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"The people who write poems about the divine frenzy of going over the top are usually those who dipped their pens a long, long way from the slimy duckboards of the trenches. It's funny how we hate to face realities. I knew a commuter once who rode in town every day on the 8.13. But he used to call it the 7.73. He said it made him feel more virtuous."
"Die sind besser als die Deutschen They're better than the Germans...." But the theatre orderly interrupted us and asked us to "send two or three across." I went to the Prep. to see if there were any new arrivals. It was full once again and the wounded were streaming into the station. It was quite dark outside. The duckboards were lit up by rows of hurricane lamps.
Before the candle had been put out Ruth had seen him pick up two gas-masks, and he carried these as they stumbled along the duckboards toward the next cross trench. "Halt!" A sibilant whisper. Sergeant Tremp muttered something in reply.
I knocked him down and gloated over him as he lay sprawling in the mud with my hand savagely clutching his throat. Our pent up feelings often found relief in vindictive dreams. The queue stretched along the duckboards and in between the tents like a dingy snake in the gathering gloom. It was rapidly growing in length as more and more men came hurrying up.
Loewe and John Stockton returned from hospital and Jones from a Divisional working party, which had been engaged for a month on the wholesale manufacture of duckboards. Lyon, an officer equally popular in and out of the line, had found egress from the Somme dug-outs troublesome and withdrew for a time to easier spheres.
He had a gallant look along the duckboards... Or Montague white-haired Montague, who liked to gain a far objective, whatever the risk, and gave one a little courage by his apparent fearlessness. I had no courage on those early mornings of battle.
In the morasses of the Haanebeek flats, in the slimy support lines at Zonnebeke, in the tortured uplands about Flesquieres, and in many other odd places I kept worrying at my private conundrum. At night I would lie awake thinking of it, and many a toss I took into shell-holes and many a time I stepped off the duckboards, because my eyes were on a different landscape.
Soon they were out of the tunnels through the ridge. Later she learned that the ridge was honeycombed with them. The trench they entered was broader and open to the sky. And muddy! She stepped once off the "duckboards" laid down in the middle of the passway and dipped half-way to her knee in the mire.
Then I went over to the Prep. to see if any more walking wounded had arrived, but there were none at all. I stood out in the open for a few minutes in order to breathe the fresh air. There was a roar and rumble of distant drum-fire. The trees behind the C.C.S. stood out blackly against the pallid flashes that lit up the entire horizon. The mortuary attendant came walking along the duckboards.
Our load was very heavy and we had to feel our way slowly along the duckboards. When they came to an end we walked through the grass. I was in front and all at once I tripped over some obstacle. With a strenuous effort I retained my balance but nearly tipped the dead man off the stretcher. We walked on, but did not reach the mortuary, although we should have done so long ago.
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