Imperial Valley press., 1915-03-22
(By Phil RAIDER
written for the United press)

tBy Phll Kadcrf
(Written for the United Pressl
/ copyrighted, 1915, by tbe United
PresS)
London, March 3.--Ilow does It feel
10 live in the trenches?
Here's a little recipe by which yoG
can find out. Take a cold, damn cell
lar; flood it with from , 10 6 inches
of almost ice-cold mud. At height
Of feet from the floor stretch
tangle of wires. Turn an electric
current into the wires and let the volt
age be so heavy that every wire will
be as deadly as a third rail. Now
blow out the light, crawl 10 the mid.
die of the floor in the darkness and
stand erect, trusting to blind luck
that your head won't touch the wire.
These charged wires in the dark
ness represent the Invisible deadly
trails of the bullets that fly over
your head in the trenches. Of course
if you want to be safe in the cellal
you can keep your head down, but il
you did that in the trenches YOU
would be neglecting your duty. 1t
is your duty, for instance, to fire 3
bullets an hour, if you are on guard.
Watchful eyes OF officers will discov-
er whether you are shooting into the
air or whether you are firing with
your aim fixed on the enenys
trenches. And good sentinel is
supposed to raise his head above the
trenches every 10 minutes to sea what
. is going on.
; Victor Chapman, a Harvard gradu-
ate who was with me in the trenches,
, was something of philosopher, and
he used to say;
THE danger of Icing shot is not
great. The trail OF a bullet is very
small; the space around you, as COM
pared with the trail of a bullet, is as
100000 to | so the chances of be-
ing hit are in that same proportion"
But it didn't work out with Chap
man at all. He was hit the very first
day, in the arm.
The trenches are an underground
city filled with unspeakably dirty
citizens. They are in a tangle Of
sunken streets. The houses are holes
in the earth. The streets in my dis
trict converged in one place, which the
Americans called "Longacre Square"
into a very exclusive triangle, where
all the officers lived. There are street
signs, too, telling how to reach this
or that officers hole in the ground
And now and then there are danger
signs telling the passerby to keep his
head low.
1t was 2-mile journey from our
front to the rear trench and on this
journey one would meet and pass
many men. The soldiers always
j speak to each other at such meetings,
Z just as two men pass the time of day
ON a country road.
\ The lieutenant is practically the
I mayor of this underground city, the
\ sergeants might be likened to police
4 men.
7 There is trading under way too. To-
\ bacco is the money and the storekeep-
er is the chap who, at any certain
I time, has more of one thing than he
wants or less Of another than he
needs. Thus every man is village
4 storekeeper at one time or another.
Do you want to go TO a music hall?
There is sure to be a certain dugout
somewhere in the trenches were mu-
sica men gather. In our trench
George Ullard, negro from Calves
h ton, Tex, played wonderfully on a
Il banjo with one string, and in our mud
hut there was the music of mouth or
-gans, an accordion and Ullard's ban
\ 10 every night. The German trench
was only 45 feet away from us at
this point and they used to listen to
us every evening and cheer us.
There are many little tasks with
which the citizens of this town busy
! themselves. You'll see a man clean
ing his rifle; another will be refloor-
ing his hut with straw; another will
4 be rigging a bottle on n stick for
1 the Germans to shoot at. Two OF
4 three may be preparing a dummy fig
ure for a German target; another
may be marking his initials on the
= side of the trench by sticking his
empty cartridge shells into the earth.
There are artists, too, in this
strange colony. Almost every dav
there is wooden tombstone or two to
prepare. 1t was my duty to decorate
tombstones with some sort of design
and a Belgian named Durmine always
did the lettering. You might find us
any forenoon working away with a
redhot poker, burning names and dec
orations on a wooden cross which he
had constructed out of any pieces Of
i wood he could find.
There were Americans in my ma
. chine gun squad of l6 men-Eugene
i Jacobs, who still owns butcher shop
in Pawtucket, r. l.; Victor Chapman
of New York, and myself-and on
Thanksgiving day we arranged feast
in our hut. Jose Amere, an Argen-
tinian, heard that we had picked up
some stray chickens and had shot a
goose, and that Jacobs was cooking
them for some sort of a banquet, and
he invited himself saying:
81 know what Thanksgiving day is,
and Pm South American, so | think
| ought to come"
The other IL men in the squad
didn't know what Thanksgiving day
was. but they knew chicken when they
4 u.