and roared in flight. It was astonishing that
they were invisible. Sometimes the bottom of the mud of that
communication trench was close, and sometimes not; you knew when you
had tried. And as the parapets usually had dissolved at the more
dubious places, and I was told and heard that Fritz had machine guns
trained on them, I did not waste much time experimenting.

I found the firing-line, as one usually does, with surprise. There was
a barrier of sandbags, oozing grey slime, and below, in a sort of
little cave, with his body partly resting in a pool of water, a soldier
asleep. Just beyond was a figure so merged in the environment of
aqueous muck and slime that I did not see him till he moved, and his
boots squelched. He lifted a wet rag in the grey wall and got
surprisingly rapid with a rifle which was thrust through the hole and
went off; and then turned to look at us. "That fellow opposite is a
nuisance," said my officer. "He's always potting at this corner." "Yes,
sir," said the figure of mud, darkly louring under its tin hat, "but I
know where the blighter is now, and I'll get the beggar yet." With a
sudden recollection he then touched iron, and grinned.

Slithering above the ankles in well-worked paste, and leaning against a
wall of slime, I tried to find "the nuisance opposite" with a
periscope; but before me was only a tangle of rusty wire, a number of
raw holes in shabby green grass, some objects lying about which looked
like tailors' dummies discarded to the weather, and an awe-inspiring
stillness.

There were some interchanges with serious men, who did not sing, but
who sat about in mud, or leaned against it, and were covered with it,
or who were waiting with rifles ready, or looking through periscopes,
or doing things over fires which smoked till the eyes were red. "Come
and see our mine crater," said my guide. "It's a topper. Fritz made it,
but we've got it."

I knew where that crater would be, and I thought the less of it as a
spectacle. But "out there" one must follow one's leader wherever he
goes. He was going to make me crawl after him in "No Man's Land," and
it was not dark yet. So I acquired that sinking sensation described in
the pill advertisements. The mud got down our collars; but we arrived,
though I don't know how, because I was thinking too much. It was only a
deep yellow hole in the ground, too, that crater, with barbed wire
spilled into it and round it; and you were warned to breathe ge