They have

Now old Von Kluelt he had a lot of men,

Ile.aye-ee-aye-oh I And every men he had a little gun, Ee-aye-ee-aye-oh I With a "ping-ping " here, And a " ping-ping " there,

And hore " ping '' and there a "ping," " ping-pinging " everywhere,

It's old Von Kluck he had a lot of men, Ee.aye-ee.aye-oh I '

On the march, amid other weird and wonderful songs, they have a habit of breaking out with :—

' Three cheers for the Vaterland I

Ook, ock, ock I Mein Gott I' which is to them the very acme of waggishness. They are a. funny lot. There are still a few reservists (like the little postman) left in this Batt. who were called out shortly after mobilisation in accordance with their agreement to serve five years with the colours and seven with the reserve, and so when we have a bit of a bad time and the men begin to ' crib' and `chew the fat' (Anglice, to grumble) you sometimes hear a fellow who was called up in the last month on which he was liable call out Heighol my backehee seven backsbee moaning anything which you give for no return. There is a catchword much used by those who have been ragg=ed by their pals and want to show that they can't bo treated so lightly. They say, ' Out of my way, strafe you all. I'm Basham,' or simply Strafe you, I'm Basham.' Their language is very interesting, and its useful to know what they mean by words like cushy, bliky, charpawnee, pozzy, rotey, to quote only

the commonest ones. . — is a great singer : he comes from the hills and is not taken seriously by his comrades in conse- quence. When surprised he has a way of exclaiming in an absolutely innnitatio way, ' Well, I go to Swansea!' and you can tell when lie is plens:n1 because then he is sure to sing his little Welsh carol about a Mrs. Jones who sold black lotion—the tune has been borrowed for one of our most famous songs beginning :— ' We're all going home on furlough,

• I don't think, I don't think.' "

Some passages in the letters are particularly interesting for the light they throw on the set of emotions which are peculiar to war. These are notoriously different from the emotions of observers from a distance, who cannot share or conceive them. If war did not mercifully bring its own com- pensations and powers of adaptation, it would be impossible for soldiers to be as merry as they are. In one place our subaltern, who is left unperturbed by reverses at the front, complains of had news being unnecessarily sent to him by "unimaginative idiots" from home. "Happiness out here," ho says, "depends ever so much more on what is happening at home than on the immediate situation in which you find yourself." To quote again : " We do a great deal of gambling at penny nap and vingt-et-un at odd moments, alternating with sniping, and you might be surprised to hear little one of the dearest, mildest, nicest creatures I know, say over a dull hand, `I got two of them this morning in the trench opposite sap Z,' and get only a polite ` Oh P' in answer." With two other extracts I must end :— "I forgot to record a very quaint thing that happened at a brigade concert held at — the day K. of K. came down to see us. Our divisional commander came in to honour the occa- sion, and after a thumping good programme of Welsh, English, and Irish talent, got up on the platform and made a little speech. Ho said how pleased K. had been that day with our soldierly appearance (what, what I) and our cheerfulness and good disci- pline under arms . . . and that he had promised the great man that the Division would see the campaign through to the bitter end. Loud cheers. Then an excited Irish private rushed up, and shaking the old General cordially by the hand burst out : Be Jesus surr yire right. The old — Division will stick it to the bitter end, and ye re the boy to load us to Viethry and ever- lasting fame.' Tho General, very alarmed: • Ah, yes, yes, quite so, quite so, my man. Of course, yes.' IIis staff had dived off into the surrounding trees to smother their shouts of mirth, and the last I saw of the two, they were shaking hands like old friends reunited after many years—the General very frightened—and the military police just diving on the Irishman from behind."

" Y. is a great character : I have never known a man more sparing of his words or a better listener. But be's not a wet blanket; he's too good a sort, and a silent humorist of the first water. When he first went home on leave in December he is reported, to have been seen in Piccadilly wearing a British warm coat, with no badges of rank, over his uniform, goosestepping down the pavement and giving an exaggerated salute to all officers and winking at all the Tommies and N.C.O.'s he met. This was a reaction against regimentation, and pleased him highly. He did little else on his five days."

Surely a character worth watching, this Prince Florizel, who fantastically reacted from his silence into such an effervescence