By day, where fighting was not in progress, these mazes of trenches seemed unutterable desolations of deserted silence. No sign of movement betrayed the thousands who were in them. At night, however, they were scenes of incessant activity. It was by night that entanglements were laid and defences strengthened. At night took place the changes and reliefs. From their billets in the cellars or lower stories of a ruined farm, the smashed windows barricaded with planks and sandbags, or from quarters in some deserted village or abandoned works, the reliefs moved across a country totally without lights, felt their way along lanes and roads pitted into craters by shells; navigated on planks and temporary bridges, ditches, streams, and canals; or crept under the shelter of partly demolished walls, until the rear communication ways into the trenches were reached. In this manner nearly all movements close to the firing line was made. Acknowledgment too high can never be paid to the devotion and valour of the men who, through the weeks of an unusually dreary and bitter winter, both withstood the fury of the German attacks, and patiently day by day and night by night, solidified the barrier which was to consummate the enemy's ruin. Dangerous though it was the work may well have appeared unheroic. To some interpreters of public opinion at home it did appear unheroic. The soldiers' devotion, however, is a devotion to duty. This was, in his dispatch of November 20, well expressed by the British "Eye Witness." It is difficult to do justice amid comfortable surroundings to the fortitude of those who day and night support the rigour of life in the trenches. It is true that everything is done for them which foresight and experience can suggest. It is true that by universal admission the rations are unlimited in amount and excellent in quality. But no attention and care can make trench life in winter anything but an extreme test of soldierly fortitude. It is a small thing that it is dangerous, for danger is the condition of a soldier's life; but it is monotonous, it is damp, it is insanitary, it is intolerably cold, and it is a strain upon the nerves. This war, more than any other, is one of unrecorded heroisms. Not only the British army, however, but the French and the Belgian armies had unshaken confidence in their leaders, and with good reason. In time the entrenched front became completely organised, a system of settled communications linked up by telephone wires in every direction. The French trenches formed a seemingly endless labyrinth. In Flanders along the Yser rats, driven out of their usual haunts and starving in the desolated country, took up their abode with the men in the dug-outs, and became domesticated and friendly.