es, we saw
them again, we knew they were to be greatly envied. Between standing
waist-high in mud in a trench and being drowned in it, buried in it,
blown up or asphyxiated, the post of crossing-sweeper becomes a
sinecure.

The next sign of war was more thrilling. It was a race between a French
aeroplane and German shrapnel. To us the bursting shells looked like
five little cotton balls. Since this war began shrapnel, when it bursts,
has invariably been compared to balls of cotton, and as that is exactly
what it looks like, it is again so described. The balls of cotton did
not seem to rise from the earth, but to pop suddenly out of the sky.

A moment later five more cotton balls popped out of the sky. They were
much nearer the aeroplane. Others followed, leaping after it like the
spray of succeeding waves. But the aeroplane steadily and swiftly
conveyed itself out of range and out of sight.

To say where the trenches began and where they ended is difficult. We
were passing through land that had been retrieved from the enemy. It has
been fought for inch by inch, foot by foot. To win it back thousands of
lives had been thrown like dice upon a table. There were vast stretches
of mud, of fields once cultivated, but now scarred with pits, trenches,
rusty barbed-wires. The roads were rivers of clay. They were lined with
dugouts, cellars, and caves. These burrows in the earth were supported
by beams, and suggested a shaft in a disused mine. They looked like the
tunnels to coal-pits. They were inhabited by a race of French unknown to
the boulevards--men, bearded, deeply tanned, and caked with clay. Their
uniforms were like those of football players on a rainy day at the end
of the first half. We were entering what had been the village of Ablain,
and before us rose the famous heights of Mont de Lorette. To scale these
heights seemed a feat as incredible as scaling our Palisades or the
sheer cliff of Gibraltar. But they had been scaled, and the side
toward us was crawling with French soldiers, climbing to the trenches,
descending from the trenches, carrying to the trenches food, ammunition,
and fuel for the fires.

A cold rain was falling and had turned the streets of Ablain and all
the roads to it into swamps. In these were islands of bricks and lakes
of water of the solidity and color of melted chocolate. Whatever you
touched clung to you. It was a land of mud, clay, liquid earth. A cold
wind whipped the rain against your f