For this was a quiet corner.  Neither side was interested in stirring up the hornets’ nest.  If a member of Parliament wished to see what trench life was like he was brought here, because it was one of the safest places for a few minutes’ look at the sandbags which Mr. Atkins stared at week in and week out.  Some Conservatives, however, in the case of Radical members, would have chosen a different kind of trench to show; for example, that one which was suggested to me by the staff officer with the twinkle in his eye on my best day at the front.

In want of an army pass to the front in order to write your own description, then, put up a wall of sandbags in a vacant lot and another one hundred and fifty yards away and fire a rifle occasionally from your wall at the head of a man on the opposite side, who will shoot at yours—­and there you are.  If you prefer the realistic to the romantic school and wish to appreciate the nature of trench life in winter, find a piece of wet, flat country, dig a ditch seven or eight feet deep, stand in icy water looking across at another ditch, and sleep in a cellar that you have dug in the wall, and you are near understanding what Mr. Atkins has been doing for his country.  The ditch should be cut zigzag in and out, like the lines dividing the squares of a checker-board; that makes more work and localizes the burst of shells.

Of course, the moist walls will be continually falling in and require mending in a drenching, freezing rain of the kind that the Lord visits on all who wage war underground in Flanders.  Incidentally, you must look after the pumps, lest the water rise to your neck.  For all the while you are fighting Flanders mud as well as the Germans.

To carry realism to the limit of the Grand Guignol school, then, arrange some bags of bullets with dynamite charges on a wire, which will do for shrapnel; plant some dynamite in the parapet, which will do for high explosive shells that burst on contact; sink heavier charges of dynamite under your feet, which will do for mines, and set them off, while you engage someone to toss grenades and bombs at you.

Though scores of officers’ letters had given their account of trench life with the vividness of personal experience, I must mention my first trench in Flanders in winter when, with other correspondents, I saw the real thing under the guidance of the commanding officer of that particular section, a slight, wiry man who wore the ribbon of the Victoria Cross won in another war for helping to “save the guns.”  He made seeing trenches in the mud seem a pleasure trip.  He was the kind who would walk up to his ball as if he knew how to play golf, send out a clean, fair, long drive, and then use his iron as if he knew how to use an iron, without talking about his game on the way around or when he returned to the club-house.  Men could go into danger behind him without realizing that they were in danger; they could share hardship without realizing that there were any hardships.  Such as he put faith and backbone into a soldier by their very manner; and if their professional training equal their talents, when war comes they win victories.