His audience, a sixty-pounder crew, stand round bleeding from the ears. The Boche are all but finished, apparently – I heard they’re packing old clock parts into trench mortars now, for want of iron scrap. Some wag quips that next time he’s sentry and hears the plop of a minenwerfer tumbling over, he’ll not blow the alarm, he’ll shout: ‘Time, gentlemen, please . . . ’ We laugh and for one heartbeat forget to be afraid. Bravery and cowardice are just two workings of the same fear moving us in different ways. The 8th East Surreys have been given footballs to kick and follow at Zero Hour; it’s to persuade them from the trenches lest their nerve fail as they advance on Montaubon. I’ve watched men hitch up their collars and trudge forward as if shrapnel and lead were no worse than a shower of winter rain. This afternoon a few of us went swimming in the mill dam behind Camp. Just for a while to have no weight, to go drifting clear of thought and world, was utter bliss. A skylark climbed high over the torn fields on its impossible thread of song: ‘like an unbodied joy.’ I don’t know why, but it reminded me of the day we took over from the French along the Somme; it was so tranquil, so picturesque, the German trenchworks crowded with swathes of tiny, brilliant flowers none of us could name.
