ave read but have never had the opportunity of seeing. No mere verbal
description would suffice to describe them. Every minute the murderous
crack of rifles and the whir of machine-guns rang out. Death hovered all
round. In front the German rifles, above the bursting shrapnel, each
shell scattering its four hundred odd leaden bullets far and wide,
killing or wounding any unfortunate man who happened to be in the way.

The trenches looked as if a giant cataclysm of Nature had taken place.
The whole earth had been upheaved, and in each of the mud-hills men had
burrowed innumerable paths, seven feet deep. It was hard to distinguish
men from mud. The former were literally caked from head to foot with the
latter. I filmed the men at work. There were several snipers calmly
smoking their cigarettes and taking careful aim at the enemy.

Crack--crack--crack--simultaneously.

"Sure, sir," remarked one burly Irish Guardsman, "and he'll never bob
his ---- head up any more. It's him I've been afther this several
hours!" And as coolly as if he had been at a rifle range at home, the
man discharged the empty cartridge-case and stood with his rifle,
motionless as a rock, his eyes like those of an eagle.

All this time it was raining hard. I worked my way along the
never-ending traverses. Coming upon a mount of sandbags, I enquired of
an officer present the nature and cause of its formation. He bade me
follow him. At one corner a narrow, downward path came into view.
Trudging after him, I entered this strange shelter. Inside it was quite
dark, but in a few seconds, when my eyes had got used to the conditions,
I observed a hole in the centre of the floor about five feet square.

Peering over the edge, I saw that the shaft was about _twenty-five feet
deep_, and that there was a light at the bottom. It then dawned upon me
what it really was. It was a mine-shaft. At the bottom, men worked at
their deadly occupation, burrowing at right angles under our own
trenches (under "No Man's Land") and under the German lines. They laid
their mines, and at the appointed time exploded them, thus causing a
great amount of damage to the enemy's parapets and trenches, and killing
large numbers of the occupants.

Retracing my steps, I fixed the camera up and filmed the men entering
the mines and others bringing up the excavated earth in sandbags and
placing them on the outside of the barricade. Then I paused to film the
men at work upon a trench road. T