THE CHARM OF TRENCH-MAKING.
ATILITARY science had designed the trenches to run _al near the spot where Nature had placed a -wood. The members of the Volunteer Training Corps Who, at the request of the War Office, had come to turn slits in the earth—some. wherein England—into commodious and ramified entrench- mints, with sumps and dug-outs and everything handsome abouttlem, had the opportunity of discovering their own raw material in •the wood, carpentering it into shape, and finally exposieg the trenches to their friends—or to one another, in the absence of visitors—as the finished product of their labour. We were far happier in our conditions than the trench-makers somewhere in France, who often have wood already fashioned into shape in sawmills, dumped down at their feet. In the wood we saw posts in the branches of trees, material for famines in the spreading foliage, withes for making hurdles and for riveting the walls of the trenches in every hazel bush. And then to enter such a place, axe and billhook in band, with full licence to out down! Every man has in him something of the devastator. Devastation for a purpose and by word of command; devastation in the interests of ultimate order, decency, and victory I It seemed a shame to deprive the "soaring human boys" in the neighbouring school of this unprecedented opportunity. Their wildest dreams can have yielded nothing more madly satisfying.
To out one's way through the matted undergrowth of that wood, which cannot have been disturbed for many years, with proper zest, it was of course necessary to believe that we were doing a real national service. Otherwise one would have suffered remorse to see the fragrant wild cherry and the delicate maple chopped into stark and bristling hideousness by unskilled hands. Personally I suffered no remorse. But our pessimist told us that the War Office had found a useless job to keep us middle.aged Volunteers quiet. Certainly he was wrong. I think, too, that his pessimism evaporated somewhat in that healthy labour. These trenches on which we were sagaged are only:a kind of ultimate precaution, to be sure. They are not very likely to be used. Still, no sensible people fail to take precautions ; and if precautions are necessary somebody has to see to them. If we Volunteers did not accept the job, younger men wanted for other duties would be turned on to it. Thus we performed one of the primary offices of Volunteers of releasing others. As though to prove that the work was wanted, there were some Territorials working the next section of trenches to our own. Now that I come to think or it, it is fair to say that these trenches are much more than' a precaution. 'The stronger they are the greateris the warning they convey to the enemy. It would not be amiss, indeed, if Germany heard something about them, but it is not my business to tell it. Perhaps she has means of hearing about them. If so, and if she should understand that Volunteer labour has produced some trenches guaranteed impervious to any common shell or shrapnel fired from field guns, she will know that she must bring bigger guns when she tries to raid England. But big guns postulate such a landing force as even Grand Admiral von Tirpitz might well feel himself unable to convoy. Remember, too, this parodox. If the trenches we dew are never used, it will.show, not their useless- ness, but their usefulness, They will quite conceivably not be used because they exist, and so have to be avoided. If they did not exist, the enemy might be tempted :to come where they are. That is the metaphysic of ,precautionary action all the world over. If it is on a sufficiently largennd efficient scale, it will never be tested, and so will appear useless • 2• e We are billeted hi a village, and early every morning we fall in before our headquarters. Two parties are formed : the wood party and the trench party. The wood party is to select and roughly to prepare the materials for trench-making and send them down on tumbrils to the trench party. The wood party forms fours and dives into the valley to take a short cut to the wood on the opposite heights. The trench party forms fours and in admen of route follows the high road towards the trenches. As it goes on its unruffled way it can see the wood party stringing out into single file and crossing ledges and stiles.
• One day I am told off to make hurdles on the edge of the wood. Idrive eix stakes into the ground to cover a length of six feet:and wire them 'together .eo that the wire lies on the grass at the bottom of the Stakes. lehoose my wither from the heap which men keep bringing out of the wood. It is fascinating work this wattling in and out of the supple young branches. It is necessary to put the thick -ends alternately at either end to keep the top of the rising hurdle level. But that rule requires discretion. Sometimes one of the upright stakes is forced out of position and you must coax it back by a little calcu- lated irregularity. When you have reached half the required height you run another wire along the uprights ; and when you have reached the full height you run two strands of Wire along the top and tourniquet them till the Whole hurdle is as compact and strong as a block of wood. I do not think this is the way they make real rustic Imrdies even to-day. I have my doubts about the wire as an impropriety ; but hurdles for trenches must be as far as possible unbreak- able. They line the walls of our sumps in the trenehes, for where sound drainage is required you must take no risks of letting the earthy walls fall in. Near by me three or four men are making fascines. On a 'horse .formed of crossed 'pickets driven into the ground they lay branches and foliage till they have achieved an approximately even thickness over a length of eighteen feet. Then they apply that wonder- fully simple but effectual -instrument the choker—simply an iron chain attached to wooden bars at about a third of the distance from the end of each bar. The chain is looped under the branches and foliage at one place, and the bars are forced above from opposite sides till they overlap and the fasoine has been compressed to a diameter of nine inches. The bars are .held in position tilithe compressed material has been secured by wire. The amateur must beware of letting go a bar till the wire is fixed. The strain is tremendous, and a man has been stunned often enough by a blow from one of the bars carelessly let go. When wire rings have been placed all along the fasoine at regular interval% the superfluous foliage and twigs are trimmed off and the fascine is ready to go to the trenches. There it will be used either in its full length, or in sections sawn off, to complete the top of trench walls or for any other constructive purpose. A fasoine is alert of maid. of-all-work in the construction of trenches.
