You must picture the trenches as deep, rather narrow gangways, which are much more like street excavations than anything else one can imagine. Some are dug down in the soil, but many of them are only a foot or two in the ground, the parapet being built up with sandbags, as in many parts of our line, especially in Flanders, the water lies too close to the surface to allow of deep digging. The bottom of the trench has a wooden flooring composed of “grids,” as they are called, footways made of short pieces of wood nailed laterally on planks placed edgeways. A deep broad step is cut in the parapet and boarded over. It looks like a deep window-seat. This is the “fire-stand,” where the look-out men are posted at the loopholes to fire at the enemy. In most parts of the line there is but little rifle-fire by day, save for sniping, as neither side can expose its men by daylight, even for a momentary shot, without grave risk. Round and about the fire-stand the whole life of the soldier in the trenches centres. While his comrade takes his turn of duty at the parapet he sleeps on the fire-stand, or cooks his food over fires, or cleans his rifle, or writes a letter home. Shelters, that the men call “funk-holes”--long holes scraped out of the side of the trench and holding two or three men--give him a dry place to sleep in and protection from the rain. But should the funk-holes be full in rainy weather, the soldier has his waterproof sheet, issued with his equipment, and thus covered he will not hesitate to lie down and sleep in the wet. What with traverses and communication trenches and outposts, what with second and third lines and support trenches, the firing-line is such a winding maze that it is utterly impossible to get a comprehensive view of it as a whole. A walk round the trenches of a single company, which will take you a good half-hour, leaves you with a confused mass of impressions: of rather grimy figures, looking very business-like with their bandoliers strapped crosswise over their overcoats, their rifles by their sides, standing at the parapet; of men in all stages of undress, cooking, eating, washing, writing, in the narrow trench; of faces seen white against the dark background of a dug-out, strained to a telephone which wails fretfully with a puny whine like the toot of a child’s trumpet; of officers in shirt-sleeves and trench boots going their rounds or writing reports amid thousands of flies in a shelter.... You walk up a trench and down a trench, you see the angular outline of machine-guns under their canvas covers in their emplacements, you are shown case upon case of ammunition, bombs, and grenades, large and small, and rocket-like cartridges which are flare-lights.