Into the morass the New Zealanders plunged boldly, only to find that they were quickly up to their belts in mud and water. When a man stumbled into a shell-hole, he simply disappeared, until, rising to the surface, he managed to scramble out with the aid of a more fortunate chum. Here and there huge spurts of mud and water leapt towards the rainy sky as German shells burst indiscriminately in the swollen stream; while everywhere the slowly-flowing water was flecked with little spurts of spray as the machine-gun bullets ricochetted from the surface. When a man was hit when crossing that forbidding morass it generally meant death to him--death by suffocation in the pestilent mud of Flanders.