LAUGHTER AND GRIM DEATH

Dominion, Volume 9, Issue 2800, 19 June 1916, Page 7

LAUGHTER AND GRIM DEATH

QUEER COMPANIONS IN WAR

(By "A Private" in the "Daily Mail.")

You shall hear a woman's voice and you shall wonder whether it is upraised in tears or laughter; you shall run to escapo a riile grenade in a- trench and miss death by a yard, and you shall laugh altenvards at tho odd antics you muao as you tumbled over yourself in your haste, Laughter and teats are bedfellows, and at moments of stress, you will resort to one or other as your nature is, "Bo happy if you can laugh," the man in tho trench would tell you; "the war will bo won by .them that can laugh; aad they that do not laugh will weep."

"if we had no sense of humour out yonder I think we should almost go mad sometimes," a sergeant said to mo one day. "As it is, tho lads don't get really cheerful until things got to their very worst. When the trench mortars come over regularly-and often, when tho rain makes the trench fall in and the. lads have to turn out in tho wet and-mud to dig stuff that cannot be dug and that only fingers can movo by taking hand'fuls'of the slime and placing it on the parapet, then you'll hear somo funny remarks, then they chaff one another in great spirits, 'then . they. become almost' sublime in' their superiority to all conditions that ought, you would imagine,make them weep. ' "T had my best laugh for a long time yesterday watching a sentry when those ifinonwerfers (trench mortars) were coming over. You remember too blow tho trenoh in a little higher up than, your place. I needed'no reminder; they ''get my wind up," more than 'anything. • "Well, he had heard the tish-tish of it as it came, and he had seen it, and he was-watching it, a hundred feet up, hovering. He had his hands gripping tho traverse one on either side, his face flat to the sky, and ho kept making little darts, now to the right,-now to tho left, as he imagined the Minenwerfor was going' to drop. He had the wind ■up like" blazes.- Then he saw,, as I Imvo 6een for a few seconds—hence my sangfroid— thatHt was falling behindhand ho. crawled into a little dug-out with his legs trailing across the trench, for all the world like an ' ostrich putting its head into a hole. After tho explosion he emerged and stored about and blinked as I imagine.chickens do when ; they first toddle out of their shells, and he. got up and gripped, the traverse land stared aloft again,/waiting for.'tho Doxt./ "It's'.bad enough when .the, trenches are empty, but when they are full of men it's the deuco 1 I remember one day when.the Germans were working off on us a lot of surplus .rifle grenades, a platoon of — came up carrying planks for the R.E.'s. Just as they got near to me the whistle went, and' they began to run down the narrow trench, some this way, some that; falling into each; other, some fools lugging their planks along with them."'My Heavens, but they were funny!" Oh, yes, it was very funny; I was there in the middle of them, running too/(it was; raining), and at every step I trod/ on my waterproof cape and fell in tho mud and water. And a fellow with a plank fell on top of me. It was. very funny indeed! Thoro.is a/lot of fun, though, to be found in trenohes. I have a great friend, Wr —, vr-ho- insists on making our tea. He claims to understand accrtain patent cooking-stove better, than anybody, and he makes the tea like, this: ."Where's that stove?"'l find him the stove from beneath his equipment. V-"Any oil about?" I rake up our parafhn bottle.. ~ ■ /."Any lyater going?" , lie asks sweetly, perching the'etove on his knees and the Oil bottle,rafter he haß finished with it, on the knee of the' rnaii next to him, who cannot then move except at peril of saturation, by paraffin. : . - 1 Having dived outside and procured a billy-can of water from our neighbours' dug-out in , their absence, I-> give it to W- —, who balances the liilly-c'an on tho stove and', assumes the look' of a martyr. ' "You might,",he says plaintively; "look: .aftei-; : th"e : tea 'arid.sugar; and Win".(other-„' ' Wise purloin)' '."somebody's .milk: while ■you're doing nothing." , • W— — is an abiding joy. /Then there -is B , who sometimes has "stand-to's" by himself. The other morning he'rose and scrambled out of the dug-out in a hurry, treading on me in several places as he did so. At length lie. came back swearing softly: "I got it into my I'.ead," he said, "that it was 'standing to'; went ; to my post* put on my equipment, and stood there waiting for the rum. After about ten minutes I .sort" of woke up and found it wasn't 'stand-to" for two hours yet. But, best of all, my platoon boasts "C.8." /He'is irrepressible. Any of us would rather do a ."rotten" fatigue with "C.K." than an' easy one with anyone else.'. The last-day I was in. trenches I was watching • for Mineniverfers—they had been coming, over all morning—when. I 'heaw aijmerr'y voice singing ' Things are slow when we are out of town, . . . ■ , . Society is upside down, and'round tho traverse strutted "C.R.," his steel helmet polished and at a -rakish angle, his face clean and shaved (he had just; performed that opeiation in a cup of water), and his identification disc tucked in place of a monocle in his eye. With men like these about,_ there is always laughter running alongside death.