the ruins of a house, may run up out of a ditch; may be cut into a
rise of ground sheltered under a hill, and is built in many ways by
many men. As to who is the best builder of trenches there can be
little doubt, and any British soldier would probably admit that for
painstaking work and excellence of construction there are few to rival
Von Hindenburg. His Hindenburg line is a model of neatness and
comfort, and it would be only a very ungrateful British soldier who
would deny it.

You come to the trenches out of strangely wasted lands, you come
perhaps to a wood in an agony of contortions, black, branchless,
sepulchral trees, and then no more trees at all. The country after
that is still called Picardy or Belgium, still has its old name on the
map as though it smiled there yet, sheltering cities and hamlet and
radiant with orchards and gardens, but the country named Belgium -- or
whatever it be -- is all gone away, and there stretches for miles
instead one of the world's great deserts, a thing to take its place no
longer with smiling lands, but with Sahara, Gobi, Kalahari, and the
Karoo; not to be thought of as Picardy, but more suitably to be named
the Desert of Wilhelm. Through these sad lands one goes to come to the
trenches. Overhead floats until it is chased away an aëroplane with
little black crosses, that you can scarcely see at his respectful
height, peering to see what more harm may be done in the desolation
and ruin. Little flashes sparkle near him, white puffs spread out
round the flashes: and he goes, and our airmen go away after him;
black puffs break out round our airmen. Up in the sky you hear a faint
tap-tapping. They have got their machine guns working.

You see many things there that are unusual in deserts: a good road, a
railway, perhaps a motor bus; you see what was obviously once a