They have smoked away
its fighting tension, its hideous expectancy. They refuse to let
mangling and murder put crimps in their spirit. Apparently there is
nothing hellish enough to flatten the human spirit. Not all the
sprinkled shells and caravans of bleeding victims can cow the boys of
the front line. In this work of lifting clear of horror, tobacco has
been a friend to the soldiers of the Great War.
"I wouldn't know a good cigarette if I saw it," said Geoffrey Gilling,
after a year of ambulance work at Fumes and Coxyde. He had given up all
that makes the life of an upper-class Englishman pleasant, and I think
that the deprivation of high-grade smoking material was a severe item in
his sacrifice.
Four of us in Red Cross work spent weary hours each day in a filthy room
in a noisy wine-shop, waiting for fresh trouble to break loose. The
dreariness of it made B---- petulant and T---- mournfully silent, and
finally left me melancholy. But sturdy Andrew MacEwan, the Scotchman
with the forty-inch barrel chest, would reach out for his big can of
naval tobacco, slipped to him by the sailors at Dunkirk when the
commissariat officer wasn't looking, and would light his short stocky
pipe, shaped very much like himself, and then we were all off together
on a jaunt around the world. He had driven nearly all known "makes" of
motor-car over most of the map, apparently about one car to each
country.
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