work is shown in the fact that three of the lady members of
the Corps have just been decorated with the Order of Leopold
--one of the highest honours which Belgium has to confer. It is
not every honour which is so well earned.

XXII. Pervyse--The Trenches

This is indeed the strangest of all wars, for it is fought in the
dark. Eyes are used, but they are the eyes of an aeroplane
overhead, or of a spy in the enemy's lines. The man who fights
lives underground, or under water, and rarely sees his foe.
There is something strangely terrible, something peculiarly
inhuman, in the silent stealth of this war of the blind. The
General sits in a quiet room far behind the lines, planning a
battle he will never see. The gunner aims by level and compass
with faultless precision, and hurls his awful engines of
destruction to destroy ten miles away a house which is to him
only a dot on a map. And the soldier sitting in his trench hears
the shells whistling overhead and waits, knowing well that if he
appeared for one instant above that rampart of earth he would
be pierced by a dozen bullets from rifles which are out of his
sight.

It is a war in the dark, and by far the most important of its
operations are carried on, its battles are fought, in the literal
sense of the word, underground. Perhaps the next war will be
fought not merely underground, but deep in the bowels of the
earth, and victory will rest, not with the finest shots or the expert
swordsmen, but with the men who can dig a tunnel most quickly.
The trenches may be cut by some herculean plough, deep tunnels
may be dug by great machines, and huge pumping engines may
keep them dry. Our engineers have conquered the air, the water,
and the land, but it is still with picks and spades that our soldiers
dig themselves into safety.

At Furnes the nearest point to us of the fighting line was
Pervyse, and as the Ambulance Corps had a dressing-station
there, we often went out to see them and the soldiers in the
trenches close by. But the Belgian line was most effectively
protected by an agency far more powerful than any trench, for
over miles and miles of land spread the floods with which the
Belgians, by breaking down the dykes, had themselves flooded
the country. The floods were a protection, but they were also a
difficulty, since they made actual trenches an impossibility. No
ordinary pumps could have kept them dry. So they had built
huts of earth behind a thick e