"It keeps up the fighting spirit of the men," said the generals. "We
must maintain an aggressive policy."

They searched their trench maps for good spots where another "small
operation" might be organized. There was a competition among the
corps and divisional generals as to the highest number of raids, mine
explosions, trench-grabbings undertaken by their men.

"My corps," one old general told me over a cup of tea in his
headquarters mess, "beats the record for raids." His casualties also
beat the record, and many of his officers and men called him, just
bluntly and simply, "Our old murderer." They disliked the necessity of
dying so that he might add one more raid to his heroic competition with
the corps commander of the sector on the left. When they waited for the
explosion of a mine which afterward they had to "rush" in a race with
the German bombing-parties, some of them saw no sense in the proceeding,
but only the likelihood of having legs and arms torn off by German
stick-bombs or shells. "What's the good of it?" they asked, and could
find no answer except the satisfaction of an old man listening to the
distant roar of the new tumult by which he had "raised hell" again.

II

The autumn of 1915 was wet in Flanders and Artois, where our men settled
down--knee-deep where the trenches were worst--for the winter campaign.
On rainy days, as I remember, a high wind hurtled over the Flemish
fields, but it was moist, and swept gusts of rain into the faces of men
marching through mud to the fighting-lines and of other men doing sentry
on the fire-steps of trenches into which water came trickling down the
slimy parapets.

When the wind dropped at dusk or dawn a whitish fog crept out of
the ground, so that rifles were clammy to the touch and a blanket of
moisture settled on every stick in the dugouts, and nothing could be
seen through the veil of vapor to the enemy's lines, where he stayed
invisible.

He was not likely to attack on a big scale while the battlefields were
in that quagmire state. An advancing wave of men would have been clogged
in the mud after the first jump over the slimy sand-bags, and to advance
artillery was sheer impossibility. Nothing would be done on either side
but stick-in-the-mud warfare and those trench-raids and minings which
had no object except "to keep up the spirit of the men." There was
always work to do in the trenches--draining them, strengthening their
parapets, making thei