with. But it is a great mistake to think it all foolishness. The most
methodical soldier in the world is behind those other sandbags, and he
doesn't do things without reason.

Farther on we came through a series of hovels, more like dog
kennels than the shelters of men, to the dark parapet where men
are always watching, watching, across a hundred yards or so of
green pasture, the dark mud parapet on the other side. Here and
there over a dug-out there fidgets a tiny toy aeroplane such as
children make, or a miniature windmill. The aeroplane propeller is
revolving slowly, tail away from the enemy, clicking and rattling as
it turns. "Just-a-perfect-night-for-gas"--that is what the aeroplane
propeller is saying.

Once only in the night there is a clatter opposite--one machine-gun
started it, then two together, then forty or fifty rifles. Perhaps they
think they saw a patrol. The Turks used to get precisely similar
nerve-storms on Russell's Top. Nobody even troubles to remark it. Dawn
breaks over the watching figures without one incident to report.

It is after the light has grown and become fixed that you will notice,
if you look carefully for it, a thin film of blue smoke floating upwards
from behind the sandbags on the other side of No Man's Land. Only a
hundred and fifty yards away from you the German cook must be fitting
his old browned and burned dixies and kerosene tins over their early
morning fire.

We had our early morning coffee, too. And as we walked homewards we
found that from a particular point we were looking straight at a distant
barn roof which is in German territory. Near it, towards his trenches,