on the advance. A false move, and his
overstrained nerves may send the carbine to his shoulder.

We walked just behind the trenches in the moonlight for a mile. No one
said anything. The wind was icy. Across the railroad embankment it
chopped the inundation into small crested waves. Only by putting one's
head down was it possible to battle ahead. From Dixmude came the
intermittent red flashes of guns. But the trenches beside us were
entirely silent.

At the end of a mile we stopped. The road turned abruptly to the right
and crossed the railroad embankment, and at this crossing was the ruin
of what had been the House of the Barrier, where in peaceful times the
crossing tender lived.

It had been almost destroyed. The side toward the German lines was
indeed a ruin, but one room was fairly whole. However, the door had
been shot away. To enter, it was necessary to lift away an
extemporised one of planks roughly nailed together, which leaned
against the aperture.

The moving of the door showed more firelight, and a very small, shaded
and smoky lamp on a stand. There were officers here again. The little
house is slightly in front of the advanced trenches, and once inside
it was possible to realise its exposed position. Standing as it does
on the elevation of the railroad, it is constantly under fire. It is
surrounded by barbed wire and flanked by trenches in which are
_mitrailleuses_.

The walls were full of shell holes, stuffed with sacks of straw or
boarded over. What had been windows were now jagged openings,
similarly closed. The wind came through steadily, smoking the chimney
of the lamp and making the flame flicker.

There was one chair.

I wish I could go farther. I wish I could say that shells were
bursting overhead, and that I sat calmly in the one chair and made
notes. I sat, true enough, but I sat because I was tired and my feet
were wet. And instead of making notes I examined my new six-guinea
silk rubber rain cape for barbed-wire tears. Not a shell came near.
The German battery across had ceased firing at dusk that evening, and
was playing pinochle four hundred yards away across the inundation.
The snipers were writing letters home.

It is true that any time an artilleryman might lose a game and go out
and fire a gun to vent his spleen or to keep his hand in. And the
snipers might begin to notice that the rain was over, and that there
was suspicious activity at the House of the Barrier. And, to take a