The winter was over, the birds were singing again on the barbed wire entanglements, the green grasses peeped out between the cobbles of the deserted village streets, and the flowers showed in the open spaces between the lines. The trenches were becoming dry; the parapets no longer crumbled down; it was possible to climb over the parados at night without flinging half the structure into the muddy alleys, where the soldiers kept eternal watch on the lines across the way. Sheepskin jackets were handed in; top boots were worn no more; a man could sleep at ease in a dug-out now, for the roofs, no longer weighted by the rain, had ceased falling in on the hapless sleepers. The tottering walls gathered strength; tottering spirits were braced up; men saw the sun and were pleased. The winter was over. For one who has not experienced them, it is difficult to realise the hardships of the front line between the months of October and April. The trenches are deep ditches filled with mud and water that reach the waist. Now and again the heavy top-boots are useless protection against wet, the water rises over the tops of the boots and runs down the legs of the men. The boots stick in the mud, and often the men have to climb out of them; clamber from cells into a quagmire. In the days following the first trench winter when the earth got dry soldiers who had died in their top-boots were dug from the floors of the trenches. Weary with their efforts to get free from the deadly embrace of the muddy quagmire, they fell asleep and succumbed to exposure, died in their graves. And in spring they were dug out and buried anew. The dug-out is as treacherous as the trench. The shaky construction, the lodge of fear, is always built in a hurry. Weak props hold a crazy roof in place; sandbags filled with earth serve the purpose of tiles. In dry weather a dug-out serves its purpose well, but in the rainy weather the sandbags becoming saturated finally weigh the rafters and props down to earth. Time and again the weary sleepers never wake, their shelter becomes their grave. The trenches in the summer nights have a charm peculiarly their own when the starshells riot in the heavens and the air is full of the languorous scent of sleeping flowers. If the guns of war are silent, there is a genial atmosphere pervading the whole place, and men go about their work in a light-hearted manner.