Page:War's dark frame (IA warsdarkframe00camp).pdf/181

Rh "Most of them, when the rats begin to eat them alive, wake up and say, Shoo."

There has, perhaps, been as much written about vermin as bullets. Momentarily the subject clung—probably because it kept us from looking too far ahead. It is impossible to exaggerate the bullets. We began to suspect that imagination had played with the other, for these men were fairly clean. While their uniforms were marked with last night's mud and whitened with this morning's dust, they required no more radical antidote than a brisk brushing. Trenches are dirty and uncomfortable, but I couldn't see here such disorder of body and clothing as is observable among any gang of labourers engaged in excavation work.

Conditions," the trench officer said, are naturally better than during the winter and early spring, but experience as well as the weather has got something to do with it."

“What about the activities of certain unpleasant small life?"

He paused. Across the plaza we saw a few groups under non-commissioned officers, twining those deadly globes of barbed wire, invented by the French, for the blocking of communication trenches. Others worked with trowel and cement at machine gun emplacements. Some