CHAPTER XXXI

IN THE MUD OF LE BARQUE

_France, December 20th._


By the muddy, shell-pitted roadside of the sunken road in Le Barque,
behind the German lines, were found three shapeless forms. The mud
dripped from them as they lay, but they were the forms of men. And the
German soldiers who saw them, and who buried them, took it that they
were men who had not lost their lives from any shell wound; that they
had not been killed by the fire of our machine-guns, or by stray
bullets. They put down the death of those men to the mud and the mud
alone. The sunken road at Le Barque had been mashed with shells and
trampled to slime with traffic; some runner from battalion headquarters
at night, slipping through the sleet, some couple of men straggling
after the tail of an incoming platoon on a wild night when the English
barrage suddenly startled them and caused them to miss the path by a few
yards in the blackness, had stumbled unnoticed into a shell-hole. All
their company officer knew was that they were missing--and no trace of
them was found until three bodies were dragged from a shell crater, when
men told stories of men missed there before.

Now, I do not know if it really was the mud which engulfed alive the
three Germans who lay beside the sunken road of Le Barque; but I know
that their comrades thought it was. And that is a simple proof that the
mud, of which the Germans talk so much, is not all on the British side