t be brought by
incredible exertions from the seashore. I was shown a single short
sector on the Yser, where six million bags were used. For the floors
of these shelters, as well as for innumerable other purposes,
millions of feet of lumber are required, which is taken up to the
front over the network of light railways, some of which penetrate to
the actual firing-line. If trench-building materials are scarce in
Flanders, fuel is scarcer. Every stick of wood and every piece of coal
burned on the front has to be brought from great distances and at
great expense, so economy in fuel consumption is rigidly enforced. I
remember walking through a trench with a Belgian officer one bitterly
cold and rainy day last winter. In a corner of the trench a soldier in
soaking clothes had piled together a tiny mound of twigs and roots and
over the feeble flame was trying to warm his hands, which were blue
with cold. To my surprise my companion stopped and spoke to the man
quite sharply.

"We can't let one man have a fire all to himself," he explained as he
rejoined me. "Wood is too scarce for that. The fire that fellow had
would have warmed three or four men and I had to reprimand him for
building it." A moment later he added: "The poor devil looked pretty
cold, though, didn't he?"

* * * * *

I had been informed by telephone from the Belgian _Etat-Major_ that a
staff-officer would meet me at a certain little frontier town whose
name I have forgotten how to spell. After many inquiries and wrong
turnings, for in this corner of Belgium the Flemish peasantry
understand but little French and no English, my driver succeeded in
finding the town, but the officer who was to meet me had not arrived.
It was too cold to sit in the car with comfort, so a lieutenant of
gendarmerie, the chief of the local _Surete_, invited me to make
myself comfortable in his little office. After a time the conversation
languished, and, for want of something better to say, I inquired how
far it was to Ostend. I was interested in knowing, because during the
retreat of the Belgian army in October, 1914, I left two kit-bags
filled with perfectly good clothes at the American Consulate in
Ostend. They are there still, I suppose, provided the Consulate has
not been shelled to pieces by the British monitors or the bags stolen
by German soldiers.

"Ostend?" repeated the gendarme. "It isn't over thirty kilometres from
here. From the roof o