organised these chiefly at night and dug the steep ditches sideways to
join up into continuous trenches. Now they were pushing forward saps
into No Man's Land, linking them across, and so continually creeping
nearer to the enemy and a practicable jumping-off place for an attack.
(It has been made since; the village at which I peeped was in our hands
a week later.) These trenches were dug into a sort of yellowish sandy
clay; the dug-outs were mere holes in the earth that fell in upon the
clumsy; hardly any timber had been got up the line; a storm might flood
them at any time a couple of feet deep and begin to wash the sides.
Overnight they had been "strafed" and there had been a number of
casualties; there were smashed rifles about and a smashed-up machine gun
emplacement, and the men were dog-tired and many of them sleeping like
logs, half buried in clay. Some slept on the firing steps. As one
went along one became aware ever and again of two or three pairs of
clay-yellow feet sticking out of a clay hole, and peering down one
saw the shapes of men like rudely modelled earthen images of soldiers,
motionless in the cave.

I came round the corner upon a youngster with an intelligent face and
steady eyes sitting up on the firing step, awake and thinking. We looked
at one another. There are moments when mind leaps to mind. It is natural
for the man in the trenches suddenly confronted by so rare a beast as
a middle-aged civilian with an enquiring expression, to feel oneself
something of a spectacle and something generalised. It is natural for
the civilian to look rather in the vein of saying, "Well, how do you
take it?" As I pushed past him we nodded slightly with an effect of
mutual understanding. And we said with our nods just exactly what
General Joffre had said with his horizontal gestures of the hand and
what the King of Italy conveyed by his friendly manner; we said to each
other that here was the trouble those Germans had brought upon us and