Every newspaper reader knows that the Western front extends in a gigantic sweep from Ostend to Bale, but it is difficult to realise that the French and British Armies alone have to man some ten thousand miles of trenches, as we were recently reminded. The mere digging and maintenance of this mileage represents an engineering feat of no small magnitude, when it is borne in mind that the modern trench, with its bomb-proofs and dug-outs, is by way of being rather elaborate structure. But the picture is not complete until one realizes that every mile occupies certain definite -relition to the whole plan of campaign, and has tobe guarded, mapped and kept in order. On one ten-mile section of the front there are as many as 230 miles of trenches. If this wholesale entrenching is causing millions of men to revert to the life of the cave-dweller—letters from Shang! men state that their chief trouble in returning home for a few di that they cannot sleep in beds—it also seems to influence the lower forms of animal life. The great plague of the trenches is neither cold nor mud, although we hear a good deal of both, but rats. The super-rat has been called into being and it will go hard with him when the war is over—he, at least, cannot obtain insurance against peace.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.