“HUMOURS OF WAR.”

New Zealand Herald, Volume LII, Issue 16026, 18 September 1915, Page 2 (Supplement)

“HUMOURS OF WAR.”

THE SOUL OF THE BRITISH SOLDIER. **.'■ TRENCH STORIES. It is the gift of humour in our troops that makes them flout the German menace and go on fighting with a grim and ironical contempt for death, when, as at Ypres, for an awful hour or two, the game eeemed lost. Like the gravedigger in '"Hamlet," they will make a jest over dead bones and eat without loss of appetite by newmade graves. It is by his humour that one may know the soul of the British soldier.

"What! y ls there any humour in this frightful tragedy, any. kind of fun amidst all this death?" " Yes."

Mr. Phillip Gibbs, in an article on " The Humours of the War," in the Daily Chronicle, tells some grimly humorous stories of our soldiers at the front. " The humour developed by this war is not exactly suitable for drawingrooms, but it is marvellously effective in an atmosphere of high explosives. The plain facts of war are not slurred over in the way of those at home (literary gentlemen with delicate souls) who try to pretend that war is a nice, clean tiling, full of poetry and chivalry." • Mike's Spade. At an officers' mess t|iere was great laughter at the story of one of our men, who had spent his last cartridge in defending an attack. " Hand me cjown your spade, Mike," he said, and as six Germans came one by one round the end of a traverse, he split each man's skull open with a deadly blow. " Splendid fellow!" said a military chaplain, laughing very heartily. (This priest does not believe in the sentimentalities of war.) "That man ought to have the Victoria Cross." A Spy Hunt. There was a spy hunt the other day, and a man was discovered <tt work with a telephone. '* We've got him, sir," shouted a British Tommy, and many shots were fired rather wildly, until the captain approached with his revolver and put it against the forehead of the culprit. " What are you doing here, you scoundrel?" he asked sternly. "Telephoning to the battery." said the alleged spy, who was an honest Englishman. " Who's your officer?" asked the astounded captain. The bead of a little gentleman appeared, and a mild voice said, "I am." Rather a good joke that!

Dead Germans' Burial. They have queer fancier, some of our British soldiers from the rural districts, as, for instance, when a day or two ago some of them went to a great deal of trouble "with a dead German—he had been dead three weeks— order to bury him face downwards. " What on earth are you doing?" asked their sergeant-major, who could not understand the meaning of all this fuss. _ " Well, it's like this,*" was the explanation. , 'i If the beggar begins to scratch he will scratch his way to th'e devil. - It's an old belief in our district, and it took our fancy." Bayoneted His First Man. That was a rare joke, too, when a Kitchener's Army man bayoneted his first German the other«day, and was so cock-a-hoop that he stood with one foot on hie dead foe in the attitude of Lewis Waller in romantic melodrama! "I laughed until the tears came into my eyes," said a young lieutenant who witnessed the operation. ,

"Do yon begrudge them their laughter?" Sir. Gibbs asks.

" I who go among them, and now and again share a little of the peril which is part .of their daily routine, know that without such laughter an army is lost. Our soldiers are good fighting men because in the midst of all the horrors of war' they find an excuse for mirth. After a night in the trenches, where they have been bombed and shelled, they will come out and make a, mockery of German ' rightfulness,' and shout with laughter at things which would sicken more squeamish souls."