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Montague, Charles Edward - Disenchantment
Identifier
021646
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Charles Montague, Disenchantment (1922)
Soldiers would serve a divisional tour of sixteen days' duty in the line. For four days the men would be in reserve under enemy fire, but not in trenches; probably in the cellars of ruined houses. But these were not times of rest. Each day or night every man would make one or more journeys back to the trenches that they had left carrying some load of food, water, or munitions up to the three companies in trenches, or perhaps leading a pack-mule over land to some point near the front line, under cover of night. Even to lead an laden mule in the dark over waste ground confusingly wired and trenched is work; to get him back on to his feet when fallen and wriggling, in wild consternation, among a tangle of old barbed wire may be quite hard work.
After four days of their labours as sumpter mules, or muleteers, the company would plod back for another four days of duty in trenches, come out yet more universally tired at their end, and drift back to rest-billets, out of ordinary shell-fire, for their sixteen days or so of 'divisional rest'.
Charles Montague, Disenchantment (1922)
The war had more obvious disagreeables, too, you have heard all about them: the quelling coldness of frosty nights spent in soaked clothes - for no blankets were brought up to the trenches; the ubiquitous dust and stench of corpses and buzzing of millions of corpse-fed flies on summer battlefields; and so on, and so on.
God, make my brooding mind a rift
Through which a meaning gleams.