This is indeed the strangest of all wars, for it is fought in the dark.  Eyes are used, but they are the eyes of an aeroplane overhead, or of a spy in the enemy’s lines.  The man who fights lives underground, or under water, and rarely sees his foe.  There is something strangely terrible, something peculiarly inhuman, in the silent stealth of this war of the blind.  The General sits in a quiet room far behind the lines, planning a battle he will never see.  The gunner aims by level and compass with faultless precision, and hurls his awful engines of destruction to destroy ten miles away a house which is to him only a dot on a map.  And the soldier sitting in his trench hears the shells whistling overhead and waits, knowing well that if he appeared for one instant above that rampart of earth he would be pierced by a dozen bullets from rifles which are out of his sight.

It is a war in the dark, and by far the most important of its operations are carried on, its battles are fought, in the literal sense of the word, underground.  Perhaps the next war will be fought not merely underground, but deep in the bowels of the earth, and victory will rest, not with the finest shots or the expert swordsmen, but with the men who can dig a tunnel most quickly.  The trenches may be cut by some herculean plough, deep tunnels may be dug by great machines, and huge pumping engines may keep them dry.  Our engineers have conquered the air, the water, and the land, but it is still with picks and spades that our soldiers dig themselves into safety.

At Furnes the nearest point to us of the fighting line was Pervyse, and as the Ambulance Corps had a dressing-station there, we often went out to see them and the soldiers in the trenches close by.  But the Belgian line was most effectively protected by an agency far more powerful than any trench, for over miles and miles of land spread the floods with which the Belgians, by breaking down the dykes, had themselves flooded the country.  The floods were a protection, but they were also a difficulty, since they made actual trenches an impossibility.  No ordinary pumps could have kept them dry.  So they had built huts of earth behind a thick earth bank, and partly sunk in the very low embankment, only two or three feet above the fields, on which the railway ran.  They were roofed with boards covered again with earth and sods, and behind each was a little door by which one could crawl in.  Inside, the floor was covered with a bed of straw, and a bucket with holes in its sides and full of red-hot coke did duty as a stove, while narrow loopholes served for ventilation and for light, and were to be used for firing from in the event of an attack.  Of course the huts were very cramped, but they were at least warm, they gave protection from the weather, and above all they were safe.  The men only occupied them as a matter of fact for short periods of one or two days at a time, a fresh guard coming out from Fumes to take their places.