an offensive front they have vertical sides of unsupported earth and
occasional soakaways for rain, covered by wooden gratings, and they go
on and on and on. At rare intervals they branch, and a notice board says
"To Regent Street," or "To Oxford Street," or some such lie. It is all
just trench. For a time you talk, but talking in single file soon palls.
You cease to talk, and trudge. A great number of telephone wires come
into the trench and cross and recross it. You cannot keep clear of them.
Your helmet pings against them and they try to remove it. Sometimes you
have to stop and crawl under wires. Then you wonder what the trench is
like in really wet weather. You hear a shell burst at no great distance.
You pass two pages of _The Strand Magazine._ Perhaps thirty yards on
you pass a cigarette end. After these sensational incidents the trench
quiets down again and continues to wind endlessly--just a sandy,
extremely narrow vertical walled trench. A giant crack.

At last you reach the front line trench. On an offensive sector it has
none of the architectural interest of first line trenches at such places
as Soissons or Arras. It was made a week or so ago by joining up shell
craters, and if all goes well we move into the German trench along by
the line of scraggy trees, at which we peep discreetly, to-morrow night.
We can peep discreetly because just at present our guns are putting
shrapnel over the enemy at the rate of about three shells a minute, the
puffs follow each other up and down the line, and no Germans are staring
out to see us.

The Germans "strafed" this trench overnight, and the men are tired and
sleepy. Our guns away behind us are doing their best now to give them
a rest by strafing the Germans. One or two men are in each forward sap
keeping a look out; the rest sleep, a motionless sleep, in the earthy
shelter pits that have been scooped out. One officer sits by a telephone