And so I said good-by to Vimy Ridge, and
to the brave men I had known there--living and dead. For I felt that
I had come to know some of the dead as well as the living.
CHAPTER XVIII
"You'll see another phase of the front now, Harry," said Captain
Godfrey, as I turned my eyes to the front once more.
"What's the next stop?" I asked.
"We're heading for a rest billet behind the lines. There'll be lots
of men there who are just out of the trenches. It's a ghastly strain
for even the best and most seasoned troops--this work in the
trenches. So, after a battalion has been in for a certain length of
time, it's pulled out and sent back to a rest billet."
"What do they do there?" I asked.
"Well, they don't loaf--there's none of that in the British army,
these days! But it's paradise, after the trenches. For one thing
there isn't the constant danger there is up front. The men aren't
under steady fire. Of course, there's always the chance of a bomb
dropping raid by a Taube or a Fokker. The men get a chance to clean
up. They get baths, and their clothes are cleaned and disinfected.
They get rid of the cooties--you know what they are?"
I could guess. The plague of vermin in the trenches is one of the
minor horrors of war.
"They do a lot of drilling," Godfrey went on. "Except for those times
in the rest billets, regiments might get a bit slack. In the
trenches, you see, the routine is strict, but it's different.
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