March that I first saw the British front. The winds
were much like the seasonal winds at home; but the Flanders mud is
like no other mud, in the judgment of the British soldier. It is mixed
with glue. When I returned to the front in June for a longer stay, the
mud had become clouds of dust that trailed behind the motor-car.
In March my eagerness to see a trench was that of one from the
Western prairies to get his first glimpse of the ocean. Once I might go
into a trench as often as I pleased I became "fed up" with trenches,
as the British say. They did not mean much more than an alley or a
railway cutting. One came to think of the average peaceful trench as
a ditch where some men were eating marmalade and bully beef and
looking across a field at some more men who were eating sausage
and "K.K." bread, each party taking care that the other did not see
him.
Writers have served us trenches in every possible literary style that
censorship will permit. Whoever "tours" them is convinced that none
of the descriptions published heretofore has been adequate and
writes one of his own which will be final. All agree that it is not like
what they thought it was. But, despite all the descriptions, the public
still fails to visualize a trench. You do not see a trench with your eyes
so much as with your mind and imagination. That long line where all
the powers of destruction within man's command are in deadlock has
become a symbol for something which cannot be expressed by
words. No one has yet really described a shell-burst, or a flash of
lightning, or Niagara Falls; and no one will ever describe a trench. He
cannot put anyone else there. He can only be there himself.
The first time that I looked over a British parapet was in the edge of a
wood. Board walks ran across the spongy earth here and there; the
doors of little shanties with earth roofs opened on to those streets,
which were called Piccadilly and the Strand. I was reminded of a
pleasant prospector's camp in Alaska. Only, everybody was in
uniform and occasionally something whished through the branches of
the trees. One looked up to see what it was and where it was going,
this stray bullet, without being any wiser.
We passed along one of the walks until we came to a wall of
sandbags--simply white bags about three-quarters of the size of an
ordinary pillowslip, filled with earth and laid one on top of another like
bags of grain. You stood beside a man who had a rifle laid
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