ow and again to come along and smile on me, I tell you heaven had no
extra attractions to offer me. The man who got wounded in those days
was a lucky dog, all right; in fact, he mostly is at all times, and
about the silliest thing the War Office ever did was to issue an honor
stripe for wounds. The man deserving of the greatest credit is not the
man who gets wounded, but the man who stays on in the trenches week
after week, and month after month enduring the nervous strain and
unnatural conditions, living like a rat in a hole in the ground. There
are none who have been there for any length of time who do not welcome
the sharp pain of a wound as a relief.

The Germans opposite us in their trenches at Bapaume were, of course,
in as bad a plight as we were. When I scouted down their trenches at
night I found equipment and stores lying on top of the parapet.
Evidently, the mud in the bottom of their trenches was as bad as in
ours, and anything dropped had to be fished for. Perhaps there were no
deep dugouts just there. We would not allow our men to use these deep
dugouts as nothing so conduces to bad morale. Once men get deep down
out of range of the shells they are very, very reluctant to leave their
"funk-holes." A man has to be hardened to shell-fire before he is of
any value as a fighter, and these deep dugouts take men out of reach of
most of the shells, and when they come in the open again they have to
be hardened anew.

It is not generally a wise plan to occupy the old German trench, as he
has the range of it very accurately, and anyway it is in most cases so
badly battered about after our artillery has done with it as not to be
at all superior as a residence to the shell-holes in front of it, and
it is mostly full of dead Germans which are unearthed by the shells as
often as we bury them. God knows the smell of a live German is not a
pleasant thing to live near, but as for dead ones! . . . Our method
was to construct a new trench about fifty yards in advance by linking
up a chain of shell-holes, and we felt the labor to be worth while when
we saw the shells falling behind us, and it was not much harder than if
we had had to clean out the old German trench.

On our right flank there was a gap of a hundred yards that we patrolled
two or three times a night, and in our net we sometimes caught some
Germans who were lost. On one occasion a German with a string of
water-bottles round his neck, and a "grunt" t