ich infested them.

"Rats are the worst plague," said a colonel, coming out of the battalion
headquarters, where he had a hole large enough for a bed and table.
"There are thousands of rats in this part of the line, and they're
audacious devils. In the dugout next door the straw at night writhes
with them... I don't mind the mice so much. One of them comes to dinner
on my table every evening, a friendly little beggar who is very pally
with me."

We looked out above the mine-craters, a chaos of tumbled earth, where
our trenches ran so close to the enemy's that it was forbidden to smoke
or talk, and where our sappers listened with all their souls in their
ears to any little tapping or picking which might signal approaching
upheaval. The coats of some French soldiers, blown up long ago by some
of these mines, looked like the blue of the chicory flower growing in
the churned-up soil... The new mine was not fired that afternoon, up
to the time of my going away. But it was fired next day, and I wondered
whether the gloomy boy had gone up with it. There was a foreknowledge of
death in his eyes.

One of the officers had spoken to me privately.

"I'm afraid of losing my nerve before the men. It haunts me, that
thought. The shelling is bad enough, but it's the mining business that
wears one's nerve to shreds. One never knows."

I hated to leave him there to his agony... The colonel himself was
all nerves, and he loathed the rats as much as the shell-fire and the
mining, those big, lean, hungry rats of the trenches, who invaded the
dugouts and frisked over the bodies of sleeping men. One young subaltern
was in terror of them. He told me how he shot at one, seeing the glint
of its eyes in the darkness. The bullet from his revolver ricocheted
from wall to wall, and he was nearly court-martialed for having fired.

The rats, the lice that lived on the bodies of our men, the water-logged
trenches, the shell-fire which broke down the parapets and buried men in
wet mud, wetter for their blood, the German snipers waiting for English
heads, and then the mines--oh, a cheery little school of courage for
the sons of gentlemen! A gentle academy of war for the devil and General
Squeers!

VII

The city of Ypres was the capital of our battlefields in Flanders from
the beginning to the end of the war, and the ground on which it stands,
whether a new city rises there or its remnants of ruin stay as a
memorial of dreadful things, w