For this corner of Belgium had been saved by turning it into a shallow lake.  By opening the gates in the dikes the Allies had let in the sea and placed a flood in front of the advancing enemy.  The battle front was a reeking pond.  The opposing armies lived like duck hunters in a swamp.  To dig a foot was to encounter water.  Machine guns here and there sat but six inches above the yellow flood.  Men lay in pools to fire them.  To reach outposts were narrow paths built first of bags of earth—­a life, sometimes for every bag.  And, when this filling was sufficient, on top a path of fascines, bound together in bundles, made a footway.

For this reason the Belgians approached their trenches not through deep cuts which gave them shelter but with no other cover than the darkness of night.  During the day, they lay in their shallow dugouts, cut off from any connection with the world behind them.  Food, cooked miles away, came up at night, cold and unappetizing.  For water, having exhausted their canteens, there was nothing but the brackish tide before them, ill-smelling and reeking of fever.  Water carts trundled forward at night, but often they were far too few.

The Belgians, having faced their future through long years of anxiety, had been trained to fight.  In a way they had been trained to fight a losing war, for they could not hope to defeat their greedy neighbor on the east.  But now they found themselves fighting almost not at all, condemned to inactivity, to being almost passively slaughtered by enemy artillery, and to living under such conditions as would have sapped the courage of a less desperate people.

To add to the difficulties, not only did the sea encroach, turning a fertile land into a salt marsh, but the winter rains, unusually heavy that tragic first winter, and lacking their usual egress to the sea, spread the flood.  There were many places well back of the lines where fields were flooded, and where roads, sadly needed, lost themselves in unfordable wallows of mud and water.

Henri then, knowing all this—­none better—­had his first question to settle, which was this:  As spring advanced the flood had commenced to recede.  Time came when, in those trenches now huddled shallow behind the railway track, one could live in a certain comfort.  In the deeper ones, the bottom of the trench appeared for the first time.

On a day previous, however, the water had commenced to come back.  There had been no rain, but little by little in a certain place yellow, ill-smelling little streams began to flow sluggishly into the trenches.  Seeped, rather than flowed.  At first the Belgian officers laid it to that bad luck that had so persistently pursued them.  Then they held a conference in the small brick house with its maps and its pine tables and its picture of an American harvester on the wall, which was now headquarters.

Sitting under the hanging lamp, with an orderly making coffee at a stove in the corner, they talked it over.  Henri was there, silent before his elders, but intently listening.  And at last they turned to him.