I, personally, do not know how the men and their officers can live through that sort of time. Remember that a fair proportion of them were a few months ago adding up figures in the office of an insurance company or a shipping firm--gulping down their midday coffee and roll in a teashop in King or Collins Streets. But take even a Central District farmer or a Newcastle miner--yes, or a Scottish shepherd or an English poacher--take the hardest man you know, and put him to the same test, and it is a question whether the ordeal would not break even his spirit. Put him out of doors into the thick of a dirty European winter; march him ten miles through a bitter cold wind and driving rain, with--on his back--all the clothing, household furniture, utensils and even the only cover which he is allowed to take with him; dribble him in through mud up to his knees--sometimes up to his waist--along miles and miles of country that is nothing but broken tree stumps and endless shell 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.