The machine-gunners of both sides are extremely busy.  In the plains of France the pursuit of their nefarious trade was practically limited to front-line work.  When they did venture to indulge in what they called “overhead” fire, their friends in the forefront used to summon them after the performance, and reproachfully point out sundry ominous rents and abrasions in the back of the front-line parapet.  But here they can withdraw behind a convenient ridge, and strafe Boches a mile and a half away, without causing any complaints.  Needless to say, Brother Boche is not backward in returning the compliment.  He has one gun in particular which never tires in its efforts to rouse us from ennui.  It must be a long way off, for we can only just hear the report.  Moreover, its contribution to our liveliness, when it does arrive, falls at an extremely steep angle—­so steep, indeed, that it only just clears the embankment under which we live, and falls upon the very doorsteps of the dug-outs with which that sanctuary is honeycombed.

This invigorating shower is turned on regularly for ten minutes, at three, six, nine, and twelve o’clock daily.  Its area of activity includes our tiny but, alas! steadily growing cemetery.  One evening a regiment which had recently “taken over” selected 6 P.M. as a suitable hour for a funeral.  The result was a grimly humorous spectacle—­the mourners, including the Commanding Officer and officiating clergy, taking hasty cover in a truly novel trench; while the central figure of the obsequies, sublimely indifferent to the Hun and all his frightfulness, lay on the grass outside, calm and impassive amid the whispering hail of bullets.

As for the trenches themselves—­well, as the immortal costermonger observed, “there ain’t no word in the blooming language” for them.

In the first place, there is no settled trench-line at all.  The Salient has been a battlefield for twelve months past.  No one has ever had the time, or opportunity, to construct anything in the shape of permanent defences.  A shallow trench, trimmed with an untidy parapet of sandbags, and there is your stronghold!  For rest and meditation, a hole in the ground, half-full of water and roofed with a sheet of galvanised iron; or possibly a glorified rabbit-burrow in a canal-bank.  These things, as a modern poet has observed, are all right in the summer-time.  But winter here is a disintegrating season.  It rains heavily for, say, three days.  Two days of sharp frost succeed, and the rain-soaked earth is reduced to the necessary degree of friability.  Another day’s rain, and trenches and dug-outs come sliding down like melted butter.  Even if you revet the trenches, it is not easy to drain them.  The only difference is that if your line is situated on the forward slope of a hill the support trench drains into the firing-trench; if they are on the reverse slope, the firing-trench drains into the support trench.  Our indefatigable friends Box and Cox, of the Royal Engineers, assisted by sturdy Pioneer Battalions, labour like heroes; but the utmost they can achieve, in a low-lying country like this, is to divert as much water as possible into some other Brigade’s area.  Which they do, right cunningly.