Here I will merely remark that the “good” dug-out in which we were living was blown in by a 4·2 shell exactly four days later, killing one officer and wounding the other two badly. With regard to the state of the trenches, it was dry weather, and “when they were dry they were dry, and when they were wet they were wet!”
“3rd Feb. Another beautiful February morning. Slept quite well, despite rats overhead. O’Brien and Dixon awfully dull and heavy; can’t think why. Everything outside is full of life; there is a crispness in the air, and a delightful sharp shadow and light contrast as you look up Maple Redoubt.
Meditations on coldness, and how it unmans--on hunger, and how it weakens--on the art of feeding and warming, and how women realise this, while men do not usually know there is any art in keeping house at all!
Meditations, too, on the stupidity, slowness, and clumsiness of officers’ servants.”
Dixon’s snores make me bucked with life; so, too, this same clumsiness of the servants. Lewis came in just now. ‘Why are you waiting, Lewis?’ I asked. ‘I thought Watson was waiting to-day.’ (This after a great strafing of servants for general stupidity and incompetence.) ‘None of the others dared come in, sir,’ he replied, in his high piping voice, and a broad grin on his face. Oh! they are good fellows! Why be fed up with life? Why long faces? Long faces, these are the bad things of life, the things to fight against....”
So did my vision of the Third Army School bear fruit, I see now!
“Philosophy from the trenches. Does it cover everything? Does it explain the fellows I passed this morning being carried to the Aid Post, one with blood and orange iodine all over his face, and the other wounded in both legs? It always comes as a surprise when the bombs and shells produce wounds and death....
Watched a mine go up this evening--great yellow-brown mass of smoke, followed by a beautiful under-cloud of orange-pink that steamed up in a soft creamy way. No firing and shelling followed as at Givenchy....
10 p.m. Great starlight. Jupiter and Venus both up, and the Great Bear and Orion glittering hard and clean in the steely sky. I wish I had a Homer. I am sure he has just one perfect epithet for Orion on a night like this. I shall read Homer in a new light after these times. I begin to understand the spirit of the Homeric heroes; it was all words, words, words before. Now I see. Billet life--where is that in the _Iliad_? In the tents, of course. And the eating and drinking, the ‘word that puts heart into men,’ the cool stolid facing of death, all those gruesome details of wounds and weapons, all is being enacted here every day exactly as in the Homeric age. Human nature has not altered.