mouth-piece between your teeth, peered out through the goggles in the side of the gray flannel and slowly suffocated. Seeing that we were in a valley, all the gas from the shells drifted down to the low ground where the gun-pits had been dug and hung there ready to stifle your men directly the suffocation of their helmets became too much to bear. Mash Valley was most excellently chosen as a place in which to test one’s guts.     

       Heming had been with us two days when the Major took him up with him to make a reconnaissance of the front. At that time I was corporal of the B. C. party, so I went ahead to lay in wire in order that we might keep in touch with the battery should the Major wish to register the guns. At the head of Mash Valley there was an engineers’ dump, known as Kay, and it was at this point that the main trench-system began. We ran our wire in as far as Kay and were met there by the Major and Heming at three in the morning.     

       A Scotch mist was drifting across the desolation. The air was piercingly cold and a watery moon looked down, I think the first thing that impressed one about the trenches of the Somme was their desertion. The dead far outnumbered the living, and the dead were for the most part unburied. One wondered from where the men would spring up to fight should a Hun attack commence. The walls of the trenches were honey-combed with little scooped out holes. In those holes, with their knees drawn up to their chins and the mist soaking down on them, unshaven haggard men slept. They were polluted to the eyes and wearied to extinction. Sometimes their feet stuck out across the duck-board. You stumbled across them, but they did not waken; they only moaned. When they did not moan, you were puzzled; until a man made some motion or spoke, you were never certain whether he was living or dead. The slain defenders and those who had taken over from them huddled side by side, keeping guard together.     

       Here and there one of the kennels had been crushed in by a shell and the inmate had been killed while he slept. His putteed legs and heavy army boots were still thrust out across the duck-board; they were the only reminders of his sojourn there.     

       As one drew nearer to the front-line through the winding labyrinth of trenches, he noticed that the sides were walled up with the dead. Men’s bodies had proved cheaper than sandbags; 

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