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all new ways to see us arrive together at the school.
    They shouted, “Sarah's got a boyfriend!” And, “Johnny's going to get maaaa-ried!”
    In class, Mr. Tuttle singled me out for his questions about history and geography. He glowed when I knew the answers and coached me when I didn't, but I wished he would just leave me alone. I didn't want the boys to think that he liked me or, worse, to think I was smart.
    When school finally ended, I was first out the door. I ran all the way home, frightened the boys would chase me.

C HAPTER 6
    November 3, 1914
    Dearest Johnny,
    I have to admit that the front is not quite what I'd expected. To call the line a trench is rather kind. It's really just a ditch scraped through the mud, filled to my ankles with foul, brown water. All the dirt is piled behind us and before us, at the edge of a no-man's-land that's even worse in daylight than it is in darkness. Flat, black, broken by shells, it is divided by coils of barbed wire that glisten in the sun, going on and on as far as I can see.
    Scattered across this no-man's-land lie men who seem to be sleeping, all flung about in the mud. A leg pokes up from here, a head from there. Yet not one of them moves, not from hour to hour or day to day, until the wind breathes across them, and their tattered clothes flap mournfully. In a funny way, I think of them as survivors, the last of the great armies that battled back and forth in the days and weeks before I came. The Huns attacked repeatedly all along this sector, and twice they captured the trench where I sit, only to be driven back within an hour or two. So the ground has been churnedand churned again, until all sorts of things are buried in it now.
    The smell, I have to tell you, is atrocious. And the rats can give you shivers. We have to share the trench with an army of them, a gruesome brown army that spends the days huddled in our hiding holes, in our kits and blankets. When darkness comes, they go swarming over the top to forage through the night across that dreadful no-man's-land that haunts my every dream.
    The blessing is that I seldom see it. I'd rather thought that we would be fighting one long battle. That when we weren't fighting we might be playing billiards in the dugouts, or singing songs by firesides. But we stand with our guns in the morning, and again in the evening, waiting for the Huns that are bound to come again. And the rest of the time we live like moles, almost blindly in the mud. From dawn to dusk we see nothing but mud, and the strip of sky above us.
    Old Fritz is always ready to pick off any man who shows his head, and he'll sometimes blast away at nothing at all with his rifles and machine guns. We learn rather quickly to listen for the shells from his big guns and judge—by the sound they make—whether we should duck our heads or get up and try to dodge them. Some days he fairly keeps us hopping.
    But other days are rather peaceful. We spend hours talking about our families and our homes. Some of the lads are forever writing letters, and others play endless games of cards. There's always a little crowd that comes to watch me whittle.
    Here's a pair of funny fellows, enclosed, to add to yourarmy. One is catching a bit of rest while he can. In a moment, someone will kick him awake and send him to work with a shovel. The other is a different sort. Every morning this chap brings up our breakfast in big tin pots. Others come with him to carry our mail, and they take away the letters that we've just written. It's the high point of the day, hot food and letters straight from England. Right now, the chap beside me is reading yesterday's
Times!
    It's a funny thing, but the war stops at breakfast. Fritz doesn't shoot at us, and we don't shoot at him. If the wind is right, we can even smell his bacon cooking. This morning I tried to pitch a biscuit to him. But I don't think it reached the wire.
    All my love, forever,
    Dad
    I was disappointed by the first figure that I