n, some mark or
notice on a door, some sign-post, some little line of graves, or hear,
on the lips of a native, some slang phrase of English, learned long
before in the wartime, in childhood, when the English were there. All
the villages behind our front were thronged with our people. There
they rested after being in the line and there they established their
hospitals and magazines. It may be said, that men of our race died in
our cause in every village within five miles of the front. Wherever
the traveller comes upon a little company of our graves, he will know
that he is near the site of some old hospital or clearing station,
where our men were brought in from the line.

* * * * *

So much for the roads by which our men marched to this battlefield.
Near the lines they had to leave the roads for the shelter of some
communication trench or deep cut in the mud, revetted at the sides
with wire to hinder it from collapsing inwards. By these deep narrow
roads, only broad enough for marching in single file, our men passed
to "the front," to the line itself. Here and there, in recesses in the
trench, under roofs of corrugated iron covered with sandbags, they
passed the offices and the stores of war, telephonists, battalion
headquarters, dumps of bombs, barbed wire, rockets, lights,
machine-gun ammunition, tins, jars, and cases. Many men, passing these
things as they went "in" for the first time, felt with a sinking of
the heart, that they were leaving all ordered and arranged things,
perhaps forever, and that the men in charge of these stores enjoyed,
by comparison, a life like a life at home.

Much of the relief and munitioning of the fighting lines was done at
night. Men going into the lines saw little of where they were going.
They entered the gash of the communication trench, following the load
on the back of the man in front, but seeing perhaps nothing but the
shape in front, the black walls of the trench, and now and then some
gleam of a star in the water under foot. Sometimes as they marched
they would see the starshells, going up and bursting like rockets, and
coming down With a wavering slow settling motion, as white and bright
as burning magnesium wire, shedding a kind of dust of light upon the
trench and making the blackness intense when they went out. These
lights, the glimmer in the sky from the enemy's guns, and now and then
the flash of a shell, were the things seen by most of