---
created_at: '2014-10-22T19:58:07.000Z'
title: A Soldier Explains What It Was Like in the World War I Trenches (1916)
url: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119933/interview-wounded-world-war-i-soldier-bulgaria
author: diodorus
points: 133
story_text: ''
comment_text: 
num_comments: 41
story_id: 
story_title: 
story_url: 
parent_id: 
created_at_i: 1414007887
_tags:
- story
- author_diodorus
- story_8494778
objectID: '8494778'

---
“Say it,” I begged him.

He smiled.

“What kind of clothes did you have?”

“Our Dardanelles suit.”

So it was true; it had been almost impossible to believe.

“We was up in the mountains with the same stuff we wore down in
Gallipoli in summer,” he went on, in his unimpassioned way: “The
trenches only came up to your knees, and no protection at all; and then
there was no food.”

“No food?”

“Well, a biscuit, a bit of jam and some tea, maybe.”

“How many times a day?”

“Twice a day some, three times a day some, mostly once; when they could
get it to us. Just enough to keep the life in you.”

“What did you do all that time?”

“We had to be looking out always; you had to be on your knees, too, for
that. No sleep—o’ course you dozed a bit now and then, but mostly you
had to be watchin’.”

Impossible to go forwards or backwards, impossible to believed;
stupefied with the bitter icy waiting. I was told later the German
officers had maintained that nine days’ delay. The Bulgarians would
never have held the comitadjis  back so long.

“And how did the boys feel?”

“Oh—“ he stopped, puzzled. Fortunately he was no psychologist or he
would have told me how the boys felt, and I should not have learned that
there are times when you do not feel.

“The last two days—“ he began, and stopped again, puzzled. “Well,
we—didn’t feel good,” he finished lamely.

“What do you mean?—You sort of woke up, and felt—?”

“We felt something coming,” he said, tersely; and just for an instant I
felt what those men, a yard apart in the knee-high trenches that were no
protection at all, had felt.

“We knew they were getting ready for something,” he said, with another
stop, in that elliptical fashion of his.

“Artillery?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “artillery.”

“What about your own?”

“Oh, the English guns were no good at all,” he said, decidedly. “The
French was all right. The Bulgarians worked theirs fine.”

At the foreign office they had told me the English and French artillery
worked much better than the Bulgarian, but Jimmie had been out there
nine days and nights, in Balkan mountain wind and tropical clothing, and
at the end the Bulgars had come “with the knife.” I do not imagine you
can remember much difference between shrapnel and bayonets sometimes.
Moreover, it is true that the effect of only the enemy’s shrapnel was
apparent to Jimmie; but it is equally true that the Bulgarians are so
inordinately proud of their prowess with the “knife” that they gladly
belittle any other excellence of the army merely to enhance the glory of
their bayonets. “Ein dummer Pat\!” Herbst of the Intelligence Office
said impatiently, when I repeated to him what Jimmie had said of the
Bulgarian artillery.

“Yes,” Jimmie said again, in his even tone, “ours was all mismanaged—bad
handlin’—I think it was the Colonel’s fault.”

“Then the Bulgarians came?” I prompted. “Did you check them at all?”

“We was fagged—no life in us left. And then they were three to one, and
we each of us a yard apart.” He bent down and stroked over his wound
again.

That was all. January first, took the King’s shilling, and later took
four months of the Dardenelles; after that he marched “fine o’ heart”
with a tropically clothed division the majority of whose members had
never seen service into an early Macedonian winter to meet the
Bulgarians, was rippled with a bayonet through the left thigh and now
lay comfortable and quite content in the Red Cross Hospital in Sofia
where he received every care the Bulgarians themselves received.

“The only trouble is—they don’t understand you,” he said, not by way of
complaint, but to explain.

One year this bit of flesh and blood and bone had played the game with
steel, and he was one of those who had come through, even survived the
errors of his officers. I looked at the mild amiable man, with his large
girl’s eyes and face with no indication of energy or personal assertion.
This Irishman, who in the normal course of events might never have gone
from Dublin to London, here in Sofia. For all the purposeless pain of
the situation it was shriekingly comic.

“Who fights the point?” I asked, rather pointlessly.

He smiled at the stupidity of the question.

“Oh, the Bulgarians,” he said, with the nearest approach to emphasis I
had heard from him, bending down over the discomfort of his wound again.
