Eric Campbell’s protruding leg

Many of the lads on the trenches become obsessed with the possibility of getting a ‘holiday wound’, a non-fatal injury serious enough to get them sent home, out of the fighting.

 

However, none was more committed to the possibility than Eric Campbell, who devised what he believed was a fool-proof scheme to secure just such a wound.

 

He positioned his bed in our bunkhole by the door, and, by means of a strap and pulley system, proceeded to sleep with his legs protruding upwards out of the door, hoping to catch a stray bullet in the leg that would get him sent home.

 

We joked, of course, about the surprise that Mrs Campbell was going to get when he got home on leave and spent the night with his leg protruding upwards, but I’m afraid that particular conversation became particularly course, with a series of blue jokes relating to late-night protrudings.

 

The much awaited ‘holiday wound’ never came, bullets avoided him as if sticking-up-legs were out of fashion. In fact Eric was one of just three of us in our platoon who survived the entire war without so much as a scratch.

 

I lost touch with Campbell soon after we went home, the address he gave me was returned to sender, and he never to me, nor to any of us. I guess, war over, he did everything he could to forget it ever happened.  A lot of us did that.

 

So that was the last we heard of Eric Campbell. Or was it? Johnny Eagle tells a tale that he was camping in the lake district one summer, and passed a tent with a man’s right leg protruding out from the tent flap. It was late, so he didn’t disturb the man, but he says for a fact that it was Eric’s leg, he’d recognise it anywhere.