Eric Braithwaite’s Trousers

“Eric’s given his trousers a name,” someone joked the first time the name tag was spotted stitched into his trousers, by a mother clearly concerned that the worst thing that could happen during a war was for your trousers to get mislaid.

 

“’Eric Braithwaite’”, Monty read, “He’s given them HIS name.”

 

“If he’s given them his own name that means he’s married them,” John the Stoat said sagely.

 

And so Eric was known all along the trenches, ‘The boy who married his trousers’.

 

Eric didn’t keep his trousers long, none of us did. Eric was a chubby kid when he joined us, but the weight soon fell off him, and his trousers were so huge on him even belt AND braces weren’t enough to keep them up. He swapped them for a better-fitting pair from a fallen colleague.

 

Trousers aren’t immune to the bedlam of the trenches.  I’ve seen men shot to pieces, so much so that their best buddies can’t identify them, but their trousers still intact, nothing more than a splash of blood on them. I’ve seen other men with their trousers ripped to shreds, but without so much as a scratch on them.

 

The gods of war play with loaded dice and the sole aim of the game is chaos and confusion.

What became of Eric’s trousers, the ones he married, we would never know.

 

Or so we assumed. Until one day we found the corpse of a chubby German soldier wearing the wrong trousers, a pair that was clearly from our uniform. We inspected the trousers to see whether they were useable, and they we found the label, written in clear blue lettering, ‘Eric Braithwaite’.

 

“Fucking hell,” John the stoat said, “Eric’s trousers left him for a German.”