door of the shattered house, turned to the right past the
driving shed where a sentry sharply challenged us. It was one of those
moonlight nights with a bit of a haze making objects indistinct and
exaggerating them. We started out across the fields towards the
trenches. There was plenty of light to see our way across several
ditches. The ground was perfectly flat and the outlines of several
pollard willow stubs, with a bundle of small branches growing out of
them, etched themselves on my memory.

"Ware wire," said the Colonel, who walked ahead to show the way. I
ducked a field telephone wire strung between trees.

"Ware wire," he said again, and I found we were making our way between
barbed wire entanglements.

"These are the breastworks," he said, pointing to ghostly heaps that
loomed on either side. "We line them every night, they furnish our
support."

Several wet ditches were jumped by the aid of the broom handles we
carried. The ditches in Flanders are exceedingly deep and the gunners
find much trouble in negotiating them.

The Colonel pointed out a line of shelter trenches his men held on the
first advance. They held these trenches where they "dug themselves in"
on the first night they won this ground. A little further on we came
to small holes dug in the beet field.

"Here is where they did some digging that afternoon." "They are pretty
shallow fire trenches, barely deep enough to give cover to a man."
Pretty soon a shadow loomed up ahead of us. "This is our first line of
trenches," he said.

The line of trenches proved to be a wall of mud, willow hurdles and
sand bags; in reality two walls. I followed him down a short bit of
zigzag ditch or communicating trenches and found myself in the
trenches that will go down to history, the famous trenches of
Flanders.

It would require the pen of a Dante to picture this inferno. Day and
night, night and day the rifles were cracking like the sound of a big
rifle match on the ranges at home. Two lines of parapets, for there
are really very few trenches, wind sinuously over the country from the
sea to the Alps. These parapets are about the height of a man, and run
in zigzag fashion. Here and there where the wall is specially built a
dugout is constructed that will hold four or five men. In these huts
the men cook and sleep during the day.

At night they come out like moles digging or straightening their
defences or else running saps towards the enemy. Here and the