My Year of the War eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 443 pages of information about My Year of the War.

My Year of the War eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 443 pages of information about My Year of the War.

The first man who made his presence felt was a good six feet in height, with a heavy moustache and the earpieces of his cap tied under his chin, though the night was not cold.  He placed himself fairly in front of me in the narrow path back of the breastworks and he looked a cowled and sinister figure in the faint glow from a brazier.  I certainly did not want any physical argument with a man of his build.

“Who are you?” he demanded, as stiffly as if I had broken in at the veranda window with a jemmy.

For the nearer you come to the front, the more you feel that you are in the way.  You are a stray extra piece of baggage; a dead human weight.  Everyone is doing something definite as a part of the machine except yourself; and in your civilian clothes you feel the self-conscious conspicuousness of appearing on a dancing-floor in a dressing-gown.

Captain P------was a little way back in another passage.  I was alone
and in a rough tweed suit—­a strange figure in that world of khaki and
rifles.
“A German spy!  That’s why I am dressed this way, so as not to excite
suspicion,” I was going to say, when a call from Captain P------
identified me, and the sentry’s attitude changed as suddenly as if the
inspector of police had come along and told a patrolman that I might
pass through the fire lines.

“So it’s you, is it, right from America?” he said.  “I’ve a sister living at Nashua, New Hampshire, U.S.A. with three brothers in the United States army.”

Whether he had or not you can judge as well as I by the twinkle in his eye.  He might have had five, and again he might not have one.  I was a tenderfoot seeing the trenches.

“It’s mesilf that’s going to America when me sarvice in the army is up in one year and six months,” he continued.  “That’s some time yet.  I’m going if I’m not killed by the Germans.  It’s a way that they have, or we wouldn’t be killing them.”

“What are you going to do in America?  Enlist in the army?”

“No.  I’m looking for a better job.  I’m thinking I’ll be one of your millionaires.  Shure, but that would be to me taste.”

Not one Irishman was speaking really, but a dozen.  They came out of their little houses and dug-outs to gather around the brazier; and for every remark I made I received a fusillade in reply.  It was an event, an American appearing in the trench in the small hours of the morning.

A trench-toughened, battle-toughened old sergeant was sitting in the doorway of his dug-out, frying a strip of bacon over one rim of the brazier and making tea over the other.  The bacon sizzled with an appetizing aroma and a bullet sizzled harmlessly overhead.  Behind that wall of sandbags all were perfectly safe, unless a shell came.  But who worries about shells?  It is like worrying about being struck by lightning when clouds gather in a summer sky.

“It looks like good bacon,” I remarked.

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My Year of the War from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.