t, so that
we had to retire slightly, on either side, and not they.

[Footnote 25: Locally pronounced Merse.]

Farms, nearly all of them roofless and half-ruined, were dotted about
over the country. Small ones for the most part they were, and of the
usual type--a liquid and stinking manure-heap surrounded on three
sides by a living-house and barns. Of the roads, those from Dranoutre
to Lindenhoek, Dranoutre to Neuve Eglise, and Neuve Eglise _via_
Wulverghem to Messines, were _pave_--_i.e._, cobble-stones down the
centre and mud on both sides. Those joining Lindenhoek to Neuve Eglise
and Wulverghem were also mostly _pave_. The remainder were mere field
tracks for the most part, rarely metalled, and in wet weather almost
impassable for mud.

O that mud! We have heard lots about Flanders mud, but the reality
transcends imagination, especially in winter. Greasy, slippery,
holding clay, over your toes in most places and over your ankles in
all the rest--where it is not over your knees,--it is the most
horrible "going" I know anywhere. Whether you are moving across plough
or grass fields, or along lanes, you are perpetually skating about and
slipping up on the firmer bits and held fast by the ankles in the
softer ones. There is no stone in the district, nothing but rich loamy
clay, _alias_ mud. However much you dig, you never come across stone,
nothing but sticky mud which clings to your shovel and refuses to be
parted from it--mud that has to be scraped off at almost every stroke,
mud that absorbs water like a sponge yet refuses to give it up again.
Every little puddle and rut, every hoof-depression full of rain,
remains like that for weeks; even when the weather is fine the water
does not seem to evaporate, but remains on the surface.

And when it rains, as it did all that winter (except when it snowed),
the state of the trenches is indescribable. Some were, frankly, so
full of water that they had to be abandoned, and a breastwork erected
behind. But a breastwork is slow work, especially if you are less than
100 yards from the enemy. For weeks, indeed, the garrison of one
particular trench had to lie out on the mud, or on what waterproofs
they could get, behind a shelter two to three feet high--always
growing a little, yet never to be made to a real six feet height for
reason of conspicuousness and consequent clusters of Black Marias.

Other trenches varied from five inches to five feet deep in mud; in
one a