hould be cut zigzag in and out, like the lines dividing the
squares of a checker-board; that makes more work and localizes the
burst of shells.

Of course, the moist walls will be continually falling in and require
mending in a drenching, freezing rain of the kind that the Lord visits
on all who wage war underground in Flanders. Incidentally, you must
look after the pumps, lest the water rise to your neck. For all the while
you are fighting Flanders mud as well as the Germans.

To carry realism to the limit of the Grand Guignol school, then,
arrange some bags of bullets with dynamite charges on a wire, which
will do for shrapnel; plant some dynamite in the parapet, which will do
for high explosive shells that burst on contact; sink heavier charges of
dynamite under your feet, which will do for mines, and set them off,
while you engage someone to toss grenades and bombs at you.

Though scores of officers' letters had given their account of trench life
with the vividness of personal experience, I must mention my first
trench in Flanders in winter when, with other correspondents, I saw
the real thing under the guidance of the commanding officer of that
particular section, a slight, wiry man who wore the ribbon of the
Victoria Cross won in another war for helping to "save the guns." He
made seeing trenches in the mud seem a pleasure trip. He was the
kind who would walk up to his ball as if he knew how to play golf,
send out a clean, fair, long drive, and then use his iron as if he knew
how to use an iron, without talking about his game on the way around
or when he returned to the club-house. Men could go into danger
behind him without realizing that they were in danger; they could
share hardship without realizing that there were any hardships. Such
as he put faith and backbone into a soldier by their very manner; and
if their professional training equal their talents, when war comes they
win victories.

We had rubber boots, electric torches, and wore British warms, those
short, thick coats which collect a modicum of mud for you to carry
besides what you are carrying on your boots. We walked along a
hard road in the dark toward an aurora borealis of German flares,
which popped into the sky like Roman candles and burst in circles of
light. They seemed to be saying: "Come on! Try to crawl up on us
and play us a trick and our eyes will find you and our marksmen will
stop you. Come on! We make the night into day, and watchin