But it may well happen that in spite of babies, and baths, and brass bands, and footballs, and boxing-gloves, and playing marbles (the General in command of one of our divisions told me he had seen six Argyll and Sutherland sergeants playing marbles with shrapnel bullets in some support trenches), the men get bored.  They are often very crowded, and crowding may develop fastidious animosities.  A man may tolerate shrapnel in the trenches with equanimity, and yet may find his neighbour’s table-manners in billets positively intolerable.  Men may become “stale” or get on each other’s nerves.  When a company commander sees signs of this, he has one very potent prescription; he prescribes a good stiff route march.  It has never been known to fail.  Many a time in the winter months, when out visiting Divisional Headquarters, did I, in the shameful luxury of my car, come across a battalion slogging along ruddy and cheerful in the mud, and singing with almost reproachful unction: 

     Last night I s-s-aw you, I s-saw you, you naughty boy!

Some one ought to make an anthology (for private circulation only) of the songs most affected by our men, and also of the topographical Limericks with which they beguile the long hours in the trenches.  And if the English soldier is addicted to versifying it may be pleaded in his behalf that, as Mommsen apologetically remarks of Caesar, “they were weak verses.”  Not always, however, I have seen some unpublished verses by a young officer on the staff of the late General Hubert Hamilton, a man beloved by all who knew him, describing the burial of his dead chief at night behind the firing-line, which in their sombre and elegiac beauty are not unworthy to rank with the classical lines on the burial of Sir John Moore.  And there is that magnificent Hymn before Battle by Captain Julian Grenfell, surely one of the most moving things of its kind.

With such diversions do our men beguile the interminable hours.  After all it is the small things that men resent in life, not the big ones.  I once asked a French soldier over a game of cards—­in civil life he was a plumber, whom we shall meet again[7]—­whether he could get any sleep in the trenches amid the infernal din of the guns.  “Oh, I slept pretty well on the whole,” he explained nonchalantly, “mais mon voisin, celui-la”—­he pointed reproachfully to a comrade who was imperturbably shuffling the pack—­“il ronflait si fort qu’il finissait par me degouter.”

FOOTNOTE: 

[7] See Chapter XV.

XI

AT G.H.Q.[8]