One is under varying spells. To-day he seems in the midst of a fantastic world, whose horror makes it impossible of realisation. To-morrow, as his car takes him along a pleasant by-road among wheat-fields where peasants are working and no soldier is in sight, it is a world of peace, and one thinks that he has mistaken the roar of a train for the distant roar of gun-fire. Again, it seems the most real of worlds, an exclusive man’s world, where nothing counts but organised material force, and all those cleanly, well-behaved men in khaki are a part of the permanent population. One sees the war as a colossal dynamo, where force is perpetual like the energy of the sun. The war is going on forever. The reaper cuts the harvest, but another harvest comes. War feeds on itself, renews itself. Live men replace the dead. There seems no end to supplies of men. The pounding of the guns, like the roar of Niagara, becomes eternal. Nothing can stop it. XV TRENCHES IN WINTER A trench must be “experienced”--Appearance of the trench--A trench periscope--“One hundred and fifty yards away”-- Imagination at work--The dead wall opposite--Trench realism-- A genuine officer--A night excursion--General Mud--The German flares--A house in a trench wall--Oozing walls--“A ditch in the mud”--Discovered by a searchlight--Suspense--Arrival of supplies--The relief and cleanliness. The difference between trench warfare in winter and in summer is that between sleeping on the lawn in March and in July. It was in the mud and winds of March that I first saw the British front. The winds were much like the seasonal winds at home; but the Flanders mud is like no other mud, in the judgment of the British soldier. It is mixed with glue. When I returned to the front in June for a longer stay, the mud had become clouds of dust that trailed behind the automobile. In March my eagerness to see a trench was that of one from the Western prairies to get his first glimpse of the ocean. Once I might go into a trench as often as I pleased I became “fed up” with trenches, as the British say. They did not mean much more than an alley or a railroad cut. One came to think of the average peaceful trench as a ditch where some men were eating marmalade and bully beef and looking across a field at some more men who were eating sausage and “K. K.” bread, each party taking care that the other did not see him.