There were lucky ones here as elsewhere. Such was H. L., who made himself some mittens with a pair of old socks found in a German trench. Men are not very squeamish in war-time, when they have been wearing the same ragged filthy garments for a month. "You could not touch my vest with a pair of tongs, it is so dirty," wrote the same H. L. to his sister. The officers were no better off, except that they had socks. "We never change; we never wash; we never brush our hair," wrote Alfred de Nanteuil. "I have been living in the same grime ever since I left Brest. The only things I have changed are my socks. All my ideas of hygiene are upset, for, on the whole, I have never felt so well." Some few complain of the food. "I have been three days in the trenches without enough to eat," grumbles one sailor J. L. R. But the majority declare that the tinned meat was not bad, especially when it was warmed, and that, on the whole, they got enough.[57] As for drink, with the exception of the coffee, pronounced "famous," the unanimous verdict was that it was execrable, neither wine nor beer, only stagnant water; "and they say, besides, that the Boches have poisoned it." The men were recommended only to drink it in their coffee, well boiled. "I lived for days on bread and sugar, with a cup of coffee for an occasional treat," wrote Alfred de Nanteuil. "All the water in the district is polluted. So I go very well for a week without drinking anything but coffee." François Alain, for one, was four days without food or drink, lying among the straw in a barn where twenty-seven of his comrades had been bayoneted. How did this nineteen-year-old conscript escape the Boches who had remained in the neighbourhood? Through a little hole he had made with his knife in one of the tiles of the roof he observed all their movements, and took note of their trenches and the emplacements of their cannon and their machine-guns; and one fine night, when there was not too much moonlight, he crawled out, killing a German officer who was reconnoitring the French positions, and got back into our lines with a cargo of precious information, a thick coating of mud, and teeth sharpened by a fast of ninety-six hours.[58] And these men, dripping with wet, with empty stomachs and burning heads, never lost heart for a moment. The same note recurs in all their letters: "In spite of this, all goes well, and we are not downhearted, especially when we can have a go at the Boches." The one thing consoles them for the other. They know the perils of the trenches, and they prefer them to the inactivity of being kept in reserve. "We have had twelve days of fighting now," wrote the Marine C., of Audierne, "and this evening, I am glad to say, we are to be in the first line, for it is better to be under fire than resting." Was this paradox or braggadocio? Not at all. They spoke as they thought. They courted danger as other men shun it. FOOTNOTES: