In trenches at Bois Grenier in 1915 Richards and Stevens were watching Private Berry standing in a pool of water with his boots and puttees off, trying to fix a pump: ‘his language,’ reported Richards, ‘was delightful to listen to’:
Soon he slipped on his back in the water and we burst out laughing. Then suddenly Stevens too dropped down in a sitting position with his back against the back of the trench; but this was no laughing matter. A sniper on our right front had got him right through the head. No man ever spoke who was shot clean through the brain: some lived a few seconds and others longer. Stevens lived about fifteen minutes… He was a married man with three children and one of the cleanest white men I ever met. He was different to the majority of us, and during the time he was in France he never looked at another women and he could have had plenty of them in some of the places we were in…
[…]
A Cambrin in June 1915 Robert Graves was shocked to find a man hit in the head:
making a snoring noise mixed with animal groans… One can joke with a badly-wounded man and congratulate him on being out of it [that is, out of combat]. One can disregard a dead man. But even a miner can’t make a joke that sounds like a joke over a man who takes three hours to die, after the top part of his head has been taken off by a bullet fired at twenty yards’ range.
Source:
Holmes, Richard. "Earth and Wire." Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front, 1914-1918. London: HarperCollins, 2004. 295-96. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Richards Old Soldiers p. 77.
Graves Goodbye p. 98.
Further Reading:
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