Trechos de Over The Top (1917), de Arthur Guy Empey.
It was in an office in Jersey City. [...]
The windows were open and a feeling of spring pervaded the air. Through the open windows came the strains of a hurdy-gurdy playing in the street - I DIDN'T RAISE MY BOY TO BE A SOLDIER.
"Lusitania Sunk! American Lives Lost!" - I DIDN'T RAISE MY BOY TO BE A SOLDIER. To us these did not seem to jibe.
The Lieutenant in silence opened one of the lower drawers of his desk and took from it an American flag which he solemnly draped over the war map on the wall.
- - -
"I am sorry that I cannot accept your offer, but I am leaving for England next week," and hung up the receiver.
[...] The trip across was uneventful.
- - -
That night there was a Zeppelin raid, but I didn't see much of it, because the slit in the curtains was too small and I had no desire to make it larger.
- - -
Recruiting posters were everywhere. The one that impressed me most was a life-size picture of Lord Kitchener with his anger pointing directly at me, under the caption of "Your King and Country Need You." No matter which way I turned, the accusing finger followed me. I was an American, in mufti, and had a little American flag in the lapel of my coat. I had no king, and my country had seen fit not to need me, but still that pointing finger made me feel small and ill at ease. I got off the bus to try to dissipate this feeling by mixing with the throng of the sidewalks.
Presently I came to a recruiting office.
- - -
Then I explained to him that I would not sign it without first reading it. I read it over and signed for duration of war. Some of the recruits were lucky. They signed for seven years only.
Then he asked me my birthplace. I answered, "Ogden, Utah."
He said, "Oh yes, just outside of New York?"
[...] Pretty soon I stood before him a proper Tommy Atkins in heavy marching order, feeling like an overloaded camel.
- - -
Tommy generally carries the oil with his rations; it gives the cheese a sort of sardine taste.
Add to this a first-aid pouch and a long ungainly rifle patterned after the Daniel Boone period, and you have an idea of a British soldier in Blighty.
Before leaving for France, this rifle is taken from him and he is issued with a Lee-Enfield short-trench rifle and a ration bag.
In France he receives two gas helmets, a sheep-skin coat, rubber mackintosh, steel helmet, two blankets, tear-shell goggles, a balaclava helmet, gloves, and a tin of anti-frostbite grease which is excellent for greasing the boots. Add to this the weight of his rations, and can you blame Tommy for growling at a twenty kilo route march?
- - -
I was "somewhere in France." [...]
This training consisted of the rudiments of trench warfare. Trenches had been dug, with barbed-wire entanglements, bombing saps, dugouts, observation posts, and machine-gun emplacements. We were given a smattering of trench cooking, sanitation, bomb throwing, reconnoitering, listening posts, constructing and repairing barbed wire, "carrying in" parties, methods used in attack and defense, wiring parties, mass formation, and the procedure for poison-gas attacks.
- - -
Then we started our march up to the line in ten kilo treks. [...]
Our billet was a spacious affair, a large barn on the left side of the road, which had one hundred entrances, ninety-nine for shells, rats, wind, and rain, and the hundredth one for Tommy. I was tired out, and using my shrapnel-proof helmet, (shrapnel proof until a piece of shrapnel hits it), or tin hat, for a pillow, lay down in the straw, and was soon fast asleep.
- - -
From that time on my friends the "cooties" were constantly with me.
The aristocracy of the trenches very seldom call them "cooties," they speak of them as fleas.
To an American, flea means a small insect armed with a bayonet, who is wont to jab it into you and then hop, skip, and jump to the next place to be attacked. There is an advantage in having fleas on you instead of "cooties" in that in one of his extended jumps said flea is liable to land on the fellow next to you; he has the typical energy and push of the American, while the "cootie" has the bull-dog tenacity of the Englishman, he holds on and consolidates or digs in until his meal is finished.
There is no way to get rid of them permanently. No matter how often you bathe, and that is not very often.
- - -
Just imagine it, writing a love letter during a "cootie" hunt; but such is the creed of the trenches.
- - -
Now, just imagine my hard luck. Out of five religions I was unlucky enough to pick the only one where church parade was compulsory!
[...] After church parade we were marched back to our billets, and played football all afternoon.
