We had, without a dissenting voice. A ditch in the mud--that was all, no matter how much farther we went. So we passed out of the trench into a soapy, slippery mud which had been ploughed ground in the autumn, now become lathery with the beat of men’s steps. Our party became separated, when some foundered and tried to hoist themselves with both boot straps at once. The C. O. called out in order to locate us in the darkness, and the voice of an officer in the trenches cut in: “Keep still! The Germans are only a hundred yards away!” “Sorry!” whispered the C. O. “I ought to have known better.” Then one of the German searchlights that had been swinging its stream of light across the paths of the flares lay its fierce, comet eye on us, glistening on the froth-streaked mud and showing each mud-splashed figure in heavy coat in weird silhouette. “Stand still!” That is the order whenever searchlights come spying in your direction. So we stood still in the mud, looking at one another and wondering. It was the one tense second of the night, which lifted our thoughts out of the mud with the elation of risk. That searchlight was the eye of death looking for a target. With the first crack of a bullet we should have known that we were discovered and that it was no longer good tactics to stand still. We should have dropped on all fours into the porridge. The searchlight swept on. Perhaps Hans at the machine gun was nodding or perhaps he did not think us worth while. Either supposition was equally agreeable to us. We kept moving our mud-poulticed feet forward, with the flares at our backs, till we came to a road where we saw dimly a silent company of soldiers drawn up and behind them the supplies for the trench. Through the mud and under cover of darkness every bit of barbed wire, every board, every ounce of food, must go up to the moles in the ditch. The searchlights and the flares and the machine guns waited for the relief. They must be fooled. But in this operation most of the casualties in the average trenches, both British and German, occurred. Without a chance to strike back, the soldier was shot at by an assassin in the night. When the men who had been serving their turn of duty in the trenches came out, a magnet drew their weary steps--cleanliness. They thought of nothing except soap and water. For a week they need not fight mud or Germans or parasites, which, like General Mud, waged war against both British and Germans. Standing on the slats of the concrete floor of a factory, they peeled off the filthy, saturated outer skin of clothing with its hideous, crawling inhabitants and, naked, leapt into great, steaming vats, where they scrubbed and gurgled and gurgled and scrubbed. When they sprang out to apply the towels, they were men with the feel of new bodies in another world.