Has she a fair brow? It's merely a space for
wrinkles. Are her eyes bright? What years of horror when you watch
them grow watery and weak with age. Are her teeth pearly white? The
toothache grips them and wears them down to black and yellow stumps.
Is her body graceful, her waist slender, her figure upright. She
becomes a mother, and every line of her person is distorted, she
becomes a nightmare to you. Ah, perfect woman! They could not (p. 074)
fashion you in Eden! When I think of a woman washing herself! Ugh!
Your divinity washes the dust from her hair and particles of boiled
beef from between her teeth! Think of it, Horatio!"
"Nark it, you fool," said Bill, lifting a fag end from the bottom of
the trench and lighting it at mine. "Blimey, you're balmy as nineteen
maggots!"
It was a few days after this incident that, in the course of a talk
with Stoner, the subject of trenches cropped up.
"There are trenches and trenches," he remarked, as we were cutting
poppies from the parapet and flinging the flowers to the superior
slope. "There are some as I almost like, some as I don't like, and
some so bad that I almost ran away from them."
For myself I dislike the narrow trench, the one in which the left side
keeps fraying the cloth of your sleeve, and the right side strives to
open furrows in your hand. You get a surfeit of damp, earthy smell in
your nostrils, a choking sensation in your throat, for the place is
suffocating.
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