- - -
Against the horizon we could see numerous observation balloons or "sausages" as they are called.
On the afternoon of the third day's march I witnessed my first aeroplane being shelled. A thrill ran through me and I gazed in awe. The aeroplane was making wide circles in the air, while little puffs of white smoke were bursting all around it. These puffs appeared like tiny balls of cotton while after each burst could be heard a dull "plop."
- - -
Next evening, we took over our sector of the line. In single file we wended our way through a zigzag communication trench, six inches deep with mud. This trench was called "Whiskey Street." On our way up to the front line an occasional flare of bursting shrapnel would light up the sky and we could hear the fragments slapping the ground above us on our right and left. Then a Fritz would traverse back and forth with his "typewriter" or machine gun. The bullets made a sharp cracking noise overhead.
The boy in front of me named Prentice crumpled up without a word. A piece of shell had gone through his shrapnel-proof helmet. I felt sick and weak.
- - -
In this trench there were only two dugouts, and these were used by Lewis and Vickers, machine gunners, so it was the fire step for ours. Pretty soon it started to rain. We put on our "macks," but they were not much protection. The rain trickled down our backs, and it was not long before we were wet and cold.
- - -
Suddenly, the earth seemed to shake and a thunderclap burst in my ears. I opened my eyes, - I was splashed all over with sticky mud, and men were picking themselves up from the bottom of the trench. The parapet on my left had toppled into the trench, completely blocking it with a wall of tossed-up earth. The man on my left lay still. I rubbed the mud from my face, and an awful sight met my gaze - his head was smashed to a pulp, and his steel helmet was full of brains and blood. A German "Minnie" (trench mortar) had exploded in the next traverse.
- - -
[...] put the offending sentry under arrest. The sentry clicked twenty-one days on the wheel, that is, he received twenty-one days' Field Punishment No. I, or "crucifixion," as Tommy terms it.
This consists of being spread-eagled on the wheel of a limber two hours a day for twenty-one days, regardless of the weather. During this period, your rations consist of bully beef, biscuits, and water.
- - -
Tommy is a great cigarette smoker. He smokes under all conditions, except when unconscious or when he is reconnoitering in No Man's Land at night.
- - -
Six loaves of fresh bread, each loaf of a different size, perhaps one out of the six being as flat as a pancake, the result of an Army Service Corps man placing a box of bully beef on it during transportation.
[...] A tin of biscuits, or as Tommy calls them "Jaw-breakers."
[...] Once I tasted trench pudding, but only once.
- - -
His [Tommy] pay is only a shilling a day, twenty-four cents, or a cent an hour. Just imagine, a cent an hour for being under fire, - not much chance of getting rich out there.
- - -
"Well, Yank, they've done me in. I can feel myself going West." His voice was getting fainter and I had to kneel down to get the words. Then he gave me a message to write home to his mother and his sweetheart, and I, like a great big boob, cried like a baby. I was losing my first friend of the trenches.
[...] To get to the cemetery, we had to pass through the little shell-destroyed village, where troops were hurrying to and fro.
As the funeral procession passed, these troops came to the "attention," and smartly saluted the dead.
Poor Pete was receiving the only salute a Private is entitled to "somewhere in France."
[...] On the Western Front there are no coffins, and you are lucky to get a blanket to protect you from the wet and the worms.
- - -
My thoughts generally ran in this channel:
Will I emerge safely from the next attack? If I do, will I skin through the following one, and so on? While your mind is wandering into the future it is likely to be rudely brought to earth by a Tommy interrupting with, "What's good for rheumatism?"
Then you have something else to think of. Will you come out of this war crippled and tied into knots with rheumatism, caused by the wet and mud of trenches and dugouts? You give it up as a bad job and generally saunter over to the nearest estaminet to drown your moody forebodings in a glass of sickening French beer.
- - -
"Over the Top with the Best o' Luck and Give them Hell." The famous phrase of the Western Front. The Jonah phrase of the Western Front.
- - -
The standard bomb used in the British Army is the "Mills." It is about the shape and size of a large lemon. Although not actually a lemon, Fritz insists that it is; perhaps he judges it by the havoc caused by its explosion.
- - -
The average British soldier is not an expert at throwing; it is a new game to him, therefore the Canadians and Americans, who have played baseball from the kindergarten up, take naturally to bomb throwing and excel in this act.
