First impressions! Do you know, I think my first impression was of the difficulty of finding one's way about in a maze of muddy ditches which all looked exactly alike, despite a few occasional muddy notice-boards perched in odd corners: "Princes Street," "Sauchiehall Street," "Manchester Avenue," "Stinking Sap," "Carlisle Road," and the like. I had a trench map of the sector, but it seemed to me one never could possibly identify the different ways, all mud being alike, and no trench offering anything but mud to remember it by. In the front or fire-trench itself, the firing line, one can hop up on the fire-step, look round quickly between bullets, and get a bearing. But in all these interminable communication and branch trenches where one goes to and fro, at a depth varying from six to ten or twelve feet, seeing only clay and sky, how the dickens could one find the way? And yet, do you know, so quickly are things borne in upon you in this crude, savage life of raw realities, so narrow is your world, so vital your need of knowing it; so unavoidable is your continuous alertness, and so circumscribed the field of your occupation, that I feel now I know nothing else in the world quite so well and intimately as I know that warren of stinking mud: the two sub-sectors in which I spent last week. Manchester Avenue, Carlisle Road, Princes Street, with all their side alleys and boggy by-ways! Why, they are so photographed on the lining of my brain that, if I were an artist (instead of a very muddy subaltern ex-clerk) I could paint the whole thing for you--I wish I could. Not only do I know them, but I've merely to shut my eyes to see any and every yard of them; I can smell them now; I can feel the precise texture of their mud. I know their hidden holes and traps, where the water lies deep. I know to an inch where the bad breaks are in the duck-boards that you can't see because the yellow water covers them. Find one's way! I know them far better than I know the Thames Embankment, the Strand, or Brixton Hill! That's not an exaggeration.