Maclean by Allan Donaldson

the bodies was lying face down across a pile of dirt with all its clothes blown off, and Akers said to the boy, ‘Don’t that remind you of your girlfriend?’ The boy turned around and puked until it looked as if he was going to die. That was when one of the boys went after Akers with his rifle butt. They got hold of him before he did any damage, but Akers reported him anyway, and he got three days’ pack drill.
    â€œâ€˜Ash-cans’ was what we used to call them mortar bombs,” Maclean said to Leveret.
    â€œThat’s right,” Leveret said. “You got a better memory than I have. You even used to be able to talk to them Frenchmen a little, didn’t you? They was sumpin’, wasn’t they? Them and the god-damned English. Wasn’t they just sumpin’ too. And their god-damned officers with their fuckin’ airs. Wonder somebody didn’t shoot ‘em.”
    You men, you men there, what are you doing here? Get out where you belong. Lieutenant! Lieutenant whatever-your name is! You there! These men of yours have mud on their boots! Try to make them look a little more like soldiers. You Canadians are a disgrace to His Majesty’s uniform.
    Once somewhere near Festubert, they sent them an English lieutenant. They’d been marched half the night in full pack, first this way and then that, listening to shell fire and machine guns off ahead, all of them hoping to Christ it would be over before they got there. A mile or more behind the line, their lieutenant and five of the boys were killed by shrapnel, and soldiers were scattered all over the place. Floundering around in the dark, cursing and falling over each other, they got themselves back together again, more or less, and settled down in one of the rear support trenches and went to sleep.
    When they woke up, they found they now had this English lieutenant. He didn’t look more than twenty years old, and he was as smooth-faced as a girl. But he was all dressed up in a spanking, new officer’s uniform out of a London tailor shop, and he was carrying a cane and a fucking great revolver that he probably didn’t know one end of from the other. It was as plain as death that he’d never been in the line before that morning. He had been dug out of some headquarters somewhere probably, and here was his chance to show what he was made of and do his bit for King and Country. Except that he was scared out of his mind. You could tell the minute you looked at him that he was going to get himself killed and that he knew it. He was like a man walking in his sleep. Or a man about to be put in front of a firing squad.
    That day was one of the worst he could remember. Attacks. Counter attacks. Torrents of shells coming down from every direction. Machine guns firing from every direction. And them sitting there in that trench, getting peppered with shrapnel and having the shit scared out of them by high explosives, no one knowing where they were or what the hell was going on.
    Half way through the morning, they were ordered up through a maze of communication trenches to the main support trench. The Germans, it turned out, had just taken the forward trench, and the boys who had been in it and weren’t already dead were holding out in shell holes and back along the communication trenches. It was their job to join up with them and re-take the forward trench before the Germans had time to consolidate it.
    The English general who had come to inspect them, whoever he was—they all looked and talked the same—stood on a little platform with a swagger stick under his arm and shouted at them in a high-pitched voice, “If you lose a trench, there is to be no hesitation, no waiting for orders. The standing order is that it is to be re-taken immediately at the point of the bayonet. The point of the bayonet, you understand.” And he stood up on tiptoes on his little platform and stabbed at the air with his swagger