unction:


Last night I s-s-aw you, I s-saw you, you naughty boy!


Some one ought to make an anthology (for private circulation only) of
the songs most affected by our men, and also of the topographical
Limericks with which they beguile the long hours in the trenches. And if
the English soldier is addicted to versifying it may be pleaded in his
behalf that, as Mommsen apologetically remarks of Caesar, "they were
weak verses." Not always, however, I have seen some unpublished verses
by a young officer on the staff of the late General Hubert Hamilton, a
man beloved by all who knew him, describing the burial of his dead chief
at night behind the firing-line, which in their sombre and elegiac
beauty are not unworthy to rank with the classical lines on the burial
of Sir John Moore. And there is that magnificent _Hymn before Battle_ by
Captain Julian Grenfell, surely one of the most moving things of its
kind.

With such diversions do our men beguile the interminable hours. After
all it is the small things that men resent in life, not the big ones. I
once asked a French soldier over a game of cards--in civil life he was a
plumber, whom we shall meet again[7]--whether he could get any sleep in
the trenches amid the infernal din of the guns. "Oh, I slept pretty well
on the whole," he explained nonchalantly, "mais mon voisin,
celui-là"--he pointed reproachfully to a comrade who was imperturbably
shuffling the pack--"il ronflait si fort qu'il finissait par me
dégoûter."