* * * * * The real nightmare was only just beginning. There had been the torment of frost and cold; now came the torments of mud, of gas, of incessant artillery, of fatigue and lack of sleep. Under the swift thaw the whole battered countryside seemed to turn from ice to mud. It was deep on the _pavé_ roads, deeper round the billets, deeper still on the unpaved tracks, and deepest of all in the trenches. In Winterbourne’s hallucinated memories, where images and episodes met and collided like superimposed films, that Spring was mud. He seemed to spend his time pledging through interminable muddy trenches, up to the ankles, up to the calves, up to the knees; shovelling mud frantically out of trenches on to the berm, and then by night from the berm over the parapets, while the shells crashed and the machine-gun bullets struck gold sparks from the road stones. When he was not doing that, he was scraping mud with a knife from his boots and clothes, trying to dry socks and puttees and to rub some warmth into his livid aching feet. He had not known that wet cold could keep one’s legs so achingly dead for so long. He had not known how wearisome it could be to drag tired legs and carry burdens through deep sticky chalk mud, where each step was an effort, where each leg stuck deep as the other was laboriously pulled from the sucking mud. He had not known that one could hate an inert thing so much. Overhead it might be sunny, with innumerable little fleecy puffs of exploded shrapnel pursuing a darting white airplane high in the misty blue March sky. Underfoot, it was mud. They had no time to look at the sky, as they dragged along, toiling their bent way along those muddy ditches. * * * * * He remembered a week of blessed respite which he spent in an underground gallery, squatting twelve hours a day by a winch and interminably winding sandbags of chalk to men in the trench. These galleries—which were never used—were being dug to conceal two or three divisions before a surprise attack. They seemed to extend for miles. The cutting and picking at the advancing end was done by R.E.’s, skilled miners who cut with astonishing rapidity and accuracy. The Pioneers filled the chalk into sacks, and dragged them along the galleries, where Winterbourne incessantly wound them to the top. The Engineers had better rations than the infantry and the Pioneers, whose lunch was bread and cheese. They had huge cold beefsteaks and bottles of strong tea and rum for their lunch. Winterbourne during his half hour’s midday rest one day wandered up to their end of the gallery, just as they were eating. He could not help glancing rather wolfishly at their meal. One of them noticed it, and pointing to his steak, said with his mouth full: “Ah reckon tha doesn’t get groob the likes o’ this in thy lot, lad.” “No, but the stew’s very good—only you get a bit tired of it every day.”