of the German searchlights that had been swinging its
stream of light across the paths of the flares lay its fierce, comet eye
on us, glistening on the froth-streaked mud and showing each mud-
splashed figure in heavy coat in weird silhouette.

"Standstill!"

That is the order whenever the searchlights come spying in your
direction. So we stood still in the mud, looking at one another and
wondering. It was the one tense second of the night, which lifted our
thoughts out of the mud with the elation of risk. That searchlight was
the eye of death looking for a target. With the first crack of a bullet we
should have known that we were discovered and that it was no longer
good tactics to stand still. We should have dropped on all fours into
the porridge. The searchlight swept on. Perhaps Hans at the
machine-gun was nodding or perhaps he did not think us worth while.
Either supposition was equally agreeable to us.

We kept moving our mud-poulticed feet forward, with the flares at our
backs, till we came to a road where we saw dimly a silent company of
soldiers drawn up and behind them the supplies for the trench.
Through the mud and under cover of darkness every bit of barbed
wire, every board, every ounce of food, must go up to the moles in
the ditch. The searchlights and the flares and the machine-guns
waited for the relief. They must be fooled. But in this operation most
of the casualties in the average trenches, both British and German,
occurred. Without a chance to strike back, the soldier was shot at by
an assassin in the night.

When the men who had been serving their turn of duty in the
trenches came out, a magnet drew their weary steps--cleanliness.
They thought of nothing except soap and water. For a week they
need not fight mud or Germans or parasites, which, like General Mud,
waged war against both British and Germans. Standing on the slats
of the concrete floor of a factory, they peeled off the filthy, saturated
outer skin of clothing with its hideous, crawling inhabitants and,
naked, leapt into great steaming vats, where they scrubbed and
gurgled and gurgled and scrubbed. When they sprang out to apply
the towels, they were men with the feel of new bodies in another
world.

Waiting for them were clean clothes, which had been boiled and
disinfected; and waiting, too, was the shelter of their billets in the
houses of French towns and villages, and rest and food and food and
rest, and newspapers and tobacco a