major.

"In that event, I don't see why I shouldn't eat when I have a chance,"
the captain returned; which I found was a characteristic trench habit,
particularly in winter when exposure to the raw, cold air calls for plenty
of body-furnace heat.

We had a ration soup and ration ham and ration prunes and cheese;
what Tommy Atkins gets. When we were outside the house and
starting for the trench this captain, with his wounded arm, wanted to
carry my knapsack. He seemed to think that refusal was breaking the
Hague conventions.

Where we turned off the road, broken finger-points of brick walls in
the faint moonlight indicated the site of Neuve Chapelle; other
fragments of walls in front of us were the remains of a house; and
that broken tree-trunk showed what a big shell can do. The trunk, a
good eighteen inches in diameter, had not only been cut in two by
one of the monsters of the new British artillery, but had been carried
on for ten feet and left lying solidly in the bed of splinters of the top
of the stump. All this had been in the field of that battle of a day,
which was as fierce as the fiercest day at Gettysburg, and fought
within about the same space. Every tree, every square rod of ground,
had been paid for by shells, bullets, and human life.

But now we were near the trenches; or, rather, the breastworks. We
are always speaking of the trenches, while not all parts of the line are
held by trenches. A trench is dug in the ground; a breastwork is
raised from the level of the ground. At some points a trench becomes
practically a breastwork, as its wall is raised to get free of the mud
and water.

We came into the open and heard the sound of voices and saw a
spotty white wall; for some of the sandbags of the new British
breastworks still retained their original colour. On the reverse side of
this wall lines were leaning in readiness, their fixed bayonets faintly
gleaming in the moonlight. I felt of the edge of one and it was sharp,
quite prepared for business. In the surroundings of damp earth and
mud-bespattered men, this rifle seemed the cleanest thing of all,
meticulously clean, that ready weapon whose well-aimed and telling
fire, in obedient and cool hands, was the object of all the drill of the
new infantry in England; of all the drill of all infantry. Where pickets
watched in the open in the old days before armies met in pitched
battle, an occasional soldier now stands with rifle laid on the parapet,
watc