ing
cathedral, and who later, while carrying French wounded from the field
of battle, was himself hit three times, and of his wounds died?

I hinted to the lieutenant that the cathedral would remain for some
time, but that the trenches would soon be ploughed into turnip-beds.

So, we moved toward the trenches. The officer commanding them lived in
what he described as the deck of a battleship sunk underground. It was a
happy simile. He had his conning-tower, in which, with a telescope
through a slit in a steel plate, he could sweep the countryside. He had
a fire-control station, executive offices, wardroom, cook's galley, his
own cabin, equipped with telephones, electric lights, and running water.
There was a carpet on the floor, a gay coverlet on the four-poster bed,
photographs on his dressing-table, and flowers. All of these were buried
deep underground. A puzzling detail was a perfectly good brass lock and
key on his door. I asked if it were to keep out shells or burglars. And
he explained that the door with the lock in tact had been blown off its
hinges in a house of which no part was now standing. He had borrowed it,
as he had borrowed everything else in the subterranean war-ship, from
the near-by ruins.

He was an extremely light-hearted and courteous host, but he frowned
suspiciously when he asked if I knew a correspondent named Senator
Albert Beveridge. I hastily repudiated Beveridge. I knew him not, I
said, as a correspondent, but as a politician who possibly had high
hopes of the German vote. "He dined with us," said the colonel, "and
then wrote against France." I suggested it was at their own risk if they
welcomed those who already had been with the Germans, and who had been
received by the German Emperor. This is no war for neutrals.

Then began a walk of over a mile through an open drain. The walls were
of chalk as hard as flint. Unlike the mud trenches in Artois, there were
no slides to block the miniature canal. It was as firm and compact as a
whitewashed stone cell. From the main drain on either side ran other
drains, cul-de-sacs, cellars, trap-doors, and ambushes. Overhead hung
balls of barbed-wire that, should the French troops withdraw, could be
dropped and so block the trench behind them. If you raised your head
they playfully snatched off your cap. It was like ducking under
innumerable bridges of live wires.

The drain opened at last into a wrecked town. Its ruins were complete.
It made Pompeii