- - -
Cassell had been a telegrapher in civil life and joined up when war was declared. As for me, I knew Morse, learned it at the Signaler's School back in 1910. With an officer in the observation post, we could not carry on the kind of conversation that's usual between two mates, so we used the Morse code.
- - -
We had an orchestra of seven men and seven different instruments. This orchestra was excellent, while they were not playing.
- - -
Tommy plays few card games; the general run never heard of poker, euchre, seven up, or pinochle. They have a game similar to pinochle called "Royal Bezique," but few know how to play it.
- - -
I liked that prisoner, he was a fine fellow, had an Iron Cross, too. I advised him to keep it out of sight, or some Tommy would be sending it home to his girl in Blighty as a souvenir.
- - -
Did you ever see one of the steam shovels at work on the Panama Canal, well, it would look like a hen scratching alongside of a Tommy "digging in" while under fire, you couldn't see daylight through the clouds of dirt from his shovel.
- - -
He was about six feet one, and as strong as an ox. I am five feet five in height, so we looked like Bud Fisher's "Mutt and Jeff" when together.
- - -
Executions are a part of the day's work but the part we hated most of all, I think certainly the saddest.
- - -
No photographs or maps are allowed to leave France, but in this case it appealed to me as a valuable souvenir of the Great War and I managed to smuggle it through.
- - -
On June 24, 1916, at 9:40 in the morning our guns opened up, and hell was let loose. The din was terrific, a constant boom-boom-boom in your ear.
At night the sky was a red glare. Our bombardment had lasted about two hours when Fritz started replying. Although we were sending over ten shells to his one, our casualties were heavy. There was a constant stream of stretchers coming out of the communication trenches and burial parties were a common sight.
In the dugouts the noise of the guns almost hurt. You had the same sensation as when riding on the Subway you enter the tube under the river going to Brooklyn - a sort of pressure on the ear drums, and the ground constantly trembling.
- - -
If you cut a wire improperly, a loud twang will ring out on the night air like the snapping of a banjo string. Perhaps this noise can be heard only for fifty or seventy-five yards, but in Tommy's mind it makes a loud noise in Berlin.
- - -
Then came a flash in front of me, the flare of his rifle - and my head seemed to burst. A bullet had hit me on the left side of my face about half an inch from my eye, smashing the cheek bones. I put my hand to my face and fell forward, biting the ground and kicking my feet. I thought I was dying.
[...] the body of one of my mates. I put my hand on his head, the top of which had been blown off by a bomb. My fingers sank into the hole. I pulled my hand back full of blood and brains, then I went crazy with fear and horror [...]; a bullet caught me on the left shoulder. It did not hurt much, just felt as if someone had punched me in the back, and then my left side went numb. My arm was dangling like a rag. I fell forward in a sitting position. But all fear had left me and I was consumed with rage and cursed the German trenches.
On the right and left of me several soldiers in colored kilts were huddled on the ground, then over came the second wave, also "Jocks."
Then it was taps for me. The lights went out.
- - -
Then I became unconscious. When I woke up I was in an advanced first-aid post.
- - -
I was put into a Ford with three others and away we went for an eighteen-mile ride. Keep out of a Ford when you are wounded; insist on walking, it'll pay you.
- - -
An English girl dressed in khaki was driving the ambulance, while beside her on the seat was a Corporal of the R.A.M.C.
- - -
One afternoon I received a note, through our underground channel, from my female visitor, asking me to attend a party at her house that night. I answered that she could expect me and to meet me at a certain place on the road well known by all patients, and some visitors, as "Over the wall." I told her I would be on hand at seven-thirty.
- - -
The wound in my face had almost healed and I was a horrible-looking sight - the left cheek twisted into a knot, the eye pulled down, and my mouth pointing in a north by northwest direction. I was very down-hearted and could imagine myself during the rest of my life being shunned by all on account of the repulsive scar.
[...] the undertaker squad carried me to the operating room or "pictures," as we called them because of the funny films we see under ether, and the operation was performed. It was a wonderful piece of surgery, and a marvelous success.
- - -
After four months in the hospital, I went before an examining board and was discharged from the service of his Britannic Majesty as "physically unfit for further war service."
