of men
at the same time. This was arranged in case the line was pushed back
by the advancing enemy.

When Zaidos had arrived at this point in his drawing, his paper gave
out, and he was obliged to write the rest on the back of the sheet.

"You will see, fellows," he wrote, "just how the second trench is laid
out by looking at the first. Back of the barbed wire and the
observation trenches come a lot of connecting trenches again. These
are not laid out in exactly the same direction as the first group, of
course, but are generally the same. Instead of a shelter for thirty
men, there is a shelter for one hundred thirty men. The cook house is
much larger, and the First Aid Station is really a sort of hospital,
where the men can be placed until they are taken back to the regular
field hospital which is back of the third trench, four hundred yards
away. This makes the hospital proper pretty safe.

"The shelter for men in the third position holds three hundred men
easily and the hospital is quite complete.

"You never saw such courageous fellows as these are. Just think, you
chaps, kicking as you do over there about the feed and the beds and the
barracks, what it is like to live underground against the bare earth!

"The men are never able to undress to sleep. Once in two weeks each
man has a bath, which he has to take in _two minutes_. He is then
given a complete set of new underwear. The men spend four days in the
trenches, almost always under fire night and day. There has been no
firing since we struck the place, but there is going to be a bad time
soon, they say. And then the noise is perfectly deafening, they tell
me.

"When the men have been four days in the trenches under fire, they are
sent back in squads to the nearest village for four days to rest and
get their nerves back in shape.

"I was talking to a jolly young Englishman this morning, and he told me
about the place he stayed in the village. He has just come back.

"He was quartered in a cellar, where they were perfectly safe from
Zeppelin bombs or stray shells, but it was dark and damp and cold.
When he went to sleep at night the rats ran all over him, and he and
all the other fellows had to wrap their coats around their faces to
keep the rats from running over the bare skin. Some rats, eh?

"A lot of chaps go to pieces with rheumatism, and have to be sent way
back to the stationary hospitals in the cities.

"This Englishman I was talki