Up these trenches, you may reflect as you trudge along with what one might call a rabbit’s-eye view on either side, reliefs and rations go up at dark, long files of silent men plodding through the summer night with the frogs croaking in the marshes and the night-jars creaking in the trees. Down these trenches come the men who have done their spell of duty in the firing-line, muddy and unshaven and laden with all kinds of personal belongings from a month-old copy of the _Sketch_ to a German cooking-pot, silently delighted at the prospect of a few days’ respite from trench mortars and “whizz-bangs” and bullets and vermin. Here, when fighting is toward, there is a crush in the Strand on a Saturday night. In one direction go the men bearing boxes of bombs and ammunition swiftly forward to the firing-line, squeezing themselves back against the muddy walls on the cry of “Gangway there!” to let orderlies with messages past; in the other direction the wounded, roughly bandaged, make their painful way back to the regimental aid-post or field ambulance. The shells come crashing over in and around the trench, and the bullets from the front line snap and whinny and whistle in the air as though to proclaim to all men still alive that their mission is not yet accomplished. But a little rain, and these trenches become first quagmires of mud, the sticky whitish clay of Flanders, of which our men speak with horror, or the browner soil of France, then stagnant ponds, knee or even waist deep, in which men, walking alone and struck down by shell or bullet, have been known to drown before help could reach them. But sombre thoughts have no place in the communication trenches. The men you meet, passing up and down, are smiling. The Adjutant, descending with mud-covered boots and puttees, his stout broomstick in his hand, from his morning walk round his battalion’s section of the line, gives you a cheery “Good-day!” after the etiquette of officers when they meet out here. A working party, laden with spades and saws and beams, who are marching in Indian file ahead of you, are joking as they plod. One of them has a mouth-organ, and is softly playing a little music-hall jingle as he walks: “I’d like to be, I’d like to be, I’d like to be right home in Dixie....” As, with a whistling “whoosh,” a shell comes over from the deep blue sky ahead, the music stops, the party stops, and the men, turning with a common movement, crane their heads out of the trench to see where the shell has fallen. Boom! ... the report comes back, and a cloud of dense black smoke eddies out above a clump of trees. “My word!” says the sergeant, “the brigade’s catching it to-day and no mistake!” Then the party trudges on again down the trench, while the crickets chirp noisily in the corn, and the musician resumes his little tune: “I’d like to be, I’d like to be, I’d like to be right home in Dixie....”