[Illustration: THE BARELY RECOGNISABLE REMAINS OF A TRENCH]

One picked the likeliest line, and was ploughing along it, when a
bullet hissed not far away. It did not seem probable that there were
Germans in the landscape. One looked for another cause. Away to one
side, against the skyline, one had a momentary glimpse of three or four
Australians going along, bent low, making for some advanced position. It
must be some stray bullet meant for them. Then another bullet hissed.

So out on that brown hill-side, in some unrecognisable shell-hole
trench, the enemy must still have been holding on. It was a case for
keeping low where there was cover and making the best speed where there
was not; and the end of the journey was soon reached.

Now that is a country in which I, to whom it was a rare adventure, found
Australians living, working, moving as if it were their own back yard.
In that country it is often difficult, with the best will in the world,
to tell a trench when you come to it. One of the problems of the modern
battle is that, when men are given a trench to take, it is sometimes
impossible to recognise that trench when they arrive at it. The stretch
in front of the lines is a sea of red earth, in which you may notice,
here or there, the protruding timber of some old German gun position
with its wickerwork shell-covers around it--the whole looking like a
broken fish basket awash in a muddy estuary. An officer crawled out to
some of this jetsam the other day, and, putting up his head from the
wreckage, found nothing in the horizon except one solitary figure
standing about two hundred yards in front of him; and it was a German.

Imagine the factory hand from Saxony set down to do outpost duty in this
sort of wilderness. I spoke the other day to a little tailor or