A SURGEON IN ARMS
sternation of the Tommy as the Colonel good-naturedly came up and showed him the way was good to look at.
On a drizzling, rainy day when our Battalion occupied the front lines on part of the Vimy Ridge, I was standing in front of a so-called dugout, which consisted of a room about twelve feet by twelve, in which, through lack of space, two Medical Officers and their four Assistants and two batmen, ate, slept, and attended the wounded and sick. We were sheltered from shells by a tin roof, on which someone had piled two layers of sandbags.
The trenches were of sand with no revetments of any kind, so that the rain, which had been pouring for days, washed the earth down and formed mud to the knees. Sometimes the mud was rich and creamy, and, except for the fact that whoever happened to be in front of you spattered it in your face, it was easy to get through. The other variety of mud was mucilaginous and tenacious, and in getting through it one was very likely to lose his boots—particularly if they were the long rubber kind—and socks, or to get stuck fast. There were
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