o safety. In one room I entered
some bucolic wag had clothed a bust of Venus in a lance-corporal's cap
and field-service jacket, and affixed a box-respirator in the alert
position. We made the mess in what had been the nursery, and the
adjutant and myself slept in bunks off an elaborately mined passage, in
making which British tunnellers had worked so hard that cracks showed
in the wall above, and the whole wing appeared undecided whether or not
to sink. We learned that there were two schools of opinion regarding
the safety of the passage. The Engineers of one Division thought the
wing would not subside; some equally competent Engineers shook their
heads and said no civil authority would dream of passing the passage as
safe. The adjutant and myself relied upon the optimists; at any rate,
we should be safe from the Hun gunners, who treated the chateau as one
of their datum points.

We were relieving an Army Field Artillery brigade commanded by a
well-known scientific gunner, and on the afternoon that we arrived he
took the colonel and myself on an explanatory tour of the battery
positions and the "O.P.'s." They were leaving their guns in position
for us to use. There was a Corps standing order that steel helmets
should be worn and box-respirators kept in the alert position in this
part of the line. So first we girded up ourselves in compliance with
orders. Then our guide made us walk in single file and keep close to
the houses as we walked along the main street. "He has a beautiful view
of the chateau gates and can see movement in the centre of the road,"
he informed us.

It was a terribly battered village. The church tower had been knocked
out of shape. Roofs that had escaped being smashed in were threadbare,
or seemed to be slipping off skeleton houses. Mutilated telegraph-poles
and broken straggly wires, evil-smelling pools of water, scattered
bricks, torn roadways, and walls blackened and scarred by bomb and
shell, completed a scene of mournfulness and desolation. We passed one
corner house on the shutters of which some "infanteers" had chalked the
inviting saucy sign, "Ben Jonson's Cafe." Then we struck across a
fast-ripening wheat-field and put up a mother partridge who was
agonised with fear lest we should discover her young ones. "It will be
a pity if these crops can't be gathered in," remarked our colonel. To
right and left of us, and beyond the ruined village that lay
immediately in front, were yellow fields