A Fox Under My Cloak Read Free Page A

the grave one a little salute, he went back to his platoon.
    *
    The damp December dusk was closing down as they approached the dark, still mass of leafless tress; and filed towards the edge of a wood. Then a novel kind of path began, firm but nobbly to the feet, but so welcome after the mud of the preceding field. The path was like walking on an uneven and wide ladder. Therough rungs, laid close together, were made of little sawn-off branches, nailed to laid trunks of trees. As they went nearer the flares, bullets began to crack. He found that he, like the new draft, was ducking, as during the first time under fire. But soon he grew accustomed to the cracks, and walked on upright.
    They came to a cross-ride in the wood and waited there, near some bunkers in which braziers glowed brightly. The sight was cheering. Figures in balaclavas stood about. “What’s it like, mate?” he asked. “Cushy,” came the reply, as a cigarette brightened. These were regulars; he felt happy again. Braziers, lovely crackling coke flames!
    They filed on down the corduroy path, and came to the edge of the wood, beyond which the flares were clear and bright, like lilies. The trench was just inside the wood. There was no water in it; he saw sandbag dugouts behind the occupants standing-to for the relief. It was indeed cushy.
    Thus began a period or cycle of eight days for No. 1 Company: two in the front line followed by two back in battalion reserve in billets, two in support in the wood, and two more again in the front line. It was not unenjoyable: the danger negligible—a shell arriving now and again—subject more of curiosity than of fear—news of someone getting sniped; work in the trench, digging by day, revetting the parapet and fatigues in the wood by night: for the weather was fine. One trench, called Birdcage Walk, had a beautifully made parapet with steel loop-holes built in; and was paved along a length of fifty yards entirely by unopened tins of bully beef, taken from some of the hundreds of boxes lying about in the wood. These boxes had been chucked away by former carrying parties, in the days before corduroy paths. The trench had been built by the Grenadiers, now no longer bearded, though some of their toes were showing through their boots; it was said among the London Highlanders that a cigarette-end, dropped anywhere in it, while the Bill Browns were in, was a “crime”, heavily punished. Phillip said it seemed rather awful, to be treated like that. “It’s the form,” remarked Church, and he wondered what Church meant.
    *
    All form, and shape even, of the carefully-made trenches disappeared under the rains falling upon the yellow clay which retained them. Phillip was soaked all day and all night; the weight of his greatcoat was doubled with clay.
    After the rain, mists lay over a countryside that had no soul, with its broken farmhouse roofs, dead cattle in No Man’s Land, its daylight nihilism beyond the parapet, with never a movement of life, never a glimpse of a German; except those that were dead, and lying motionless, in varying attitudes of complete stillness, day after day upon the level brown field extending to the yellow subsoil parapet of the German trench behind its barbed-wire fence.
    At night mists blurred the brightness of the light-balls, the Véry lights or flares as they were now generally called; the mists, hanging heavier in the woods, settled to hoar, which rimed trees and duck-boards and tiles of shed and barn and clarified a keener air in cheerful sunlight. Frost formed floating films of ice upon the clay-blue water in the shell-holes, which tipped when mess-tins were dipped for brewing the daily ration of tea mixed with sugar. It was pleasant in the wood, squatting by a little stick fire. Movement was laborious now upon the paths not yet laid with corduroy; boots became pattened with yellow clay. Still, it might be worse—memory of the tempest that had fallen on the last day of the battle for Ypres,