re up
and they were marched back to billets that they were able to cultivate
that somewhat exclusive society. Their trenches were like the suburbs,
they were faintly conscious that people lived in the next street, but
they never saw them. Their neighbours were as self-contained and silent
as themselves, except when their look-outs or machine-guns became
loquacious. Then they too became eloquent, and the whole line talked
freely at the Germans 200 yards away. By day the men slept heavily on
straw in hollows under the parapet, supported with crates and sprinkled
with chloride of lime; by night they were out at the listening posts,
in the sap-heads, or behind the parapet, with their eyes glued to the
field of yellow mustard in front of us. They had watched that field for
three months. They knew every blade of grass therein. No experimental
agriculturist ever studied his lucerne and sainfoin as they have studied
the grasses of that field. They have watched it from winter to spring;
they have seen the lesser celandine give way to pink clover and sorrel,
and the grass shoot up from an inch to a foot. They have, indeed, been
studying not botany but ethnology, searching for traces of that species
of primitive man known to anthropologists as the Hun. They have never
found him except once, when one of our look-outs saw something crawling
across that field about midnight and promptly emptied his magazine. In
the morning they saw a grey figure lying out in the open; the days
passed and the long grass sprang up and concealed it till nothing was
left to attest its obscene presence except a little cloud of black
flies. Their horizon is bounded by rows of sand-bags, and their interest
in those sand-bags is only equalled by their interest in the field in
front of them. Occasionally one of our men finds them more than usually
interesting. There is a loud report, the click of a bolt, and the
pungent smell of burnt cordite. Then all is still again.

The tangent-sight on the standard of their machine-gun is always at 200,
and they have not altered the range for three months. Occasionally at
night the N.C.O. seizes the traversing-handles, and with his thumb on
the button slowly sweeps that range of sand-bags, till the feed-block
sucks up the cartridge-belt like a chaff-cutter and the empty
cartridge-cases lie as thick round the tripod as acorns under an oak.
The Huns reply by taking a flashlight photograph of us with a calcium
flare, and the