“And now about those trenches—­as I promised.  The great thing to grasp is that they are narrow.  They are a sort of negative wall.  They are more like giant cracks in the ground than anything else....  But perhaps I had better begin by telling how we got there.  We started about one in the morning ladened up with everything you can possibly imagine on a soldier, and in addition I had a kettle—­filled with water—­most of the chaps had bundles of firewood, and some had extra bread.  We marched out of our quarters along the road for a mile or more, and then we took the fields, and presently came to a crest and dropped into a sort of maze of zigzag trenches going up to the front trench.  These trenches, you know, are much deeper than one’s height; you don’t see anything.  It’s like walking along a mud-walled passage.  You just trudge along them in single file.  Every now and then some one stumbles into a soakaway for rainwater or swears at a soft place, or somebody blunders into the man in front of him.  This seems to go on for hours and hours.  It certainly went on for an hour; so I suppose we did two or three miles of it.  At one place we crossed a dip in the ground and a ditch, and the trench was built up with sandbags up to the ditch and there was a plank.  Overhead there were stars, and now and then a sort of blaze thing they send up lit up the edges of the trench and gave one a glimpse of a treetop or a factory roof far away.  Then for a time it was more difficult to go on because you were blinded.  Suddenly just when you were believing that this sort of trudge was going on forever, we were in the support trenches behind the firing line, and found the men we were relieving ready to come back.

“And the firing line itself?  Just the same sort of ditch with a parapet of sandbags, but with dug-outs, queer big holes helped out with sleepers from a nearby railway track, opening into it from behind.  Dug-outs vary a good deal.  Many are rather like the cubby-house we made at the end of the orchard last summer; only the walls are thick enough to stand a high explosive shell.  The best dug-out in our company’s bit of front was quite a dressy affair with some woodwork and a door got from the ruins of a house twenty or thirty yards behind us.  It had a stove in it too, and a chimbley, and pans to keep water in.  It was the best dug-out for miles.  This house had a well, and there was a special trench ran back to that, and all day long there was a coming and going for water.  There had once been a pump over the well, but a shell had smashed that....

“And now you expect me to tell of Germans and the fight and shelling and all sorts of things. I haven’t seen a live German; I haven’t been within two hundred yards of a shell burst, there has been no attack and I haven’t got the V.C.  I have made myself muddy beyond describing; I’ve been working all the time, but I’ve not fired a shot or fought a ha’porth.  We were busy all the time—­just at work, repairing the