From the breastworks, Captain P------and I went for a stroll in the
Village, or the site of the village, silent except for the occasional
singing of a bullet.  When we returned he lighted the candle on a stick
stuck into the wall of his earth-roofed house and suggested a nap.  It
was three o’clock in the morning.  Now I could see that my rubber
boots had grown so heavy because I was carrying so much of the soil
of Northern France.  It looked as if I had gout in both feet—­the over-bandaged, stage type of gout—­which were encased in large mud
poultices.  I tried to stamp off the incubus, but it would not go.  I tried
scraping one foot on the other, and what I scraped off seemed to
reattach itself as fast as I could remove it.

“Don’t try!” said the captain.  “Lie down and pull your boots off in the doorway.  Perhaps you will get some sleep before daybreak.”

Sleep!  Does a debutante go to sleep at her first ball?  Sleep in such good company, the company of this captain who was smiling all the while with his eyes; smiling at his mud house, at the hardships in the trenches, and, I hope, at having a guest who had been with armies before!

It was the first time that I had been in the trenches all night; the first time, indeed, when I had not been taken into them by an escort in a kind of promenade.  On this account I was in the family.  If it is the right kind of a family, that is the way to get a good impression.  There would be plenty of time to sleep when I returned to London.

So Captain P------ and I lay there talking.  I felt the dampness of the
earth under my body and the walls exuded moisture.  The average
cellar was dry by comparison.  “You will get your death of cold!” any
mother would cry in alarm if her boy were found even sitting on such
cold, wet ground.  For it was a clammy night of early spring.  Yet,
peculiarly enough, few men get colds from this exposure.  One gets
colds from draughts in overheated rooms much oftener.  Luckily, it
was not raining; it had been raining most of the winter in the flat
country of Northern France and Flanders.

“It is very horrible, this kind of warfare,” said the captain.  He was thinking of the method of it, rather than of the discomforts.  “All war is very horrible, of course.”  Regular soldiers rarely take any other view.  They know war.

“With your wounded arm you might be back in England on leave,” I suggested.

“Oh, that arm is all right!” he replied.  “This is what I am paid for”—­ which I had heard regulars say before.  “And it is for England!” he added, in his quiet way.  “Sometimes I think we should fight better if we officers could hate the Germans,” he went on.  “The German idea is that you must hate if you are going to fight well.  But we can’t hate.”

Sound views he had about the war; sounder than I have heard from the lips of Cabinet ministers.  For these regular officers are specialists in war.