The sick parade grew larger and the ground became lakes of mud. The cook-houses--so-called--which were only fires built in hollows, had their fires so drowned that we all ate primitive diet as well as lived most closely to nature. Everyone, as usual, had his consolation in laughing at the discomforts of the others, till order came out of chaos in the days that followed.
To anyone who has served any time at the front the above word will bring back recollections of various kinds, for dugouts are of varying types. The term is employed to denote any shelter in the neighborhood of the firing line, from the funk hole which is only a recess cut into the side of a trench with little or no shelter above it and none at the entrance, to the cavity dug down into the ground a distance varying from ten feet to seventy, and strengthened by supports of wood, steel, or concrete. It is also loosely used to denote cellars, caves, and shellholes which may be employed as means of protection from rifle bullet, shrapnel, or high explosive shell.
It is probably true in dugouts, as in many of the other necessities of war, that we learned much from the German, for he was probably the first to recognize the protection rendered by a well-built--or, rather, well-dug--reënforced hole in the ground. At various times when we have taken portions of the German lines we have found well-made homes underground, with two or more long entrances, one at either end, so that if one is hit by a shell, the other affords a means of exit to the inhabitants.
Those we took at Vimy seemed almost free of rats, which statement could not truthfully be made of our own dugouts. I don't know whether the German has some method of getting rid of rats, but I do know from practical and irritating experience that the German either has no method of freeing his dugouts of lice, or else thoroughly enjoys the company of vermin. None of us who occupied his underground dwellings, even if only for a few days, came back free from these annoying and disgusting companions. So tenacious and clinging were they that it took repeated baths and changes to free us of them. One might conclude that they had been treated in a brotherly way by the Hun.