Now, I do not know if it really was the mud which engulfed alive the three Germans who lay beside the sunken road of Le Barque; but I know that their comrades thought it was.  And that is a simple proof that the mud, of which the Germans talk so much, is not all on the British side of the trenches.

Looking from our lines yesterday across a valley one noticed a German trench running up the farther side, the grey mud parapet heaped out, like the earth of one long, continuous grave, on both sides of the trench.  Behind that trench, along its whole length, as far as we could see, ran a sinuous thread of light-coloured soil.  It was the beaten track by which the Germans had moved up and down their trench.  They could not move in the trench, so when they wanted to move they had to hop up and move outside of it.  If we were sniping by day they could not move at all; and the track had probably been made by Germans moving at night.  It hugged the trench in case we started shooting or shelling—­when the Germans could at once jump back into the mud again.

The Germans in some parts of the Somme battlefield have been going down with frostbite in great numbers, so great as to put at least one battalion out of action.  This is through getting feet wet and frozen in muddy trenches.  To reach their front line, last month, in these valleys in front of Bapaume and Le Transloy, has been quite impossible to the Germans unless they went up over the open, or used such trenches as a self-respecting man could scarcely enter.  They came up, as would any other soldiers under the same circumstances, across the open land.  Even then there were places which a man could scarcely pass.  I know a man who, in that same sunken road at Le Barque, pulled two of his comrades by force out of the mud—­an everyday matter.  They left their boots and socks in the mud behind them.

If a man is wounded in some of those German trenches it takes eight men to get him to the dressing station and five hours to arrive there, and very much longer if there is any fighting in progress.  One would not say that any of these difficulties have been more acute amongst the Germans than with the British and Australians—­in some ways our men have faced and overcome greater hardships than the Germans.  But there is this chief difference—­the German is now getting back the shells which for two years he rained upon the British.  And he is talking—­like a German—­about the unfairness of it.

The German Staff claims that German infantry is the best in the world.  Certainly it is tough, and thoroughly convinced that it is better than any of its friends.  “The Turk is a pretty good fighter,” said a German to me a few days ago, “and the Bulgars fight well.  The Austrians are worth little.  Every time the Russians drive the Austrians back they have to call us in to repulse the Russians again for them.”