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By Root 1785 0

’s Sewing Shirts for Soldiers’, the felicitous show-stopper of a Christmas pantomime, was threatening to overtake it in popularity. And music was all the rage in ten thousand towns and villages where several hundred thousand soldiers were in training camps from Inverness to Salisbury Plain. The fact that they were not quite soldiers yet was neither here nor there. They must be entertained, and entertained they were. Local talent was rounded up by entertainment committees as forceful as any press-gang, and in many places there were concerts once a week. Sometimes the programmes were a little above the heads of the troops. Cellists droned, violinists scraped, sopranos warbled, elocutionists spouted, basses boomed, but there was often a good feed to accompany the entertainment, kind ladies distributed cigarettes, and the troops took the bad with the good. The highlight of one concert in Jedburgh was a rendering by the local doctor’s wife of ‘My Little Grey Home in the West’. It had a recognisable tune, it came as a welcome change after a programme of cultural music and heroic poems, and the troops encored it three times. They were the l/7th Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and most of them had recently left some little grey home in the west of Scotland at Lord Kitchener’s behest.

The tune, if not precisely catchy, was easy to play on a mouth organ and it was equally popular with soldiers holding the miserable outposts of the British line in Flanders. But the words were not appropriate, and in Flanders they had adopted their own version:

I’ve a little wet home in a trench,

Where the rainstorms continually drench,

There’s a dead cow close by

With her feet towards the sky

And she gives off a horrible stench.

Underneath, in the place of a floor,

There’s a mass of wet mud and some straw,

But with shells dropping there,

There’s no place to compare

With my little wet home in the trench.

The dead cow was a realistic touch. In the one-time farmyards close up to the lines there were dead cows all over the place and not all of them had been victims of enemy action. Private Crossingham of the Grenadier Guards was still trying to live down the episode when he had accidentally shot one while on sentry duty. His protestations that the cow had failed to reply to his challenge did him no good at all. His fame had spread throughout the Battalion and, wherever he went, even complete strangers were apt to taunt him as he passed with a verse of doggerel composed by a wag he would have dearly liked to get his hands on.

Last night at the setting of the sun,

I shot a farmer’s cow.

I thought she was a German Hun –

I beg her pardon now!

Despite the miseries of wet and cold and the dangers of their day-to-day existence, the troops in Flanders had not lost their sense of humour. The biggest laugh was raised in the leaking ruined cottage that served as the officers’ mess of the 1st Worcestershires behind the line at Festubert. Buckling on his equipment, staring out into the pelting rain as he prepared to take another hapless working-party up the line, Lieutenant Roberts remarked thoughtfully, ‘I went to see my Great Aunt Agnes while I was on leave. She said to me, “Tell me, are there any picture palaces where you and your friends can go when you get back from the trenches in the evening?”’ And, for a time, ‘off to the picture palace’ became a popular synonym for ‘going out with a working-party’ until the joke wore thin.

But if the majority of civilians were isolated from the full realities of war they were not entirely unaware of conditions at the front and of the physical hardships the men were undergoing. Knitting became a patriotic duty and mountains of parcels and bales of ‘comforts’ arrived in France by the boatload.

CQMS, R.A., S. McFie, 1/10th (Scottish) Bn. (TF), King’s (Liverpool Regt.).

Yesterday I drew a lot of cigarettes presented by somebody, and a pipe per man sent by the Glasgow tramway-men, as well as some peppermint sweets from the manufacturers.