“And then we were off, merry and blithe, no matter what our hearts registered, cheering like fiends when some of the boys in khaki chalked the gun-carriages ‘at Berlin,’ a new challenge to each Tommy to do his stunt in making the Huns pay. Then came a drifting period when we were herded like cattle from one train to another, or made long, weary marches in the blind,—for nobody seemed to know our destination. But at last we were in the shadow of the great battle, down in the earth, in one sector of a long line of a serpentine trench, zigzagging from the sea to the Alps. “This burrowing underground like a mole, digging trenches, or holes, in No Man’s Land, to string up barbed wire entanglements, or to pile sand-bags on the parapet, or to clean out the wreckage of a trench that had been battered by German gunners, or a trench-mortar—sometimes to gather up the pieces of some ‘matey’ whom you had chummed with,—all meant new activities. They were experiences and sounds—the sounds of hell—and sights that cut deep, with an impelling remembrance haunting you like grewsome shadows. “Yes, it was a strange new life,” the young soldier paused musingly, “for this kind of fighting is no battlefield with glittering helmets and bayonets, the furling of colors, the prancing of horses, the roll of gun-carriages, but stinging eyelids and a choking in thick gray smoke, with the roar of cannonading, the sharp screech of shrapnel, the bursting of star-shells, or the whir of strange, queer monsters above your head. “There was the turning of night into day,”—Philip’s face had a weary expression,—“the daily mental strain, the danger constantly facing you, the learning to know the sounds of the different shells and in what direction they were going to fall. Involuntarily, with stilled breath, you waited, and then came the sinking of your heart when you sensed that it was _your turn now_, and then to find yourself still there, but to realize that some of your mates had ‘gone West.’ “And the gas. Oh, the horror of the great, greenish balls that came rolling towards you, close to the earth, the celerity of getting into your gas-masks, and the _horrible thing_ that a comrade became if he failed to accomplish this job on time, and lay writhing in an ugly, venomous atmosphere of green. “Then there were the cooties, the parasites that feed _on you_, and with whom you maintain a constant warfare,” Philip smiled as he saw the girls squirm; “and the rats, as big as cats, with sharp, ferret-like eyes, darting from some dark crevice, or playing leap-frog over your legs at night, or mistaking your head for their nest. Ugh! But the dead-and-gone feeling—exhausted nature asserting her rights—which assailed you at some critical moment, perhaps when you were trying to be a man at your job, just got you through and through.