It had been raining heavily for a day or two. I remember thinking that in London⁠—which seemed a long way off⁠—people were going about under umbrellas and looking glum when their clothes were splashed by passing omnibuses. The women had their skirts tucked up and showed their pretty ankles. (Those things used to happen in the far-off days of peace.) But in the trenches, those that lay low, rain meant something different, and hideously uncomfortable for men who lived in holes. Our soldiers, who cursed the rain⁠—as in the old days, “they swore terribly in Flanders”⁠—did not tuck their clothes up above their ankles. They took off their trousers.

There was something ludicrous, yet pitiable, in the sight of those hefty men coming back through the communication trenches with the tails of their shirts flapping above their bare legs, which were plastered with a yellowish mud. Shouldering their rifles or their spades, they trudged on grimly through two feet of water, and the boots which they wore without socks squelched at every step with a loud, sucking noise⁠—“like a German drinking soup,” said an officer who preceded me.