plot of cheap romance.
Others sat at the entrance of their burrows with their knees tucked up,
staring gloomily to the opposite wall of the trench in day-dreams of
some places betwixt Aberdeen and Hackney Downs. I spoke to one of them,
and said, "How are you getting on?" He answered, "I'm not getting on...
I don't see the fun of this."

"Can you keep dry?"

"Dry?... I'm soaked to the skin."

"What's it like here?"

"It's hell... The devils blow up mines to make things worse."

Another boy spoke.

"Don't you mind what he says, sir. He's always a gloomy bastard. Doesn't
believe in his luck."

There were mascots for luck, at the doorways of their dugouts--a woman's
face carved in chalk, the name of a girl written in pebbles, a portrait
of the King in a frame of withered wild flowers.

A company of our New Army boys had respected a memento of French troops
who were once in this section of trenches. It was an altar built
into the side of the trench, where mass was said each morning by a
soldier--priest. It was decorated with vases and candlesticks, and above
the altar-table was a statue, crudely modeled, upon the base of which I
read the words Notre Dame des Tranchees ("Our Lady of the Trenches"). A
tablet fastened in the earth-wall recorded in French the desire of those
who worshiped here:

"This altar, dedicated to Our Lady of the Trenches, was blessed by the
chaplain of the French regiment. The 9th Squadron of the 6th Company
recommends its care and preservation to their successors. Please do not
touch the fragile statue in trench-clay."

"Our Lady of the Trenches!" It was the first time I had heard of this
new title of the Madonna, whose spirit, if she visited those ditches of
death, must have wept with pity for all those poor children of mankind
whose faith was so unlike the work they had to do.

From a dugout near the altar there came tinkling music. A young soldier
was playing the mandolin to two comrades. "All the latest ragtime," said
one of them with a grin.

So we paddled on our way, glimpsing every now and then over the parapets
at the German lines a few hundred yards away, and at a village in which
the enemy was intrenched, quiet and sinister there. The water through
which we waded was alive with a multitude of swimming frogs. Red
slugs crawled up the sides of the trenches, and queer beetles with
dangerous-looking horns wriggled along dry ledges and invaded the
dugouts in search of the vermin wh