Our men were never dry. They were wet in their trenches and wet in their dugouts. They slept in soaking clothes, with boots full of water, and they drank rain with their tea, and ate mud with their "bully," and endured it all with the philosophy of "grin and bear it!" and laughter, as I heard them laughing in those places between explosive curses.
On the other side of the barbed wire the Germans were more miserable, not because their plight was worse, but because I think they lacked the English sense of humor. In some places they had the advantage of our men in better trenches, with better drains and dugouts--due to an industry with which ours could never compete. Here and there, as in the ground to the north of Hooge, they were in a worse state, with such rivers in their trenches that they went to enormous trouble to drain the Bellewarde Lake which used to slop over in the rainy season. Those field-gray men had to wade through a Slough of Despond to get to their line, and at night by Hooge where the lines were close together--only a few yards apart--our men could hear their boots squelching in the mud with sucking, gurgling noises.
"They're drinking soup again!" said our humorists.
There, at Hooge, Germans and English talked to one another, out of their common misery.
"How deep is it with you?" shouted a German soldier.
His voice came from behind a pile of sand-bags which divided the enemy and ourselves in a communication trench between the main lines.
"Up to our blooming knees," said an English corporal, who was trying to keep his bombs dry under a tarpaulin.
"So?... You are lucky fellows. We are up to our belts in it."
It was so bad in parts of the line during November storms that whole sections of trench collapsed into a chaos of slime and ooze. It was the frost as well as the rain which caused this ruin, making the earthworks sink under their weight of sand-bags. German and English soldiers were exposed to one another like ants upturned from their nests by a minor landslide. They ignored one another. They pretended that the other fellows were not there. They had not been properly introduced. In another place, reckless because of their discomfort, the Germans crawled upon their slimy parapets and sat on top to dry their legs, and shouted: "Don't shoot! Don't shoot!"