have been easy meat if they had rushed us.

We made our way back slowly, and eventually caught the gleam of
steel helmets. They were British. We had stumbled upon our left
sector. We found out then that the line curved and that instead of
the left sector being directly to the left of ours--the center--it
was to the left and to the rear. Also there was a telephone wire
running from one to the other. We reported and made our way back to
the center in about five minutes by feeling along the wire. That
was our method afterwards, and the patrol was cushy for us.




CHAPTER VII

FASCINATION OF PATROL WORK


I want to say a word right here about patrol work in general,
because for some reason it fascinated me and was my favorite game.

If you should be fortunate--or unfortunate enough, as the case
might be--to be squatting in a front-line trench this fine morning
and looking through a periscope, you wouldn't see much. Just over
the top, not more than twenty feet away, would be your barbed-wire
entanglements, a thick network of wire stretched on iron posts
nearly waist high, and perhaps twelve or fifteen feet across. Then
there would be an intervening stretch of from fifty to one hundred
fifty yards of No Man's Land, a tortured, torn expanse of muddy