ncidents the trench
quiets down again and continues to wind endlessly--just a sandy,
extremely narrow vertical walled trench. A giant crack.

At last you reach the front line trench. On an offensive sector it has
none of the architectural interest of first line trenches at such places
as Soissons or Arras. It was made a week or so ago by joining up shell
craters, and if all goes well we move into the German trench along by
the line of scraggy trees, at which we peep discreetly, to-morrow night.
We can peep discreetly because just at present our guns are putting
shrapnel over the enemy at the rate of about three shells a minute, the
puffs follow each other up and down the line, and no Germans are staring
out to see us.

The Germans "strafed" this trench overnight, and the men are tired and
sleepy. Our guns away behind us are doing their best now to give them
a rest by strafing the Germans. One or two men are in each forward sap
keeping a look out; the rest sleep, a motionless sleep, in the earthy
shelter pits that have been scooped out. One officer sits by a telephone
under an earth-covered tarpaulin, and a weary man is doing the toilet of
a machine gun. We go on to a shallow trench in which we must stoop, and
which has been badly knocked about.... Here we have to stop. The road to
Berlin is not opened up beyond this point.

My companion on this excursion is a man I have admired for years and
never met until I came out to see the war, a fellow writer. He is a
journalist let loose. Two-thirds of the junior British officers I met
on this journey were really not "army men" at all. One finds that the
apparent subaltern is really a musician, or a musical critic, or an
Egyptologist, or a solicitor, or a cloth manufacturer, or a writer. At
the outbreak of the war my guide dyed his hair to conceal its tell-tale
silver, and having been laughed to scorn by the ordinary recruiting
people, enlisted in the sportsmen's battalion. He was wounded, and then
the authorities discovered that he was likely to be of more use with a
commission and drew him, in spite of considerable resistance, out of the
firing line. To which he always returns whenever he can get a visitor
to take with him as an excuse. He now stood up, fairly high and clear,
explaining casually that the Germans were no longer firing, and showed
me the points of interest.

I had come right up to No Man's Land at last. It was under my chin. The
skyline, the last skyline bef