of the Loamshires' front line, mining activity was great. A
continuous group of craters stretched along No Man's Land, separating
them from the wily Hun, for half the battalion front--a group which we
will call Outpost. The name is wrong, but it will serve. To the near
lips of each crater a sap ran out from the front line, so that merely
the great yawning hole lay between the saphead and the corresponding
abode of the Germans on the other lip. Each night these sapheads were
held by a small group of men armed with Verey lights, bombs,
bowie-knives, and other impedimenta of destruction; while between the
saps the trench was held but lightly--in some cases, not at all. The
idea of concentrating men in the front line has long been given up by
both sides.

If therefore one strolls along the firing line--a tedious amusement at
all times--it is more than likely that one will find long stretches
completely deserted. The scene is desolate; the walk is strangely
eerie. Walls of sandbags tower on each side, in some cases two or
three feet above one's head; the clouds go scudding by, while the
shadows of a traverse dance fantastically as a flare comes hissing
down. The Hun is thirty yards away; the silence is absolute; the place
is ghostly with the phantoms of forgotten men. And sometimes, as one
walks, strange fancies creep into one's brain. Relics of childish
fears, memories of the bogey man who waited round the end of the dark
passage at home, come faintly from the past. And foolish though it be,
one wonders sometimes with a sharp, clutching pang of nervous
fear--What is round the next corner?

Nothing--of course not. What should there be? The night is quiet; the
trench is English. The next party is forty yards farther on; the
voices of the last still come softly through the air. And yet--and
yet----! But I digress again.

Now not one of the least of all the crimes of those responsible for the
disposal of the underworld of France, when it comes to the surface in
sandbags, is the following. (Lest any one may think that I am writing
a text-book, I would crave patience.) Be it known, then, that to keep
out a bullet some four feet of earth are necessary. Less than that and
the bullet will come through and impinge with great violence on the
warrior behind. This fact is well known to all whose path in life
leads them to the trenches; but for all that Tommy is a feckless lad.
In some ways he bears a marked resem