holes--holes into which, if a man were to fall, he might lie for days
before he were found, or even might never be found at all. After many
hours, trickle him, half dead with dragging his feet at every step out
of the putty-like mud, into a shallow, straggling, open ditch not in any
way different from a watery drain between two sodden country paddocks,
except that there is no grass about it--nothing but brown, slippery mud
on floor and trench sides and over the country in all directions as far
as eye can see. At the end of it all put him to live there, with what
baggage he carried on his back and nothing more; put him in various
depths of mud, to stay there all day in rain, wind, fog, hail,
snowstorm--whatever weather comes--and to watch there during the endless
winter nights, when the longed-for dawn only means another day and
another night out there in the mud ditch, without a shred of cover. And
this is what our men have had to go through.

The longed-for relief comes at last--a change to other shell-battered
areas in support or reserve--and the battalion comes back down the long
road to the rear, white-faced and dreary-eyed, dragging slowly through
the mud without a word. For they have been through a life of which you,
or any people past and present who have not been to this war, have not
the first beginnings of a conception; something beside which a South
Polar expedition is a dance and a picnic. And that is without taking
into account the additional fact that night and day, on the Somme where
these conditions existed, men live under the unceasing sound of guns. I
can hear them as I write--it is the first longed-for gloriously bright
day, and therefore there is not an interval of a second in that
continuous roar, hour after hour. There is nothing like it anywhere else
in the world--there has never yet been anything to approach it except at
Verdun.