I am little or no use on these social occasions.  The red and gold mailed fist of a General Staff reduces me to a sort of pulverized state of meekness, which ends in my smiling at everyone and declining anything to eat.

As machine-gun officer to our Battalion I had to go through it, and as everyone was very nice to me, it all went off satisfactorily.

On this time out we were wondering how we should find the Boches on our return, and pleasant recollections of the time before filled us with a curious keenness to get back and see.  A wish like this is easily gratified at the front, and soon, of course, the day came to go into trenches again, and in we went.

CHAPTER X

MY PARTIAL ESCAPE FROM THE MUD—­THE
DESERTED VILLAGE—­MY “COTTAGE”

Our next time up after our Christmas Day experiences were full of incident and adventure.  During the peace which came upon the land around the 25th of December we had, as I mentioned before, been able to stroll about in an altogether unprecedented way.  We had had the courage to walk into the mangled old village just behind our front line trenches, and examine the ruins.  I had never penetrated into this gloomy wreck of a place, even at night, until after Christmas.  It had just occasionally caught our attention as we looked back from our trenches; mutilated and deserted, a dirty skeleton of what once had been a small village—­very small—­about twelve small houses and a couple of farms.  Anyway, during this time in after Christmas we started thinking out plans, and in a few days we heard that it had been decided to put some men into the village, and hold it, as a second line.

The platoon commander with whom I lived happened to be the man selected to have charge of the men in the village.  Consequently one night he left our humble trench and, together with his servant and small belongings from the dug-out, went off to live somewhere in the village.

About this time the conditions under which we lived were very poor.  The cold and rain were exceedingly severe, and altogether physical discomfort was at its height.  When my stable companion had gone I naturally determined to pay him a call the next night, and to see what sort of a place he had managed to get to live in.  I well remember that next night.  It was the first on which I realized the chances of a change of life presented by the village, and this was the start of two months’ “village” life for me.  I went off from our old trench after dusk on my usual round of the machine guns.  When this was over I struck off back across the field behind our trench to the village, and waded up what had been the one and only street.  Out of the dozen mangled wrecks of houses I didn’t know which one my pal had chosen as his residence, so I went along the shell-mutilated, water-logged road, peering into this ruin and that, until, at the end of the street, about four hundred yards from the Germans and two hundred yards from our own trenches, I came across a damp and dark figure lurking in the shadows:  “’Alt! ’oo goes there?” “Friend!” “Pass, friend, all’s well.”  The sentry, evidently posted at end of village.