The mud-hole was the only fountain to slake my thirst for my water bottle had been blown away with my thumb and other fragments of my flesh by the bomb. It wasn’t drinking from a crystal spring. I would press the mud down and make a small hole that filled with stale black water that tasted even worse than it looked. But it was, for all that, delicious to my fevered, wounded mouth. Drinks of it put more life in me than ever “trench rum” did. And I cannot help but believe that my good, old mud-hole had done more for me than conceal me from my enemies. I believe it acted as a poultice for my wounds in the three days or nearly three days in which I soaked in it. My fevers had come on at night most violently, I honestly do not remember ever having experienced a thorough chill. I was cold and clammy in my waking hours but never cold to the point of suffering acutely on that score. But my food was gone and though my head was light and my wounded arm hurting me intensely I found myself on the night of this third day feeling that possibly I had acquired strength for the five-hundred yards journey back to our lines. In my weakened condition, I had to think of how the obstacles, quite aside from danger from the Germans, would impede me in the night. I mean the shell-holes, the sections of barbed wire left upstanding in No Man’s Land, and the countless dead bodies I might fall over, the ravenous rats which might attack me. But to have attempted to crawl away in the day-time would have meant certain death. It may seem a strange statement, but it is true--I have the dead men of No Man’s Land to thank for the fact that I am still living. There was a mist over the land the night I made my escape. The mist decided me that the time had come to “carry on” unless I could resign myself to rot to death in the mud-hole. Surely the fog would last until I could stagger out of immediate German territory and merge myself into the torn and blasted waste of No Man’s Land. I decided to make the try. The first twenty feet I walked seemed as far as I was ever going to get. I was breathless, giddy, and my legs were almost as irresponsible to direction as was my wounded arm whenever I tried to raise it. I sat or rather fell into some smashed shrubbery and rocked and wept in despair. But that spell of weakness passed and I got to my feet again. To my surprise--you must understand my long imprisonment in the mud-hole had made my mind almost as wavery as my legs--my legs seemed stronger. Of course, they would. The confinement in the mud-hole had benumbed them. My feet began to tingle with an almost acute pain. But as I continued to move along I walked the more easily. But I was dazed and I was continuously falling over obstacles of brush or loose stones.