ct all the world
over, apparently; which is comforting.

Presently the road ends and the long sap begins. You plunge into the
dark winding alley much as into some old city's ugly by-lane. It is
Centennial Avenue. There is room in it to pass another man even when he
is carrying a shoulderful of timber. But you must be careful when you do
pass him, or one of you will find yourself waist deep in mud. I have
said before that you do not walk on the bottom of the trench as you did
in Gallipoli, but on a narrow wooden causeway not unlike the bridge on
which ducks wander down from the henhouse to the yard--colloquially
known as the "duck-boards." The days have probably passed when a man
could be drowned in the mud of a communication trench. But it is always
unpleasant to step off the duck-boards in wet weather. Seeing that the
enemy may have fixed rifles trained on you at any bend of the trench, it
is unwise to carry a light; and in a dark night and an unaccustomed
trench you are almost sure to flounder.

A party of men loaded with new duck-boards is blocked ahead of you. As
you stand there talking to another wayfarer and waiting for the unknown
obstacle to move, a bullet flicks off the parapet a few feet away. It
was at least a foot above the man's head and was clearly fired from some
rifle laid on the trench during the daytime. Every now and then the
parapet on one side becomes dense black against a dazzling white sky,
and the trench wall on the other side becomes a glaring white background
on which the shadow of your own head and shoulders sail slowly past you
in inky black silhouette. The sharp-cut shadow gradually rises up the
white trench wall, and all is black again until the enemy throws
another flare.

As you talk there comes suddenly over the flats on your left a brilliant
yellow flicker and a musical whine: "Whine--bang, whine--bang,
whine--bang, whine--bang," just like that spoken very quickly.

"That's right over the working party in Westminster Abbey," says the
last man in the procession. "Some bally fool lit a pipe, I suppose."

The man next him reckons it was about Lower George Street that got it
that time. "They been registerin' that place all day on an' off," he
says.

There was just that one swift salvo, and nothing more. Presently, when
the procession moved on, we came across men who had a shower of earth
thrown down their backs by the burst of those shells. Just one isolated
salvo in the night on one