Mais:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Webber
http://autoculture.org/?p=4046
The windows were open and a feeling of spring pervaded the air. Through the open windows came the strains of a hurdy-gurdy playing in the street - I DIDN'T RAISE MY BOY TO BE A SOLDIER.
"Lusitania Sunk! American Lives Lost!" - I DIDN'T RAISE MY BOY TO BE A SOLDIER. To us these did not seem to jibe.
The Lieutenant in silence opened one of the lower drawers of his desk and took from it an American flag which he solemnly draped over the war map on the wall.
- - -
"I am sorry that I cannot accept your offer, but I am leaving for England next week," and hung up the receiver.
[...] The trip across was uneventful.
- - -
That night there was a Zeppelin raid, but I didn't see much of it, because the slit in the curtains was too small and I had no desire to make it larger.
- - -
Recruiting posters were everywhere. The one that impressed me most was a life-size picture of Lord Kitchener with his anger pointing directly at me, under the caption of "Your King and Country Need You." No matter which way I turned, the accusing finger followed me. I was an American, in mufti, and had a little American flag in the lapel of my coat. I had no king, and my country had seen fit not to need me, but still that pointing finger made me feel small and ill at ease. I got off the bus to try to dissipate this feeling by mixing with the throng of the sidewalks.
Presently I came to a recruiting office.
- - -
Then I explained to him that I would not sign it without first reading it. I read it over and signed for duration of war. Some of the recruits were lucky. They signed for seven years only.
Then he asked me my birthplace. I answered, "Ogden, Utah."
He said, "Oh yes, just outside of New York?"
[...] Pretty soon I stood before him a proper Tommy Atkins in heavy marching order, feeling like an overloaded camel.
- - -
Tommy generally carries the oil with his rations; it gives the cheese a sort of sardine taste.
Add to this a first-aid pouch and a long ungainly rifle patterned after the Daniel Boone period, and you have an idea of a British soldier in Blighty.
Before leaving for France, this rifle is taken from him and he is issued with a Lee-Enfield short-trench rifle and a ration bag.
In France he receives two gas helmets, a sheep-skin coat, rubber mackintosh, steel helmet, two blankets, tear-shell goggles, a balaclava helmet, gloves, and a tin of anti-frostbite grease which is excellent for greasing the boots. Add to this the weight of his rations, and can you blame Tommy for growling at a twenty kilo route march?
- - -
I was "somewhere in France." [...]
This training consisted of the rudiments of trench warfare. Trenches had been dug, with barbed-wire entanglements, bombing saps, dugouts, observation posts, and machine-gun emplacements. We were given a smattering of trench cooking, sanitation, bomb throwing, reconnoitering, listening posts, constructing and repairing barbed wire, "carrying in" parties, methods used in attack and defense, wiring parties, mass formation, and the procedure for poison-gas attacks.
- - -
Then we started our march up to the line in ten kilo treks. [...]
Our billet was a spacious affair, a large barn on the left side of the road, which had one hundred entrances, ninety-nine for shells, rats, wind, and rain, and the hundredth one for Tommy. I was tired out, and using my shrapnel-proof helmet, (shrapnel proof until a piece of shrapnel hits it), or tin hat, for a pillow, lay down in the straw, and was soon fast asleep.
- - -
From that time on my friends the "cooties" were constantly with me.
The aristocracy of the trenches very seldom call them "cooties," they speak of them as fleas.
To an American, flea means a small insect armed with a bayonet, who is wont to jab it into you and then hop, skip, and jump to the next place to be attacked. There is an advantage in having fleas on you instead of "cooties" in that in one of his extended jumps said flea is liable to land on the fellow next to you; he has the typical energy and push of the American, while the "cootie" has the bull-dog tenacity of the Englishman, he holds on and consolidates or digs in until his meal is finished.
There is no way to get rid of them permanently. No matter how often you bathe, and that is not very often.
- - -
Just imagine it, writing a love letter during a "cootie" hunt; but such is the creed of the trenches.
- - -
Now, just imagine my hard luck. Out of five religions I was unlucky enough to pick the only one where church parade was compulsory!
[...] After church parade we were marched back to our billets, and played football all afternoon.
- - -
Against the horizon we could see numerous observation balloons or "sausages" as they are called.
