g never
ceases from our parapet."

Occasional rifle-shots and a machine-gun's ter-rut were audible from
the direction of the jumping red glare, which stretched right and left as
far as the eye could see. We broke off the road into a morass of mud,
as one might cross fields when he had lost his way, and plunged on
till the commanding officer said, "We go in here!" and we descended
into a black chasm in the earth. The wonder was that any ditch could
be cut in soil which the rains had turned into syrup. Mud oozed from
the sandbags, through the wire netting, and between the wooden
supports which held the walls in place. It was just as bad over in the
German trenches. General Mud laid siege to both armies. The field of
battle where he gathered his gay knights was a slough. His tug of war
was strife against landslides, rheumatism, pneumonia, and frozen
feet.

The soldier tries to kill his adversary; he tries to prevent his adversary
from killing him. He is as busy in safeguarding as in taking life. While
he breathes, thinks, fights mud, he blesses as well as curses mud.
Mother Earth is still unconquerable. In her bosom man still finds
security; such security that "dug in" he can defy at a hundred yards'
distance rifles that carry death three thousand yards. She it is that
has made the deadlock in the trenches and plastered their occupants
with her miry hands.

The C.O. lifted a curtain of bagging as you might lift a hanging over
an alcove bookcase, and a young officer, rising from his blankets in
his house in the trench wall to a stooping posture, said that all was
quiet. His uniform seemed fleckless. Was it possible that he wore
some kind of cloth which shed mud spatters? He was another of the
type of Captain Q------, my host at Neuve Chapelle; a type formed on
the type of seniors such as his C.O. Unanalysable this quality, but
there is something distinguished about it and delightfully appealing. A
man who can be the same in a trench in Flanders in mid-winter as in
a drawing-room has my admiration. They never lose their manner,
these English officers. They carry it into the charge and back in the
ambulance with them to England, where they wish nothing so much
as that their friends will "cut out the hero stuff," as our own officers
say.

In other dank cellars soldiers who were off guard were lying or sitting.
The radiance of the flares lighted the profiles of those on guard,
whose faces were half-hidden by coat-collars