of innumerable wagons
carrying up over endless cobble stones the food and ammunition for
another day.

A cart clattered past from the front with the jingle of trace chains and
hammer of metal tyres upon stones. So one driver had finished his job
for the night. Farther on was a sound of voices and a chink of spades;
some way to our left across a field we can make out dark figures--they
may be stunted willows along the far hedge, or they may be a working
party going up, with their spades and picks over their shoulders, to
one of those jobs which in this flat country can only be done by night.

Twenty miles behind the lines, or more, you can see every night along
the horizon in front of you a constant low flicker of light--the flares
thrown up by both sides over the long ribbon of No Man's Land--the
ribbon which straggles without a break from one end of France to the
other. We were getting very close to that barrier now--within a couple
of miles of it; and the pure white stars of these glorified Roman
candles were describing graceful curves behind a fretwork of trees an
inch or two above the horizon. Every five or six seconds a rifle cracked
somewhere along the line--very different from the ceaseless pecking of
Gallipoli. Then a distant German machine-gun started its sprint,
stumbled, went on again, tripped again. A second machine-gun farther
down the line caught it up, and the two ran along in perfect step for a
while. Then a third joined in, like some distant canary answering its
mates. The first two stopped and left it trilling along by itself,
catching occasionally like a motor-car engine that misfires, until it,
too, stuttered into silence. "Some poor devils being killed, I
suppose," you think to yourself, "suppose they've seen a patrol out in
front of the lines, or a party digging in the open somewhere behind the
trenches." You can't help crediting the Germans--at first, when you come
to this place as a stranger--with being much more deadly than the Turks
both with their machine-guns and their artillery. But you soon learn
that it is by no means necessary that anyone is dying when you hear
their machine-guns sing a chorus. They may chatter away for a whole
night and nobody be in the least the worse for it. Their artillery can
throw two or three hundred shells, or even more, into one of its various
targets, not once but many times, and only a man or two be wounded;
sometimes no one at all. War is alike in that respe