,
and said that every round had been observed fire.

Walking briskly--the colonel was the fittest man of forty-five I have
known--we mounted a slope of turnip-fields and fresh-ploughed land.
There was a plantation five hundred yards to right of us, and five
hundred yards to left of us; into the bigger one on the left two 5.9's
dropped as we came level with it. Splashes of newly thrown-up earth
behind tree-clumps, against banks and alongside hedges, showed the
short breast-high trenches, some six yards long, in which the infantry
had fought a few days before. Fifteen hundred yards away the clustering
trees of the great forest where the enemy lay broke darkly against the
horizon. "You see that row of tall straight trees in front of the
forest, to the right of the gabled house where the white flag is
flying," said the colonel, pulling out his glasses--"that's the present
front line." Three ponderous booms from that direction denoted trench
mortars at work.

We descended the other side of the slope, keeping alongside a hedge
that ran towards a red-roofed farm. In two separate places about three
yards of the hedge had been cut away. "Boche soldiering!" remarked the
colonel informatively. "Enabled him to look along both sides of the
hedge and guard against surprise when our infantry were coming up.

"We may as well call at Battalion Headquarters," he added when we
reached the farm. In a wide cellar, where breakfast had not yet been
cleared away, we came upon a lieutenant-colonel, twenty-four years of
age, receiving reports from his company commanders. Suave in manner,
clear-eyed, not hasty in making judgments, he had learnt most things to
be known about real war at Thiepval, Schwaben Redoubt, and other bloody
places where the Division had made history; wounded again in the August
advance, he had refused to be kept from these final phases. The
colonel and he understood each other. There was the point whether
liaison duties between infantry and artillery could be more usefully
conducted in the swift-changing individual fighting of recent days from
infantry brigade or from infantry battalion; there were conflicting
statements by junior officers upon short-shooting, and they required
sifting; a few words had to be said about the battalion's own stretch
of front and its own methods of harassing the enemy. A few crisp
questions and replies, all bearing upon realities, a smile or two, a
consultation of maps, and another portion o