1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [268]
With so many more men in France baths were becoming a problem but the Army did its best. They had commandeered breweries up and down the line where as many as a dozen men at a time could bathe in relays in the great vats filled with warmish water and until now it had been possible to provide each man with a bath once every week or ten days. Now, with so many more battalions demanding bathing facilities, the troops were lucky if their turn for a bath came round once a month. It was a sore trial for the Tommies emerging hot and sticky and dirty from a stint in the fly-ridden trenches to take up temporary abode in a fly-ridden farm where the scent of the farmyard midden could be cut with a knife. The 6th South Staffs solved the problem by using the only facilities that were readily available on the farm. One officer had the idea of lining a farm cart with a haystack tarpaulin and filled it with water from the farm pump. The ‘bath’ could only hold three men, four at most, and they were not exactly able to wallow in comfort. It took a long, long time for the men of even a single company to be bathed, the water got blacker and blacker and had to be frequently changed, but at least they were able to scrape off the worst of the dirt and it was marginally better than nothing.
In spite of the sticky heat in the narrow confines of the earthen walls and the discomfort of sudden rain storms that at least had the minor advantage of temporarily laying the dust, life in the trenches between bombardments passed quite pleasantly in the summer months. Tommies with no immediate task to perform could lounge and slumber on the warm firestep or, taking a turn as look-out, gaze through the trench periscope discreetly poked above the sandbags across the desolate expanse of No Man’s Land where the weeds and long grass mercifully hid the bodies of the dead, to that other mysterious line of sandbags that marked the parapets of the enemy trenches.
Capt. F. O. Langley, 6th Bn. (TF), South Staffs Regt., 137 Brig., 46 Div.
Our predominant feeling is one of intense curiosity as to what exactly is happening behind those black and white sandbags over the way. Are the Germans at this moment paraded there, being harangued by their officers before attack? Or are 90 per cent of them asleep and the other 10 per cent yawning. Does the spiral of blue smoke ascending to the sunny heavens indicate a deadly gas preparation or the warming up of a tinned lunch? Are there ten thousand Germans there or ten? One of my men writes naively to his sweetheart: ‘There’s millions of Germans here, but they’s all behind bags.’ On the other hand Lieutenant Collinson, whose dashing spirits demand an attack, contends that the whole line opposing us has been deserted by the soldiery and is now held by a caretaker and his wife. The caretaker does occasional shooting while his wife sends up the flares.
The tenderfoot Tommies of Kitchener’s Army were just as fascinated by the German line, and there was brisk competition for a turn at the periscope. It was weeks before the novelty began to pall and the existence of the invisible Germans was taken for granted.
Occasionally in the quietest sectors there were visitors – curious politicians during the parliamentary recess and once, to the astonishment of the Tommies, a party of bell-bottomed sailors, fresh-faced from service in His Majesty’s ships, brought on a conducted tour of the front with the idea of increasing esprit de corps between the services by giving