"Around their middle they carry some twenty or thirty bombs, little cylinders fastened on a long stick, around which fall streamers of ribbon. The clothing of ribbons suggests a mixed breed of Scotsmen and Red Indians who have taken to wearing the Red Indian head-dress as a kilt. In action they are stranger still. Crouching down among the barbed wire, the bombers, with their supporting infantrymen with fixed bayonets, raise themselves a little from the earth, and seizing one of these rocket-like bombs from their belts, grasp it by the stick and hurl it high above the parapet. It twists and travels uncertainly through the air, and then finally the streamers settle it in its flight, and it plunges straight as a plumb line down into the trench. There is a noise as though a gigantic Chinese cracker were jumping along the zigzag trench, and clouds of greenish smoke rise up, through which hurtle lumps of earth and stone and fragments of the outer iron ring of the bomb which constitute its shrapnel."[192] Life in the trenches must always be uncomfortable, and may be very trying indeed. During the winter West Flanders was a huge bog; the canals and rivers overflowed their banks, and many of the trenches were always knee-deep in slime and icy water. Large numbers of our men suffered from frost-bite in the feet. Though they were clad in sheepskin coats, and everything possible was done for their comfort, they had to bear trials and hardships such as few troops have ever endured before. The cheerfulness of our men during those bitter, dreary, and trying days was amazing. The British food supplies were excellent and unfailing. Never before has an army been fed so well. Arrangements were also made for giving the men a hot bath and a change of clothing when they returned from the trenches to their billets in the villages behind the firing line. * * * * *