The First Casualty Read Online Free PDF Page B

you back your own uniform when you come out again.’
    ‘You mean you got the same uniform back?’ a teenage conscript asked, aghast that such luxuries had ever been possible on the Western Front.
    ‘Yes, you did. That was before Kitchener died, of course. It all changed then, when the old man went down and yer conscription come in. Too many bleeding soldiers to give ‘em a decent bath or their own tunics.’
    The fact that men who were detailed for showers were then expected to take pot luck and grab any supposedly laundered uniform when they emerged on the other side was a source of enormous resentment amongst the private soldiers.
    ‘I always hangs on to my own,’ said another. ‘There’s no less bugs in the one I got on than the ones they hands you back and at least I knows my lice. They’re family.’
    ‘It’s disgusting,’ an angry-looking soldier asserted, ‘expecting free-born men to put on any filthy old uniform the army hurls at us and then asking us to take pride in our units! Bloody generals should try it themselves and see how proud they feel.’
    This soldier’s name was Hopkins and he was not a popular man. He was known to be a Communist and a follower of something he called the International, and although most of the men were always happy to vilify the much-despised General Staff they did not hold with Bolshevism.
    ‘Piss off to Russia then and see how you like it’ was the usual reply to Hopkins’s diatribes.
    ‘You’re all mad, bloody mad,’ Hopkins shouted to anyone who would listen. ‘Look at us. We’re sheep, that’s what. Sheep to the bleeding slaughter. We can’t win this war, not the poor bloody infantry. We just sit around hoping to cop a Blighty so’s we can stagger home crippled, grateful not to be dead.’
    As usual Hopkins was stirring up more resentment than support.
    ‘What do you mean we can’t win? You lying bastard!’
    ‘I mean what I say. We can’t win it and they can’t win either,’ Hopkins insisted. ‘Not the common man.’
    ‘Who are you calling common?’
    ‘The only people who will win this war, who are winning this war, who have already bloody won this war are the people who make the shells and guns that working men lob at each other.’
    ‘Ay, that’s true enough,’ a man named McCroon who was the unit’s other Bolshevik chipped in. ‘Like the slogan tells you, a bayonet is a weapon with a worker at both ends.’
    ‘And we should lay down ours and refuse to fight,’ Hopkins cried. ‘That’s what we should do, vote with our feet like the Russians are doing. Tell those bloated capitalists we won’t die for their profits.’
    ‘Well, why don’t you then, you, Bolshie bastard?’ a voice cried out. ‘Piss off so’s we don’t have to listen to you bangin’ on no more.’
    ‘Because they’d bloody shoot me, that’s why, you Tory prick! Socialism doesn’t want martyrs, it wants solidarity. If one man goes or a handful they just shoot ‘em but if we all walked off they’d have to think again, wouldn’t they? Solidarity forever!’
    ‘Don’t you ever give it a rest?’
    At that point Hopkins was forced to stop because bath time was called and the men took off their uniforms and undergarments and trooped naked into the brewery, where they stood on duckboards as the water was turned on over their heads. Some of them had managed to keep a bit of soap safe for the occasion.
    ‘I had a lovely bar of Pears my missus sent,’ a man said. ‘Fucking rat ate it. Just fucking ate the whole bar. Would you credit it?’
    ‘Won’t his shit smell beautiful!’
    There was plenty of joking and some singing too, for bare though the arrangements were, to soldiers who had lived in ditches for weeks even this brief communal shower was a treat. The joking and singing was of course filled with the bitter irony which was the Tommies’ only real defence against the nightmare in which they had found themselves.
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