Rats? What did you ever read of the rats in the trenches? Next to gas, they still slide on their fat bellies through my dreams. Poe could have got new inspiration from their dirty hordes. Rats, rats, rats--I see them still, slinking from new meals on corpses, from Belgium to the Swiss Alps. Rats, rats, rats, tens of thousands of rats, crunching between battle lines while the rapid-firing guns mow the trench edge--crunching their hellish feasts. Full fed, slipping and sliding down into the wet trenches they swarm at night--and more than one poor wretch has had his face eaten off by them while he slept. Stench? Did you ever breathe air foul with the gases arising from a thousand rotting corpses? Dirt? Have you ever fought half madly through days and nights and weeks unwashed, with feverish rests between long hours of agony, while the guns boom their awful symphony of death, and the bullets zip-zip-zip ceaselessly along the trench edge that is your skyline--and your deathline, too, if you stretch and stand upright?... You wouldn't believe all I have seen, all I have left. Ah, no; you would say, "Roméo Houle, you are lying," were I to tell you some unbelievable things that I have really lived through. Men go mad over there. When you know what life in the first-line trenches is like you will wonder that I have returned, and that, having returned, I am still in my right mind. Sometimes, at night, I find myself again carrying the wounded back after the charge, and listening to dying soldiers telling me to look into blood-soaked pockets for last letters to their sweethearts or mothers back home. "Tell mother that I received the Blessed Sacrament before the battle began." I hear their breaking voices whisper, "Tell mother," while the thundering artillery pours its curtain of fire upon us, and our boys throw back from their rude, handmade sling shots their deadly "jam-pots." "Tell mother!" I think all the battle front is crying now those words. O Mother of God, hear them and end this needless butchery! I fought at Ypres. I fought at St. Julien. I fought at Lacouture and Festubert. I fought at Cuinchy. I fought at Givenchy and La Bassée, and in the first-line trenches at Messines. And before all these I fought in the first line at Richebourg and Laventie, and I live, one of 16 alive out of 500. II--AN AMERICAN WHO WENT "OVER THERE"