WORSE THAN THE SOMME.

Our trouble this winter will be the same as on the Somme during last, a winter of evil memory. It will be the trouble of getting up supplies to the lines, and of getting shelter and any decency of comfort for the men in the front and support positions. As on the Somme, but worse than on the Somme, we have behind us now an eight-mile stretch of crater land, over which our battles have been fought, so that it is a great desert of mangled earth with innumerable deep pits, pierced by shell explosions and filled with water, a bogland and lakeland in which men sink to their armpits. Four miles of that ground are under heavy and continual fire. Another four miles of it are under scattered and harassing fire, and nowhere is there any cover except a few splinter-proof dug-outs. All through this coming winter – alas! it has come – masses of men will have to take their turn in this great Slough of Despond, in the wetness and the coldness and misery of it, and transport officers and “Q,” that, mystic letter which stands for all the organisation of supplies, will not find it easy to provide them with the material of life and war. They will do it, but it will not be easy. They will do it by roads and tracks laid under fire, broken by shells and laid again by fresh relays of men, who work like soldier ants in all this muck-heap, getting nil the risks and none of the glory. They will do it by pack mules, heavily laden but sure-footed, among the shell craters, and winding slowly in long single files across that blasted country where shells come with a scream down the wind, and the earth vomits up blackly about these mudsplashed beasts. They will do it by ration parties, trudging up night after night in the black darkness, lightened only by the glare of gun-fire, dodging shell-bursts, stumbling, falling into shell-pits, but getting there. Always getting there, if they have any luck. The transport drivers will take their wagons to the end of the last tracks, and unless their horses are killed or the drivers are hit they will be at the dumps by schedule time. “I give my men their orders, and then don’t worry,” one of our transport officers said the other night. “I know that if they are not all killed they will get the goods up all right.” That is the way it is done, but it is not an easy or a pleasant way and those eight miles deep and a hundred miles long of craterland and a bogland, the worst on the Flanders front, but bad everywhere, make a belt in which there is wretchedness redeemed only by great heroism, great patience, and the spirit of the British soldiers, who endure all these things with their jaws squared to the task.