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We woke to a fine sunny morning, stiff and cold from having slept on the concrete floor in our uniforms without bedding. Carter, who must have been nearer fifty than thirty, stoically did not show the pain which must have been much worse for him than for those, like me, who were nearer eighteen than twenty. “What a rum smell”, I said sniffing the sweet and rotten air. Carter drew in his breath through compressed lips and spat it out. The nearest, I thought, he ever gets to a smile. “Must be a corpse somewhere – that's what that smell means.” We hunted vainly, four or five of us when that many had woken. “It's not a Boche – they stink; not the rotten sweet smell.” ‘In death they were not divided’ – much. We could not find it so we had to endure it till we moved off two days later.
The trains were for men or horses, forty or eight, and with one or two coaches or compartments for officers; not just broken down third-class compartments such as we might have used in our youth when we ourselves were civilians, but grand, shabby, broken down first class, thus making unmistakable the gulf that separated US from THEM. Our men, my men or The Men? Or perhaps “Men!” as one would address them before battle. It seemed queer that Sergeant O'Toole, Hayler, Allen, the other Allen, Richardson, Gee Colombo should suddenly have become estranged and separated as we now approached the Line for which we had prepared so long. Much later I had a similar crisis of etiquette when cheerful, jolly Smith suddenly became ‘It’ when a shell splinter entered his brain and we could not get his limbs to pack properly into the grave. ‘Him’, ‘Corporal’, ‘Matey’, ‘Smith’ – time was getting short and it made things awkward if we had to make a grave to fit him (or It).
We sat in our superior comfort. I felt uneasily that my crew might
not see or realize that I was entitled to travel first class because of my graver responsibilities.
The afternoon landscape through which we crawled was scrub-covered. It gre