Coming to a narrow, cart-rutted lane a little further on, I was just starting to go up it when, suddenly, a bright idea struck me.  An old zig-zag communication trench (a relic of a bygone period) left the lane on the right, and apparently ran out across the field to within a few yards of the furthest farm.  Once there, I had only a hundred yards more to do.

I entered the communication trench.  It was just a deep, narrow slot cut across the field, and had, I should imagine, never been used.  I think the enormous amount of water in it had made it a useless work.  I saw no sign of it ever having been used.  A fearful trench it was, with a deep deposit of dark green filthy, watery mud from end to end.

This, I could see, was the only way up to the farm, so I made the best of it.  I resigned myself to getting thoroughly wet through.  Quite unavoidable.  I plunged into this unwholesome clay ditch and went along, each step taking me up to my thighs in soft dark ooze, whilst here and there the water was so deep as to force me to scoop out holes in the clay at the side when, by leaning against the opposite side, with my feet in the holes, I could slowly push my way along.  In time I got to the other end, and sat down to think a bit.  As I sat, a bullet suddenly whacked into the clay parapet alongside of me, which stimulated my thinking a bit.  “Had I been seen?” I tried to find out, and reassure myself before going on.  I put my hat on top of a stick and brought it up above the parapet at two or three points to try and attract another shot; but no, there wasn’t another, so I concluded the first one had been accidental, and went on my way again.  By wriggling along behind an undulation in the field, and then creeping from one tree to another, I at last managed to get up into our reserve trenches, where I obtained my first daylight, close-up view of our trenches, German trenches, and general landscape; all laid out in panorama style.

In front of me were our front-line trenches, following the line of the little stream which ran into the Douve on the right.  On the far side of the stream the ground gently rose in a long slope up to Messines, where you could see a shattered mass of red brick buildings with the old grey tower in the middle.  At a distance of from about two to four hundred yards away lay the German trenches, parallel to ours, their barbed wire glistening in the morning sunlight.

“This place I’m in is a pretty good place for a sniper to hitch up,” I thought to myself.  “Can see everything there is to be seen from here.”

After a short stocktaking of the whole scene, I turned and wallowed my way back to the farm.  Some few days later they did make a sniper’s post of that spot, and a captain friend of mine, with whom I spent many quaint and dismal nights in St. Yvon, occupied it.  He was the “star” shot of the battalion, an expert sniper, and, I believe, made quite a good bag.

CHAPTER XXIII