In many places German and Allies' trenches almost touched each other. The first two weeks at the Aisne were one continual downpour, and the foundation of that ground is chalk. On the sides of the plateau of Craonne, after two weeks' rain, the chalky mud seemed bottomless. "It filled the ears and eyes and throats of our men," wrote John Buchan, "it plastered their clothing and mingled generously with their diet. Their grandfathers, who had been at Sebastopol, could have told them something about mud; but even after India and South Africa, the mire of the Aisne seemed a grievous affliction." The fighting was constant, the nervous strain exhausting, and the cold and wet were even harder to bear. There had as yet been no time to build trenches with all conveniences, such as the Germans possessed on the crest of the ridge, and the trenches of the Allies were a chilled inferno of woe.
A stretch of waste ground lay between the trenches, and often for days at a time the fire was too heavy to rescue the wounded or bring in the dead. The men in the trenches, on either side, were compelled to hear the groans of the wounded, lying in the open day after day, until exhaustion, cold and pain brought them a merciful release. In letters more than one soldier declared that the hardest thing to bear was to hear a fellow comrade shrieking or groaning in agony a few steps away for hours--even days at a time--and to be able to do nothing to help. The stench from the unburied bodies was so great that officially all the tobacco for the whole battle front was commandeered and sent to the trenches under the plateau of Craonne and on the hill to the westward, where the British First Army Corps was placed. Such, for the two weeks between September 22, 1914, and October 6, 1914, was the trench warfare during the second phase of the battle of the Aisne, a condition never after repeated in the war, for such a feat as the crossing of the Aisne could scarcely be duplicated. It was gallant, it was magnificent, and it was costly--the British casualty list for September 12 to October 6, 1914, being, killed, wounded and missing, 561 officers and 12,980 men--but it was useless, and only served to give the Allies a temporary base whereby General Foch was successful in checking the German attempt to capture the Rheims-Verdun railway. It was a victory of bravery, but not a victory of result.