eau. It was being shelled. The Germans
seemed to have a rooted objection to that chateau. Every morning, as we
crouched in our mud kennels, we heard those "Crumphs," and soon got to
be very good judges of form. _We_ knew they were shelling the chateau.
When they didn't shell the chateau, we got it in the trenches; so we
looked on that dear old mangled wreck with a friendly eye--that
tapering, twisted, perforated spire, which they never could knock down,
was an everlasting bait to the Boche, and a perfect fairy godmother to
us.

Oh, those days in that trench of ours! Each day seemed about a week
long. I shared a dug-out with a platoon commander after that first
night. The machine-gun section found a suitable place and made a dug-out
for themselves.

Day after day, night after night, my companion and I lay and listened to
the daily explosions, read, and talked, and sloshed about that trench
together.

The greatest interest one had in the daytime was sitting on the damp
straw in our clay vault, scraping the mud off one's saturated boots and
clothes. The event to which one looked forward with the greatest
interest was the arrival of letters in the evening.

Now and again we got out of our dug-out and sloshed down the trench to
scheme out some improvement or other, or to furtively look out across
the water-logged turnip field at the Boche trenches opposite.
Occasionally, in the silent, still, foggy mornings, a voice from
somewhere in the alluvial depths of a miserable trench, would suddenly
burst into a scrap of song, such as--

Old soldiers never die,
They simply fade away.

--a voice full of "fed-upness," steeped in determination.

Then all would be silence for the next couple of hours, and so the day
passed.

[Illustration: The Knave of Spades.]

At dusk, my job was to emerge from this horrible drain and go round the
various machine-gun positions. What a job! I generally went alone, and
in the darkness struck out across the sodden field, tripping,
stumbling, and sometimes falling into various shell holes on the way.

One does a little calling at this time of day. Having seen a gun in
another trench, one looks up the nearest platoon commander. You look
into so-and-so's dug-out and find it empty. You ask a sergeant where the
occupant is.

"He's down the trench, sir." You push your way down the trench, dodging
pools of water and stepping over fire buckets, mess tins, brushing past
men standing, leaning