under an earth-covered tarpaulin, and a weary man is doing the toilet of
a machine gun. We go on to a shallow trench in which we must stoop, and
which has been badly knocked about.... Here we have to stop. The road to
Berlin is not opened up beyond this point.

My companion on this excursion is a man I have admired for years and
never met until I came out to see the war, a fellow writer. He is a
journalist let loose. Two-thirds of the junior British officers I met
on this journey were really not "army men" at all. One finds that the
apparent subaltern is really a musician, or a musical critic, or an
Egyptologist, or a solicitor, or a cloth manufacturer, or a writer. At
the outbreak of the war my guide dyed his hair to conceal its tell-tale
silver, and having been laughed to scorn by the ordinary recruiting
people, enlisted in the sportsmen's battalion. He was wounded, and then
the authorities discovered that he was likely to be of more use with a
commission and drew him, in spite of considerable resistance, out of the
firing line. To which he always returns whenever he can get a visitor
to take with him as an excuse. He now stood up, fairly high and clear,
explaining casually that the Germans were no longer firing, and showed
me the points of interest.

I had come right up to No Man's Land at last. It was under my chin. The
skyline, the last skyline before the British could look down on Bapaume,
showed a mangy wood and a ruined village, crouching under repeated
gobbings of British shrapnel. "They've got a battery just there, and
we're making it uncomfortable." No Man's Land itself is a weedy space
broken up by shell craters, with very little barbed wire in front of us
and very little in front of the Germans. "They've got snipers in most of
the craters, and you see them at twilight hopping about from one to the
other." We have very little wire because we don't mean to stay for very