made a mistake then that they can never now retrieve.

They were in a position to choose, and they chose to entrench in the high
dry sections, leaving the low-lying swamps, the damp marshy lands, for us.
We had no alternative. It was either to take a stand there on what footing
was left or be wiped off the map. We stood.

On that sector between La Bassee and Armentières it was practically an
impossibility to dig in. The muddy water was of inconceivable thickness
along the greater length of the whole front. It oused and eddied, it seemed
to swirl and draw as though there were a tide. We did not attempt to dig.
We raised sandbag breastworks some five or six feet high and lay behind
them day in and day out for an eternity, as it seemed.

Our shift in the trenches was supposed to be four days and four nights in.
It never was shorter, sometimes much longer. Once we spent eleven days and
nights in the trenches without a shift, because our reinforcing battalion
was called away to another sector of the front. I know of a Highland
Battalion that was in twenty-eight days and nights without a change.

We were unequipped as to uniform. We were in the regulation khaki of other
days. We had no waterproof overcoats. We had puttees, but the greater
number of us had no rubber boots. A very few of the men had boots of rubber
that reached to the knees. At first we envied the possessors of these, but
not for long. The water and mud, and shortly the blood, rose above the top
and ran down inside the leg of the boot. The wearers could not remove the
mud, and trench feet, frost bite, gangrene, was their immediate portion. We
lost as many men, that first winter of the war, by these terrible
afflictions as we did by actual bullets and shell fire.