usual two or three, through those green fields by those green hedgerows
when there is a sharp whiz and a crash, and a shrapnel shell from a
German seventy-seven (their field gun) bursts ten yards behind you. You
are standing at a corner studying a map, and you notice that a working
party is passing the corner frequently on some duty or another. You were
barely aware that there was a house near you.

Twenty-four hours later you hear that that house was levelled to the
ground next morning--a shrapnel shell on each side of it to get the
range--a high explosive into it to burst it up--and an incendiary shell
to burn the rubbish; and one more French family is homeless.

It takes you some time to realise that it was _you_ who burnt that
house--you and that working party which moved past the cross-roads so
often. Somebody must have seen you when the shell burst alongside that
hedge. Somebody must have been watching you all the time when you were
loitering with your map at that corner. Somebody, at any rate, must have
been marking down from the distance everything that happened at those
cross-roads. Somebody in the landscape is clearly watching you all the
while. And then for the first time you recall that those grey trees in
the distance must be behind the German lines; that distant roof and
chimney notched against a background of scrub is in German ground; the
pretty blue hill against which the willows in the plain show out like a
row of railway sleepers is cut off from you by a barrier deeper than the
Atlantic--the German trenches; and that from all yonder landscape, which
moves behind the screen of nearer trees as you walk, eyes are watching
for you all day long; telescopes are glaring at you; brains behind the
telescopes are patiently reconstructing, from every movement in our
roads or on our fields, the method of our life, studying us as a
naturalist watches his ants under a glass case.