enches themselves. It is the country behind that makes the difference.

Time was when communication trenches existed only in the fertile brain of
those who were never called upon to use them; but that time has passed
long since. Time was when the thin, tired breaking line of men who
fought the Prussian Guard at Ypres in 1914--and beat them--had hard work
to find the fire-trenches, let alone the communication ones; when a daily
supervision was a nerve-shattering nightly crawl, and dug-outs were
shell-holes covered with a leaking mackintosh. It was then that men
stood for three weeks on end in an icy composition of water and slime,
and if by chance they did get a relief for a night, merely clambered out
over the back, and squelched wearily over the open ground with bullets
pinging past them from the Germans a few score yards away.

But now there are trenches in canal banks where dead things drift slowly
by, and trenches in railway embankments where the rails are red with rust
and the sleepers green with rot; there are trenches in the chalk, good
and deep, which stand well, and trenches in the slush and slime which
never stand at all; there are trenches where the smell of the long grass
comes sweetly on the west wind, and trenches where the stench of death
comes nauseous on the east. And one and all are they damnable, for ever
accursed . . .

But the country behind--ah! there's where the difference comes. You may
have the dead flat of pastoral Flanders, the little woods, the plough,
the dykes of Ypres and Boesinghe; you may have the slag-heaps and smoking
chimneys of La Bassee and Loos; you may have the gently undulating
country of Albert and the Somme. Each bears the marks of the German
beast--and, like their inhabitants, they show those marks differently.
Ypres and the North, apathetic, seemingly lifeless; the mining districts,
grim and dour; the rolling plains still, in spite of all, cheerful and
smiling. But underlying them all--deep implacable determination, a grand
national hatred of the Power who has done this thing. . . .

He turned out of the Old Kent Road into a siding which harboured the
dug-outs of the Centre Battalion.

"Is the General here yet, Murdock?" A tall sergeant of the regiment--an
old friend of his--flattened himself against the side of the trench to
let him pass.

"Yes, sir." The sergeant's face was expressionless, though his eyes
twinkled. "I think, sir, as 'ow the General is feeli