ere purely shelters, against a
railway embankment, of planks or sandbags, and reinforced by rails from
the deserted track behind which they were hidden.

For this corner of Belgium had been saved by turning it into a shallow
lake. By opening the gates in the dikes the Allies had let in the sea
and placed a flood in front of the advancing enemy. The battle front
was a reeking pond. The opposing armies lived like duck hunters in a
swamp. To dig a foot was to encounter water. Machine guns here and
there sat but six inches above the yellow flood. Men lay in pools to
fire them. To reach outposts were narrow paths built first of bags of
earth--a life, sometimes for every bag. And, when this filling was
sufficient, on top a path of fascines, bound together in bundles, made
a footway.

For this reason the Belgians approached their trenches not through deep
cuts which gave them shelter but with no other cover than the darkness
of night. During the day, they lay in their shallow dugouts, cut off
from any connection with the world behind them. Food, cooked miles away,
came up at night, cold and unappetizing. For water, having exhausted
their canteens, there was nothing but the brackish tide before them,
ill-smelling and reeking of fever. Water carts trundled forward at
night, but often they were far too few.

The Belgians, having faced their future through long years of anxiety,
had been trained to fight. In a way they had been trained to fight a
losing war, for they could not hope to defeat their greedy neighbor on
the east. But now they found themselves fighting almost not at all,
condemned to inactivity, to being almost passively slaughtered by enemy
artillery, and to living under such conditions as would have sapped the
courage of a less desperate people.

To add to the difficulties, not only did the sea encroach, turning a
fertile land into a salt marsh, but the winter rains, unusually heavy
that tragic first winter, and lacking their usual egress to the sea,
spread the flood. There were many places well back of the lines where
fields were flooded, and where roads, sadly needed, lost themselves in
unfordable wallows of mud and water.

Henri then, knowing all this--none better--had his first question to
settle, which was this: As spring advanced the flood had commenced to
recede. Time came when, in those trenches now huddled shallow behind
the railway track, one could live in a certain comfort. In the deeper
ones, the bo