of cover. And
this is what our men have had to go through.

The longed-for relief comes at last--a change to other shell-battered
areas in support or reserve--and the battalion comes back down the long
road to the rear, white-faced and dreary-eyed, dragging slowly through
the mud without a word. For they have been through a life of which you,
or any people past and present who have not been to this war, have not
the first beginnings of a conception; something beside which a South
Polar expedition is a dance and a picnic. And that is without taking
into account the additional fact that night and day, on the Somme where
these conditions existed, men live under the unceasing sound of guns. I
can hear them as I write--it is the first longed-for gloriously bright
day, and therefore there is not an interval of a second in that
continuous roar, hour after hour. There is nothing like it anywhere else
in the world--there has never yet been anything to approach it except at
Verdun.

Life is hard enough in winter in the old-established trenches along more
settled parts of the front--there is plenty for the Comforts Fund to do
there. Dropping into the best of quiet front trenches straight from his
home life the ordinary man would consider himself as undergoing
hardships undreamt of. Visiting those trenches straight from the Somme
the other day, with their duck-boards and sandbags, and the occasional
ping of a sniper's bullet, and the momentary spasm of field guns and
trench mortars which appeared in the official summary next day as
"artillery and trench mortar activity"--after the Somme, I say, one
found oneself looking on it, in the terms of the friend who went with
me, as "war de luxe."

It is unwise to take what one man writes of one place as true of all
places or all times, or indeed of anything except what he personally
sees and knows at the moment. These conditions which I have described
are what I have seen, and are fortunately past history, or I should not
be describing them. I personally know that English troops, Scottish
troops and Australian troops went through them, and have, in some cases,
issued from such trenches and taken similar German trenches in front of
them. Our troops are more comfortable than they were, but it is in the
nature of war to find yourself plunged into extremes of exertion and
hardship without warning; and no man knows when he writes to-day--and I
doubt whether anyone of his superiors could tel