The longed-for relief comes at last—­a change to other shell-battered areas in support or reserve—­and the battalion comes back down the long road to the rear, white-faced and dreary-eyed, dragging slowly through the mud without a word.  For they have been through a life of which you, or any people past and present who have not been to this war, have not the first beginnings of a conception; something beside which a South Polar expedition is a dance and a picnic.  And that is without taking into account the additional fact that night and day, on the Somme where these conditions existed, men live under the unceasing sound of guns.  I can hear them as I write—­it is the first longed-for gloriously bright day, and therefore there is not an interval of a second in that continuous roar, hour after hour.  There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world—­there has never yet been anything to approach it except at Verdun.

Life is hard enough in winter in the old-established trenches along more settled parts of the front—­there is plenty for the Comforts Fund to do there.  Dropping into the best of quiet front trenches straight from his home life the ordinary man would consider himself as undergoing hardships undreamt of.  Visiting those trenches straight from the Somme the other day, with their duck-boards and sandbags, and the occasional ping of a sniper’s bullet, and the momentary spasm of field guns and trench mortars which appeared in the official summary next day as “artillery and trench mortar activity”—­after the Somme, I say, one found oneself looking on it, in the terms of the friend who went with me, as “war de luxe.”

It is unwise to take what one man writes of one place as true of all places or all times, or indeed of anything except what he personally sees and knows at the moment.  These conditions which I have described are what I have seen, and are fortunately past history, or I should not be describing them.  I personally know that English troops, Scottish troops and Australian troops went through them, and have, in some cases, issued from such trenches and taken similar German trenches in front of them.  Our troops are more comfortable than they were, but it is in the nature of war to find yourself plunged into extremes of exertion and hardship without warning; and no man knows when he writes to-day—­and I doubt whether anyone of his superiors could tell him—­whether he will, at any given date, be in a worse condition or a better one.

What the German is going through on his side of the muddy landscape is described in another chapter.  For our grand men—­and though to be called a hero is the last thing most Australians desire, the men are never grander than at these times—­the Australian Comforts Fund, the Y.M.C.A. and the canteen groceries provide almost all the comfort that ever enters that grim region.  In the areas to which those tired men come for a spell, the Comforts Fund is beginning to give them theatres for concert troupes and cinemas.  It provides some hundreds of pounds to be spent locally on the most obtainable small luxuries at Christmas, besides such gifts in kind as Christmas brings.