On the afternoon of the third day's march I witnessed my first aeroplane being shelled. A thrill ran through me and I gazed in awe. The aeroplane was making wide circles in the air, while little puffs of white smoke were bursting all around it. These puffs appeared like tiny balls of cotton while after each burst could be heard a dull "plop."
- - -
Next evening, we took over our sector of the line. In single file we wended our way through a zigzag communication trench, six inches deep with mud. This trench was called "Whiskey Street." On our way up to the front line an occasional flare of bursting shrapnel would light up the sky and we could hear the fragments slapping the ground above us on our right and left. Then a Fritz would traverse back and forth with his "typewriter" or machine gun. The bullets made a sharp cracking noise overhead.
The boy in front of me named Prentice crumpled up without a word. A piece of shell had gone through his shrapnel-proof helmet. I felt sick and weak.
- - -
In this trench there were only two dugouts, and these were used by Lewis and Vickers, machine gunners, so it was the fire step for ours. Pretty soon it started to rain. We put on our "macks," but they were not much protection. The rain trickled down our backs, and it was not long before we were wet and cold.
- - -
Suddenly, the earth seemed to shake and a thunderclap burst in my ears. I opened my eyes, - I was splashed all over with sticky mud, and men were picking themselves up from the bottom of the trench. The parapet on my left had toppled into the trench, completely blocking it with a wall of tossed-up earth. The man on my left lay still. I rubbed the mud from my face, and an awful sight met my gaze - his head was smashed to a pulp, and his steel helmet was full of brains and blood. A German "Minnie" (trench mortar) had exploded in the next traverse.
- - -
[...] put the offending sentry under arrest. The sentry clicked twenty-one days on the wheel, that is, he received twenty-one days' Field Punishment No. I, or "crucifixion," as Tommy terms it.
This consists of being spread-eagled on the wheel of a limber two hours a day for twenty-one days, regardless of the weather. During this period, your rations consist of bully beef, biscuits, and water.
- - -
Tommy is a great cigarette smoker. He smokes under all conditions, except when unconscious or when he is reconnoitering in No Man's Land at night.
- - -
Six loaves of fresh bread, each loaf of a different size, perhaps one out of the six being as flat as a pancake, the result of an Army Service Corps man placing a box of bully beef on it during transportation.
[...] A tin of biscuits, or as Tommy calls them "Jaw-breakers."
[...] Once I tasted trench pudding, but only once.
- - -
His [Tommy] pay is only a shilling a day, twenty-four cents, or a cent an hour. Just imagine, a cent an hour for being under fire, - not much chance of getting rich out there.
- - -
"Well, Yank, they've done me in. I can feel myself going West." His voice was getting fainter and I had to kneel down to get the words. Then he gave me a message to write home to his mother and his sweetheart, and I, like a great big boob, cried like a baby. I was losing my first friend of the trenches.
[...] To get to the cemetery, we had to pass through the little shell-destroyed village, where troops were hurrying to and fro.
As the funeral procession passed, these troops came to the "attention," and smartly saluted the dead.
Poor Pete was receiving the only salute a Private is entitled to "somewhere in France."
[...] On the Western Front there are no coffins, and you are lucky to get a blanket to protect you from the wet and the worms.
- - -
My thoughts generally ran in this channel:
Will I emerge safely from the next attack? If I do, will I skin through the following one, and so on? While your mind is wandering into the future it is likely to be rudely brought to earth by a Tommy interrupting with, "What's good for rheumatism?"
Then you have something else to think of. Will you come out of this war crippled and tied into knots with rheumatism, caused by the wet and mud of trenches and dugouts? You give it up as a bad job and generally saunter over to the nearest estaminet to drown your moody forebodings in a glass of sickening French beer.
- - -
"Over the Top with the Best o' Luck and Give them Hell." The famous phrase of the Western Front. The Jonah phrase of the Western Front.
- - -
The standard bomb used in the British Army is the "Mills." It is about the shape and size of a large lemon. Although not actually a lemon, Fritz insists that it is; perhaps he judges it by the havoc caused by its explosion.
- - -
The average British soldier is not an expert at throwing; it is a new game to him, therefore the Canadians and Americans, who have played baseball from the kindergarten up, take naturally to bomb throwing and excel in this act.
