about twenty
minutes, and have saved us the long difficult journey through the
communication trench. But our orders were very precise: we were not to
take short cuts even on dark nights, much less on starlit nights. Our
chiefs do well to be cautious on our behalf, for it is certain that,
though fully alive to the danger of such a route, there was not one of
my hundred fellows who would have hesitated to dash across country
just to save himself a few hundred yards.

We came to the mouth of the approach trench, four or five huge steps
cut in the chalky clay. The frost had made them slippery, and we had
to keep close to the edge of the bank to avoid stumbling. Behind me I
heard some of the men sliding down heavily, and a din of mess-tins
rolling away amidst laughter and jokes. "A merry heart goes all the
way," and I knew my Chasseurs would soon pick themselves up and make
up for lost time. This was essential, for the approach trench had
ramifications and unexpected cross-passages which might have led a
laggard astray.

We went forward slowly. The communication trench was at right angles
to the enemy's trenches. To prevent him from enfilading it with his
shells, it had been cut in zigzags. And I hardly know of a more
laborious method of progression than that of taking ten paces to the
right, making a sharp turn, and then again taking ten paces to the
left, and so on, in order to cover a distance which, as the crow
flies, would not be more than fifteen hundred yards. The passage was
so narrow that we touched the walls on either side. The moonlight
could not reach the ground we trod on, and we stumbled incessantly
over the holes and inequalities caused by the late rains and hardened
by the frost. Now and again we slid over ice that had formed on the
little pools through which our comrades had been paddling two days
before. And this was some consolation for the severity of the frost,
preferable a hundred times to the horrors of the rain.

At last we debouched into our trenches, where our predecessors were
impatiently waiting for us. Two days and two nights is a long time to
go without sleeping, without washing, without having any other view
than the walls of earth that shut you in. They were all eager to go
back over the same road they had come by two days before, to get to
their horses again, their quarters, their friends--in short, their
home. So we found them quite ready to go, blankets rolled up and slung
over their sh