How these Volunteers work I I -compare them with some young soldiers one day in the wood where I .am felling saplings. True, the soldiers are very young. But then eve are very old—comparatively I A young soldier sits under a tree smoking a fag. The proximity Of this sergeant can be beard from the tapping of an axe, but be is not visible. The boy rises up leisurely from a hummock of moss under a wild cherry and engages me in conversation. This is a rotten hole; nothing to do; the grub is rotten, too. He had been given some sort of chicken-paste to eat on his bread. I toll him that my midday meal is bread and cheese. "'Well," be says, "you needn't do this unless you like. I suppose you do it for pleasure." The boy was bored because he wanted to get to the front, I believe. There he would be a lion. Still, a Ellie irony in the situation amused me. A couple of yards away from me a man of some sixty years of age, chopping wither at their base in a hazel bush, bad not straightened his back to look up even at the sound of the conversation. And I called to mind, not without taking pleasure in the accumu- lating irony, the remark of a resident in a villa net far from the scene of our operations who had refused to take in any Volunteer as a lodger. He did not approve of the Volunteers. He held that every man ought to be in the Army. The Volunteers—so said this far-seeing patriot—spoiled recruiting.
Other days I spend in the trenches. Here is the hardest work—picking, digging, shovelling, cutting turf, turfing over conspicuous places where the earth has been reshaped. Along the base of the steep walls we jab holes in the ground with heavy jumpers, drive in stout pickets with mauls, and then do the riveting of the walls by wattling supple branches in and out of the pickets. A member of tools have been drawn from a military store, but one generally seems to have a jumper at hand when one wants a maul, or a saw when one wants wire- cutters, or a graft when one wants a spade. Every man becomes as expert and silent in the art of carrying off another's tools as an Afridi rifle-stealer. I suspect that we Volunteers go at tIle work a bit too hard. While deprecating the " Government stroke," I discover a real economy of energy in the method of the professional who spits on his hands and examines the sky once in every two minutes. Besides, our muscles are not used to the job. I call to mind the spectacle of an old gardener, seventy years of age, who used to swing his spade all day without turning a hair. The right muscles had been developed by long use, and for the rest it was knack, not strength. As for cutting wood into shape with billhook or axe, that again is cunning and not strength. I begin to doubt whether Wordsworth really severed at a single blow of the axe the knot at which the "poor old man so long and vainly had endeavoured." For the poor old man was a woodman, and Wordsworth, so far as I know, was not. But in spite of our aching muscles, what a rest-cure is this military life! When you are tired you are deliciously tired and enjoy fobd and sleep. This is quite unlike being fagged in London—a painful, not a wholesome experience. As a soldier you have regular work, regular food, regular hours, and nothing to worry about. You are removed from the world in this olaustral life; the words of command exoite in you the response of some bodily mechanism, not of responsible thought; you conform to an hynotic suggestion. Doctors have tried to expel nervous worry by quietude; have they tried to expel it by hard physical labour under strict discipline P I should like to invent a system.
e • • The joy of all who worked upon it, and the envy of those who did not, was our dug-out. The brilliant designer worked on it himself like a black, revelling in the joy of craftsman- ship. He favoured a Cyclopean style of architecture, for which the neighbouring wood supplied suitable oak trunks. When the war is over I should like to spend a day every year in the dim religious light of that recess and meditate penitentially on the words I used and the thoughts I thought when I was building up the roof of earth. It seemed to me as I laboured that the thing could never be pulled to pieces. So lot it stay there—a sort of Stonehenge for that part of the country. Or I might buy it and fence it in with barbed-wire entanglements and charge twopence for admission. If Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim had ever made dug-outs, Sterne would have had to write I cannot guess how many extra chapters.
• On my return to London a friend asked me some questions, and I answered him as well as I could, somewhat as follows :- FRIEND: It seems to me that the War Office doesn't encourage you fellows as muck as it might. You say that you know your drill pretty well, that you have uniform 12,n1 arms of a sort, and that you pay for your own food and ;1g and give your labour free. Surely at a time when the nation is crying out for more labour what you offer is invahrible. How can you account for the fact that the Government do not make more use of you?
SELF: I can't. But they are making much more use of 113 than they did, and will make more.
FRIEND: Perhaps you cause them some expense in some way you have not thought of ?
SELF: The only expense I know of is that they let us irevel free on the railway if we go in a body and from a purticulor station. If we go singly, or if we go from another stale:l, we have to pay for ourselves.
FR/END: Incredible I SELF: Not at all.
FRIEND: But you are doing work that really wants doing SELF: Certainly.
FRIEND: 1 suppose the feet is that you can't give enougi. time for you to be fitted into any regular scheme of military work or defence P SELF: We will do the fitting in, by relays, if the Government will give us the work.
FRIEND: Do you think that will happen P SELF : I am sure of it. If the war goes ou as long as seen„. likely, we shall be wanted all right. We have only got carry on. And that's what the Volunteers mean to de Digging is the present job of my lot, and that will Wei on to something else. Solvitur fodiendo. J. B. A.
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