honeycombed.

This invigorating shower is turned on regularly for ten minutes, at
three, six, nine, and twelve o'clock daily. Its area of activity
includes our tiny but, alas! steadily growing cemetery. One evening a
regiment which had recently "taken over" selected 6 P.M. as a suitable
hour for a funeral. The result was a grimly humorous spectacle--the
mourners, including the Commanding Officer and officiating clergy,
taking hasty cover in a truly novel trench; while the central figure
of the obsequies, sublimely indifferent to the Hun and all his
frightfulness, lay on the grass outside, calm and impassive amid the
whispering hail of bullets.

As for the trenches themselves--well, as the immortal costermonger
observed, "there ain't no word in the blooming language" for them.

In the first place, there is no settled trench-line at all. The
Salient has been a battlefield for twelve months past. No one has ever
had the time, or opportunity, to construct anything in the shape of
permanent defences. A shallow trench, trimmed with an untidy parapet
of sandbags, and there is your stronghold! For rest and meditation,
a hole in the ground, half-full of water and roofed with a sheet
of galvanised iron; or possibly a glorified rabbit-burrow in a
canal-bank. These things, as a modern poet has observed, are all right
in the summer-time. But winter here is a disintegrating season. It
rains heavily for, say, three days. Two days of sharp frost succeed,
and the rain-soaked earth is reduced to the necessary degree of
friability. Another day's rain, and trenches and dug-outs come sliding
down like melted butter. Even if you revet the trenches, it is not
easy to drain them. The only difference is that if your line is