Soldier from the Wars Returning by Charles Carrington

Author:Charles Carrington [Carrington, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, World War I
ISBN: 9781844153633
Google: Uus4ilKtiJoC
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
Published: 2006-01-01T00:22:15+00:00

12

Some random recollections

(i) ON THE MARCH

THOUGH the war on the Western Front seemed so immobile, the ceaseless interaction of trench reliefs implied that infantry units never stayed long in one place, not often for more than a week or ten days. In the year 1916, I find, I packed all my goods and moved house eighty times, of which fourteen removals were by train or bus and sixty-six by route march. Memory distinguishes little between these long days on the road except that some of them were in heat and dust, the others in cold and mud. They have faded into a recurrent pattern which I shall try to portray typically.

At first light the sentry from the quarter-guard wakes the orderly corporal, who goes round the barns to rouse the men where they lie sleeping in their clothes on straw. If there is still the peacetime frill of a bugler he is hounded out of bed to blow ‘revally’. A book might be written on bugle-calls, those simple tunes arranged on five notes only which, the traditionalists say, Haydn composed for George III, though I think they are much older. The soldiers know them by the ribald words sung to them:

‘Get oùt–o’bèd,

Get oùt–o’bèd,

Yer làzy bùg-gers.’

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