ger zone.

The engagement was not over yet. It had been raging with varying
intensity for almost a week, had resulted in a considerable advance of
the British line, and had now resolved itself into a spasmodic series
of struggles on the one side to 'make good' the captured ground and
steal a few more yards, if possible; on the other, to strengthen the
defence against further attacks and to make the captured trenches
untenable.

But the struggle now was to the Regiment coming out a matter of almost
outside interest, an interest reduced nearly to the level of the
newspaper readers' at home, something to read or hear and talk about in
the intervals of eating and drinking, of work and amusement and sleep
and the ordinary incidents of daily life. Except, of course, that the
Regiment always had at the back of this casual interest the more
personal one that if affairs went badly their routine existence 'in
reserve' might be rudely interrupted and they might be hurried back and
flung again into the fight.

But that was unlikely, and meantime there were still stray shells and
bullets to be dodged, the rifles and kits were blasphemously heavy, and
it was most blasphemously hot. The men were occupied enough in picking
their steps in the broken ground, in their plodding, laborious
progress, above all in paying heed to the order constantly passing back
to 'keep low,' but they were still able to note with a sort of
professional interest the damage done to the countryside. A
'small-holding' cottage between the trenches had been shelled and set
on fire, and was gutted to the four bare, blackened walls. The ground
about it still showed in the little squares and oblongs that had
divided the different cultivations, but the difference now was merely
of various weeds and rank growths, and the ground was thickly pitted
with shell-holes. A length of road was gridironed with deep and
laboriously dug trenches, and of the poplars that ran along its edge
some were broken off in jagged stumps, some stood with stems as
straight and bare as telegraph poles, or half cut through and collapsed
like a half-shut knife or an inverted V, with their heads in the dust;
others were left with heads snapped off and dangling in grey withered
leaves, or with branches glinting white splinters and stripped naked,
as in the dead of winter. In an orchard the fruit trees were smashed,
uprooted, heaped pell-mell in a tangle of broken branches, bare twisted
t