It is something you never get away from in the
trenches. So many dead have been buried so hastily and so lightly
that they are constantly being uncovered by shell bursts. The acrid
stench pervades everything, and is so thick you can fairly taste
it. It makes nearly everybody deathly sick at first, but one
becomes used to it as to anything else.

This communication trench was over two miles long, and it seemed
like twenty. We finally landed in a support trench called
"Mechanics" (every trench has a name, like a street), and from
there into the first-line trench.

I have to admit a feeling of disappointment in that first trench. I
don't know what I expected to see, but what I did see was just a
long, crooked ditch with a low step running along one side, and
with sandbags on top. Here and there was a muddy, bedraggled Tommy
half asleep, nursing a dirty and muddy rifle on "sentry go."
Everything was very quiet at the moment--no rifles popping, as I
had expected, no bullets flying, and, as it happened, absolutely no
shelling in the whole sector.

I forgot to say that we had come up by daylight. Ordinarily troops
are moved at night, but the communication trench from Bully-Grenay
was very deep and was protected at points by little hills, and it
was possible to move men in the daytime.

Arrived in the front trench, the sergeant-major appeared, crawling
out of his dug-out--the usual place for a sergeant-major--and
greeted us with,

"Keep your nappers down, you rooks. Don't look over the top. It
ayen't 'ealthy."

It is the regular warning to new men. For some reason the first
emotion of the rookie is an overpowering curiosity. He wants to
take a peep into No Man's Land. It feels safe enough when things
are quiet. But there's always a Fritzie over yonder with a
telescope-sighted rifle, and it's about ten to one he'll get you if
you stick the old "napper" up in daylight.

The Germans, by the way, have had the "edge" on the Allies in the
matter of sniping, as in almost all lines of artillery and musketry
practice. The Boche sniper is nearly always armed with a
periscope-telescope rifle. This is a specially built super-accurate
rifle mounted on a periscope frame. It is thrust up over the
parapet and the image of the opposing parapet is cast on a little
ground-glass screen on which are two crossed lines. At one hundred
fifty yards or less the image is brought up to touching distance
seemingly. Fritz simply trains his piece