ad for a mile or more, and then we took the
fields, and presently came to a crest and dropped into a sort of maze of
zigzag trenches going up to the front trench. These trenches, you know,
are much deeper than one's height; you don't see anything. It's like
walking along a mud-walled passage. You just trudge along them in single
file. Every now and then some one stumbles into a soakaway for rainwater
or swears at a soft place, or somebody blunders into the man in front of
him. This seems to go on for hours and hours. It certainly went on for
an hour; so I suppose we did two or three miles of it. At one place we
crossed a dip in the ground and a ditch, and the trench was built up
with sandbags up to the ditch and there was a plank. Overhead there were
stars, and now and then a sort of blaze thing they send up lit up the
edges of the trench and gave one a glimpse of a treetop or a factory
roof far away. Then for a time it was more difficult to go on because
you were blinded. Suddenly just when you were believing that this sort
of trudge was going on forever, we were in the support trenches behind
the firing line, and found the men we were relieving ready to come
back.

"And the firing line itself? Just the same sort of ditch with a parapet
of sandbags, but with dug-outs, queer big holes helped out with sleepers
from a nearby railway track, opening into it from behind. Dug-outs vary
a good deal. Many are rather like the cubby-house we made at the end of
the orchard last summer; only the walls are thick enough to stand a high
explosive shell. The best dug-out in our company's bit of front was
quite a dressy affair with some woodwork and a door got from the ruins
of a house twenty or thirty yards behind us. It had a stove in it too,
and a chimbley, and pans to keep water in. It was the best dug-out for
miles. This house had a well, and there was a special trench ran back to
that, and all day long there was a coming and going for water. There had
once been a pump over the well, but a shell had smashed that....

"And now you expect me to tell of Germans and the fight and shelling and
all sorts of things. _I haven't seen a live German_; I haven't been
within two hundred yards of a shell burst, there has been no attack and
I haven't got the V.C. I have made myself muddy beyond describing; I've
been working all the time, but I've not fired a shot or fought a
ha'porth. We were busy all the time--just at work, repairing the
parape