- - -
Cassell had been a telegrapher in civil life and joined up when war was declared. As for me, I knew Morse, learned it at the Signaler's School back in 1910. With an officer in the observation post, we could not carry on the kind of conversation that's usual between two mates, so we used the Morse code.
- - -
We had an orchestra of seven men and seven different instruments. This orchestra was excellent, while they were not playing.
- - -
Tommy plays few card games; the general run never heard of poker, euchre, seven up, or pinochle. They have a game similar to pinochle called "Royal Bezique," but few know how to play it.
- - -
I liked that prisoner, he was a fine fellow, had an Iron Cross, too. I advised him to keep it out of sight, or some Tommy would be sending it home to his girl in Blighty as a souvenir.
- - -
Did you ever see one of the steam shovels at work on the Panama Canal, well, it would look like a hen scratching alongside of a Tommy "digging in" while under fire, you couldn't see daylight through the clouds of dirt from his shovel.
- - -
He was about six feet one, and as strong as an ox. I am five feet five in height, so we looked like Bud Fisher's "Mutt and Jeff" when together.
- - -
Executions are a part of the day's work but the part we hated most of all, I think certainly the saddest.
- - -
No photographs or maps are allowed to leave France, but in this case it appealed to me as a valuable souvenir of the Great War and I managed to smuggle it through.
- - -
On June 24, 1916, at 9:40 in the morning our guns opened up, and hell was let loose. The din was terrific, a constant boom-boom-boom in your ear.
At night the sky was a red glare. Our bombardment had lasted about two hours when Fritz started replying. Although we were sending over ten shells to his one, our casualties were heavy. There was a constant stream of stretchers coming out of the communication trenches and burial parties were a common sight.
In the dugouts the noise of the guns almost hurt. You had the same sensation as when riding on the Subway you enter the tube under the river going to Brooklyn - a sort of pressure on the ear drums, and the ground constantly trembling.
- - -
If you cut a wire improperly, a loud twang will ring out on the night air like the snapping of a banjo string. Perhaps this noise can be heard only for fifty or seventy-five yards, but in Tommy's mind it makes a loud noise in Berlin.
- - -
Then came a flash in front of me, the flare of his rifle - and my head seemed to burst. A bullet had hit me on the left side of my face about half an inch from my eye, smashing the cheek bones. I put my hand to my face and fell forward, biting the ground and kicking my feet. I thought I was dying.
[...] the body of one of my mates. I put my hand on his head, the top of which had been blown off by a bomb. My fingers sank into the hole. I pulled my hand back full of blood and brains, then I went crazy with fear and horror [...]; a bullet caught me on the left shoulder. It did not hurt much, just felt as if someone had punched me in the back, and then my left side went numb. My arm was dangling like a rag. I fell forward in a sitting position. But all fear had left me and I was consumed with rage and cursed the German trenches.
On the right and left of me several soldiers in colored kilts were huddled on the ground, then over came the second wave, also "Jocks."
Then it was taps for me. The lights went out.
- - -
Then I became unconscious. When I woke up I was in an advanced first-aid post.
- - -
I was put into a Ford with three others and away we went for an eighteen-mile ride. Keep out of a Ford when you are wounded; insist on walking, it'll pay you.
- - -
An English girl dressed in khaki was driving the ambulance, while beside her on the seat was a Corporal of the R.A.M.C.
- - -
One afternoon I received a note, through our underground channel, from my female visitor, asking me to attend a party at her house that night. I answered that she could expect me and to meet me at a certain place on the road well known by all patients, and some visitors, as "Over the wall." I told her I would be on hand at seven-thirty.
- - -
The wound in my face had almost healed and I was a horrible-looking sight - the left cheek twisted into a knot, the eye pulled down, and my mouth pointing in a north by northwest direction. I was very down-hearted and could imagine myself during the rest of my life being shunned by all on account of the repulsive scar.
[...] the undertaker squad carried me to the operating room or "pictures," as we called them because of the funny films we see under ether, and the operation was performed. It was a wonderful piece of surgery, and a marvelous success.
- - -
After four months in the hospital, I went before an examining board and was discharged from the service of his Britannic Majesty as "physically unfit for further war service."
Mais:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Webber
http://autoculture.org/?p=4046
