suggest rebuilding the broken-in trench; it would
be done automatically--which cannot be said of them all.

At last he reached Boyau 94, and turned up towards the firing-line.
Twenty yards from the turn a mass of barbed wire crossed the trench above
his head, the barbed wire which ran in front of the support line. For it
is not only the fire-trench that is wired--each line behind is
plentifully supplied with this beautiful vegetable growth.

The mist had cleared away, and the morning sun was blazing down from a
cloudless sky, as he reached the front trench. Just to his left a
monstrous pair of bellows, slowly heaving up and down under the
ministrations of two pessimistic miners, sent a little of God's fresh air
down to the men in the mine-shafts underneath. The moles were there--the
moles who scratched and scraped stolidly, at the end of their gallery
thirty or forty yards in front, deep down under the earth in No Man's
Land.

A steady stream of sandbags filled with the result of their labours came
up the shaft down which the pipe from the bellows stretched into the
darkness--sandbags which must be taken somewhere and emptied, or used to
revet a bit of trench which needed repair.

To right and left there stretched the fire-trench--twisting and turning,
traversed and recessed--just one small bit of the edge of British land.
A hundred yards away, a similar line stretched right and left, where
other pessimistic miners ministered to other monstrous bellows, and
Piccadilly was known as Unter den Linden. The strange stagnation of it
all!

Look through the periscope at the country in front. Not a sign of life
in the torn-up crusted earth; not a movement between the two long lines
of wire. A few poppies here and there, and at one point a motionless
grey-green lump close to the farther wire. Impossible to tell exactly
what it is from the periscope--the range is too far. But, in No Man's
Land, such strange grey--and khaki--lumps may often be seen. The night,
a wiring party, perhaps a little raid or an officer's patrol,
and--discovery. You cannot always get your dead back to the trench, and
the laws that govern No Man's Land savour of the primitive. . . .

The Sapper watched the phlegmatic bellows-heaver for a few moments
curiously. His stoical indifference to any one or anything save the job
in hand, the wonderful accuracy with which he spat from time to time, the
appalling fumes from his short clay pipe, all ten