ht. One of them was a
sentry with whom I had been talking only a few moments before. He was
standing on the firing-bench looking out into the darkness, when he fell
back into the trench without a cry. It was a terrible wound. I would not
have believed that a bullet could so horribly disfigure one. He was given
first aid by the light of a candle; but it was useless. Silently his
comrades removed his identification disk and wrapped him in a blanket.
"Poor old Walt!" they said. An hour later he was buried in a shell hole
at the back of the trench.

One thing we learned during our first night in the trenches was of the
very first importance. And that was, respect for our enemies. We came
from England full of absurd newspaper tales about the German soldier's
inferiority as a fighting man. We had read that he was a wretched
marksman: he would not stand up to the bayonet: whenever opportunity
offered he crept over and gave himself up: he was poorly fed and clothed
and was so weary of the war that his officers had to drive him to fight,
at the muzzles of their revolvers. We thought him almost beneath
contempt. We were convinced in a night that we had greatly underestimated
his abilities as a marksman. As for his all-round inferiority as a
fighting man, one of the Gloucesters put it rather well:--

"'Ere! If the Germans is so bloomin' rotten, 'ow is it we ain't
a-fightin' 'em sommers along the Rhine, or in Austry-Hungry? No, they
ain't a-firin' wild, I give you my word! Not around this part o' France
they ain't! Wot do you s'y, Jerry?"

Jerry made a most illuminating contribution to the discussion of Fritz as
a fighting man:--

"I'll tell you wot! If ever I gets through this 'ere war; if I 'as the
luck to go 'ome again, with me eyesight, I'll never feel syfe w'en I sees
a Fritzie, unless I'm a-lookin' at 'im through me periscope from be'ind a
bit o' cover."

* * * * * *

How am I to give a really vivid picture of trench life as I saw it for
the first time, how make it live for others, when I remember that the
many descriptive accounts I had read of it in England did not in the
least visualize it for me? I watched the rockets rising from the German
lines, watched them burst into points of light, over the devastated strip
of country called "No-Man's-Land" and drift slowly down. And I watched
the charitable shadows rush back like the very wind of darkness. The
desolate l