y were firing at them, or at some sign of moving troops, or
at a working party if there were any; and I do not know now. As we came
back that way in the afternoon there was more shelling farther along.
The woman in the doorway simply turned her head in its direction for a
moment, and so did a younger woman who came to the doorway behind her.
Then they turned to the baby again.

Through the trees one could see that the farmhouses and cottages farther
on had mostly been battered and broken. There was a road running at a
little distance, and every roof and wall in it had been shattered. There
was a feverish, insane disorder about the little groups of buildings
there, all shattered, burnt and gaping, like the tangled nightmare of
desolation on the morning after a great city fire. Farther still was
open country again, where long communication trenches began to run
through the fields--but you could see none of this from where we stood.
Only in the distant hedgerows, perhaps, we might have noticed, if we had
looked for it, an occasional broken tree trunk--snapped off short or
broken down at a sharp angle by shell fire.

Those distant trees would be growing over our firing line--or the
German.

It is a more beautiful country than any we saw in Gallipoli, in spite of
its waterlogged ditches and the rain which had fallen miserably almost
every day since we arrived. There is green grass up to within a few
yards of the filthy mud of the front trenches; and not a hinterland of
powdered white earth which was all we had at Anzac or at Helles. Here
you have hedgerows just bursting into spring, and green grass, which on
a fine day fairly tempts you to lie on it if you are far enough away
from the lines. The country is flat and you see no sign of the enemy's
trenches, or your own--the hedgerows shut them out at half a mile as
completely as if they did not exist.

[Illustration: "AN OCCASIONAL BROKEN TREE-TRUNK--SNAPPED OFF SHORT, OR
BROKEN DOWN AT A SHARP ANGLE, BY SHELL FIRE"]

[Illustration: NO MAN'S LAND The barrier which stretches from Belgium to
the Swiss border and which not the millions of Rockefeller could enable
him to cross]

But you realise, when you have been in that country for a little while,
that you have eyes upon you all the time--you are being watched as
you have never been watched in your life before. You move along the
country road as you would walk along the roads about your own home,
until, sooner or later, t