Cheery and confident like all our men, they heed neither the menace of death which those whistling shells convey nor the grim signs that meet them on their way of the harvest the Reaper has gathered in those peaceful cornfields. Here the trench passes a little burial-ground in an orchard, lying between an old farm-house and its deep broad moat, the branches of the apple and pear trees leaning down until they seem to caress with their gnarled fingers the little white crosses of the graves. Now the trench stops by a sunken ditch, where a faint and horrible odour speaks of fallen Germans buried in the slime. The men cross the ditch by its little bridge with exaggerated sounds expressive of disgust, with a joke, in which horror has no place. “_Heute Dir, morgen mir_” is the philosophy of the trenches, and a laughing philosophy it is. Some day a poet shall sing the song of the communication trench, when peace has come back to the land and the long grasses, springing up, have smothered the narrow way that once upon a time led up to the fiery ordeal of battle. He shall tell of the men who dug the trench by night, toiling in the silver radiance of the moon among the eerie shadows flitting in and out of ruined hamlets and deserted farms. He shall conjure up the hard, black silhouette of the group, standing out against the light of the German star-shells soaring skyward with a hissing screech, making the countryside as bright as day. His verse shall carry in its swing the dull thud of pick and shovel on the soft ground blending with the hurried gasping of the machine-guns and the crack of the rifles in the firing-line. He shall sing of the men who have trodden the marshy bottom of the trench going gladly forth into battle--of those who went up and came down, of those who went up and were presently laid to rest in that earth to which, by the Heavenly Will, all men must return. And for the brave smiles and calm resolution those narrow ditches have seen, my poet shall sing of them, not as a place of horror, not as the ante-chamber of death, but as the strait path that leads to glory. Imperceptibly the winding course of the communication trench brings you nearer to noises of which you are aware without seeking to fathom their meaning. There are sounds like those produced by running a stick along an iron railing, there are individual, crisp noises like the smack of a mass of butter on a marble slab, vague echoes in the air like the rustling of gigantic wings, and here and there explosions, now loud and insistent and close and terrifying, now distant and muffled like the bark of an old dog. Then, as you realize with a flash that these are the sounds of war, and begin to distinguish between the rap-rap of the machine-gun, the hard crepitation of the rifle-bullet, and the dull boom of a shell, you find you are in the firing-line.