ivable strata. They come upon populous
German dugouts, corked by some explosion perhaps a year ago. They are
stopped far below ground by a layer of barbed wire, proved by its
superior thickness to be German. Every yard they penetrate is what
gardeners call "moved soil." It is of the nature of a fresh mole heap
or ants' nest, so crumbled and worked that all its original
consistency has been undone. A good deal of it doubtless has been
tossed fifty feet in the air on the geyser of a mine or shell
explosion. It is full of little bits of burnt sacking, the debris of
sandbags. Weapons and bits of weapons and pieces of human bodies are
scattered through it like plums. The so-called trench may be no more
than a yoked line of shell holes converted with dainty toil and loss
to a more perpendicular angle. And the tangled pattern of craters is
itself pocked with the smaller dents of bombs. There are three grades
of holes--great mine craters that look like an earth convulsion
themselves, pitted with shell holes, which in turn are dimpled by
bombs. Imagine a place like the Ypres salient, a graveyard maze under
the visitation of 8,000 shells falling from three widely separate
angles, and some slight idea may be formed of nearly two years' life
in the trenches. It is an endless struggle for some geographical
feature: a hill, a mound, a river, or for a barn or a house. At Ypres,
indeed, the German and British lines have passed through different
sides of the same stable at the same time. The competition for a hill
or bluff is such that in many cases, as at Hill 60, the desired spot,
as well as the intervening houses and even woods, have been wiped out
of existence before the rival forces.

On November 2, 1915, the British Premier announced in the House of
Commons that there were then nearly a million British soldiers in
Belgium and France; that Canada had sent 96,000 men to the front, and
that the Germans had not gained any ground in the west since April of
that year. He furthermore stated that the British Government was
resolved to "stick at nothing" in carrying out its determination to
carry the war to a successful conclusion. In addition to the troops
mentioned above, the Australian Commonwealth had contributed 92,000
men to date; New Zealand 25,000; South Africa, after a brilliant
campaign in which the Germans in Southwest Africa were subdued, had
sent 6,500; and Newfoundland, Great Britain's oldest colony, 1,600.
Contingents were