while. Then a third joined in, like some distant canary answering its
mates. The first two stopped and left it trilling along by itself,
catching occasionally like a motor-car engine that misfires, until it,
too, stuttered into silence. "Some poor devils being killed, I
suppose," you think to yourself, "suppose they've seen a patrol out in
front of the lines, or a party digging in the open somewhere behind the
trenches." You can't help crediting the Germans--at first, when you come
to this place as a stranger--with being much more deadly than the Turks
both with their machine-guns and their artillery. But you soon learn
that it is by no means necessary that anyone is dying when you hear
their machine-guns sing a chorus. They may chatter away for a whole
night and nobody be in the least the worse for it. Their artillery can
throw two or three hundred shells, or even more, into one of its various
targets, not once but many times, and only a man or two be wounded;
sometimes no one at all. War is alike in that respect all the world
over, apparently; which is comforting.

Presently the road ends and the long sap begins. You plunge into the
dark winding alley much as into some old city's ugly by-lane. It is
Centennial Avenue. There is room in it to pass another man even when he
is carrying a shoulderful of timber. But you must be careful when you do
pass him, or one of you will find yourself waist deep in mud. I have
said before that you do not walk on the bottom of the trench as you did
in Gallipoli, but on a narrow wooden causeway not unlike the bridge on
which ducks wander down from the henhouse to the yard--colloquially
known as the "duck-boards." The days have probably passed when a man
could be drowned in the mud of a communication trench. But it is always
unpleasant to step off the duck-boards in wet weather. Seeing that the
enemy may have fixed rifles trained on you at any bend of the trench, it
is unwise to carry a light; and in a dark night and an unaccustomed