We had rubber boots, electric torches, and wore British warms, those short, thick coats which collect a modicum of mud for you to carry besides what you are carrying on your boots.  We walked along a hard road in the dark toward an aurora borealis of German flares, which popped into the sky like Roman candles and burst in circles of light.  They seemed to be saying:  “Come on!  Try to crawl up on us and play us a trick and our eyes will find you and our marksmen will stop you.  Come on!  We make the night into day, and watching never ceases from our parapet.”

Occasional rifle-shots and a machine-gun’s ter-rut were audible from the direction of the jumping red glare, which stretched right and left as far as the eye could see.  We broke off the road into a morass of mud, as one might cross fields when he had lost his way, and plunged on till the commanding officer said, “We go in here!” and we descended into a black chasm in the earth.  The wonder was that any ditch could be cut in soil which the rains had turned into syrup.  Mud oozed from the sandbags, through the wire netting, and between the wooden supports which held the walls in place.  It was just as bad over in the German trenches.  General Mud laid siege to both armies.  The field of battle where he gathered his gay knights was a slough.  His tug of war was strife against landslides, rheumatism, pneumonia, and frozen feet.

The soldier tries to kill his adversary; he tries to prevent his adversary from killing him.  He is as busy in safeguarding as in taking life.  While he breathes, thinks, fights mud, he blesses as well as curses mud.  Mother Earth is still unconquerable.  In her bosom man still finds security; such security that “dug in” he can defy at a hundred yards’ distance rifles that carry death three thousand yards.  She it is that has made the deadlock in the trenches and plastered their occupants with her miry hands.

The C.O. lifted a curtain of bagging as you might lift a hanging over an alcove bookcase, and a young officer, rising from his blankets in his house in the trench wall to a stooping posture, said that all was quiet.  His uniform seemed fleckless.  Was it possible that he wore some kind of cloth which shed mud spatters?  He was another of the type of Captain Q------, my host at Neuve Chapelle; a type formed on the type of seniors such as his C.O.  Unanalysable this quality, but there is something distinguished about it and delightfully appealing.  A man who can be the same in a trench in Flanders in mid-winter as in a drawing-room has my admiration.  They never lose their manner, these English officers.  They carry it into the charge and back in the ambulance with them to England, where they wish nothing so much as that their friends will “cut out the hero stuff,” as our own officers say.

In other dank cellars soldiers who were off guard were lying or sitting.  The radiance of the flares lighted the profiles of those on guard, whose faces were half-hidden by coat-collars or ear-flaps—­ imperturbable, silent, marooned and marooning, watchful and fearless.  The thing had to be done and they were doing it; and they were going to keep on doing it.