General Mud “down and out”--“What hopes!”--Heroes in khaki-- “Tickets to England”--Coddling at home--Comradeship among the men--The uses of barbed wire--“Your hat, sir!”--Sniping-- Sentimental Mr. Atkins--Exchange of pleasantries--A “Boche” joke--A mine explodes--Wasting the Kaiser’s powder--A maze of trench “streets”--A soldier cook--And cook stoves--Officers’ mess--Fresh from Sandhurst--“When do you think the war will be over?”--_Strafing_ the chicken--From favourite actors to military methods--A night crawl between trenches--An alarm--In the midst of barbed-wire--Crawling patrols in the wheat field-- A narrow escape--A trench cot--The “morning hate”--A memory of cheerful hospitality. It was the same trench in June, still a relatively “quiet corner,” which I had seen in March; but I would never have known it if its location had not been the same on the map. One was puzzled how a place that had been so wet could become so dry. This time the approach was made in daylight through a long communication ditch, which brought us to a shell-wrecked farmhouse. We passed through this and stepped down at the back door into deep traverses cut among the roots of an orchard; then behind walls of earth high above our heads to battalion headquarters in a neat little shanty, where I deposited the first of the cakes I had brought, on the table beside some battalion reports. A cake is the right gift for the trenches, though less so in summer than in winter when appetites are less keen. The adjutant tried a slice while the colonel conferred with the general, who had accompanied me this far; and he glanced up at a sheet of writing with a line opposite hours of the day, pinned to a post of his dugout. “I wanted to see if it were time to make another report,” he said. “We are always making reports. Everybody is, so that whoever is superior to some one else knows what is happening in his subordinate’s department.” Then in and out in a maze, between walls with straight faces on the hard, dry earth, testifying to the beneficence of summer weather in constructing fastnesses from artillery fire, until we were in the firing-trench, where I was at home among the officers and men of a company. General Mud was “down and out.” He waited on the winter rains to take command again. But winter would find an army prepared against his kind of campaign. Life in the trenches in summer was not so unpleasant but that some preferred it, with the excitement of sniping, to the boredom of billets. * * * * *