es, and by telephone wires that run, now a
few inches, now four or five feet from the ground. One man trips over an
old haversack that is lying in his path--God alone knows how many
haversacks and how many sets of equipment have been swallowed up by the
mud on the plain of Flanders, part of the equipment of the wounded that
has been thrown aside to lighten the burden--and when he scrambles to
his feet again he is a mass of mud, his rifle barrel is choked with it,
it is in his hair, down his neck, everywhere. He staggers on, thankful
only that he did not fall into a shell hole, when matters would have
been much worse.

Just when the men are waiting in the open for the leading platoon to
file down into the communication trench, a German star shell goes up,
and a machine gun opens fire a little farther down the line. As the
flare sinks down behind the British trench it lights up the white faces
of the men, all crouching down in the swamp, while the bullets swish by,
"like a lot of bloomin' swallers," above their heads.

And now comes the odd quarter of a mile of communication trench. It is
very narrow, for the enemy can enfilade it, and it is paved with
brushwood and broken bricks, and a little drain, that is meant to keep
the floor dry, runs along one side of it. In one place a man steps off
the brushwood into the drain, and he falls headlong. The others behind
have no time to stop themselves, and a grotesque pile of men heaps
itself up in the narrow, black trench. One man laughing, the rest
swearing, they pick themselves up again, and tramp on to the firing
line.

Here the mud is even worse than on the plain they have crossed. All the
engineers and all the trench pumps in the world will not keep a trench
decently dry when it rains for nine hours in ten and when the trench is
the lowest bit of country for miles around. The men can do nothing but
"carry on"--the parapet must be kept in repair whatever the weather; the
sandbags must be filled however wet and sticky the earth. The mud may
nearly drag a man's boot off at his every step--indeed, it often does;
but the man must go on digging, shovelling, lining the trench with tins,
logs, bricks, and planks in the hope that one day he may have put enough
flooring into the trench to reach solid ground beneath the mud.

All this, of course, is only the infantryman's idea of things. From a
tactical point of view mud has a far greater importance--it is the most
relentless enemy