"Yes, sir," said Zaidos. He foresaw lively times.
"Good morning," said the doctor, sitting down and taking up his precious paper. The boys went out, feeling as though they had been dismissed from class.
The large cook house was very close to the First Aid Station, and was equipped with wonderful field stoves and great kettles and pots. A number of cooks were in charge, and the boiling soup smelled good enough to eat!
Three zig-zag trenches led from the cook house and First Aid Station to the second line of trenches.
Here was a repetition of the first line trench, machine guns and all. Back of it stretched a line of snipers' trenches, and behind them another barbed wire entanglement. A tunnel led under this; several of them in fact, and large enough to permit the passage of a number of men at the same time. This was arranged in case the line was pushed back by the advancing enemy.
When Zaidos had arrived at this point in his drawing, his paper gave out, and he was obliged to write the rest on the back of the sheet.
"You will see, fellows," he wrote, "just how the second trench is laid out by looking at the first. Back of the barbed wire and the observation trenches come a lot of connecting trenches again. These are not laid out in exactly the same direction as the first group, of course, but are generally the same. Instead of a shelter for thirty men, there is a shelter for one hundred thirty men. The cook house is much larger, and the First Aid Station is really a sort of hospital, where the men can be placed until they are taken back to the regular field hospital which is back of the third trench, four hundred yards away. This makes the hospital proper pretty safe.
"The shelter for men in the third position holds three hundred men easily and the hospital is quite complete.
"You never saw such courageous fellows as these are. Just think, you chaps, kicking as you do over there about the feed and the beds and the barracks, what it is like to live underground against the bare earth!
"The men are never able to undress to sleep. Once in two weeks each man has a bath, which he has to take in two minutes. He is then given a complete set of new underwear. The men spend four days in the trenches, almost always under fire night and day. There has been no firing since we struck the place, but there is going to be a bad time soon, they say. And then the noise is perfectly deafening, they tell me.