ore the British could look down on Bapaume,
showed a mangy wood and a ruined village, crouching under repeated
gobbings of British shrapnel. "They've got a battery just there, and
we're making it uncomfortable." No Man's Land itself is a weedy space
broken up by shell craters, with very little barbed wire in front of us
and very little in front of the Germans. "They've got snipers in most of
the craters, and you see them at twilight hopping about from one to the
other." We have very little wire because we don't mean to stay for very
long in this trench, but the Germans have very little wire because they
have not been able to get it up yet. They never will get it up now....

I had been led to believe that No Man's Land was littered with the
unburied dead, but I saw nothing of the sort at this place. There had
been no German counter attack since our men came up here. But at one
point as we went along the trench there was a dull stench. "Germans, I
think," said my guide, though I did not see how he could tell.

He looked at his watch and remarked reluctantly, "If you start at once,
you may just do it."

I wanted to catch the Boulogne boat. It was then just past one in
the afternoon. We met the stew as we returned along the communication
trench, and it smelt very good indeed.... We hurried across the great
spaces of rusty desolation upon which every now and again a German shell
was bursting....

That night I was in my flat in London. I had finished reading the
accumulated letters of some weeks, and I was just going comfortably to
bed.

IV. NEW ARMS FOR OLD ONES

1

Such are the landscapes and method of modern war. It is more difficult
in its nature from war as it was waged in the nineteenth century than
that was from the nature of the phalanx or the legion. The nucleus
fact--when I talked to General Joffre he was very insistent upon
this point--is still as ever the ordinary fighting man, but all the
accessories and conditions of his personal encounter with the fighting
man of the other side have been revolutionised in a quarter of a
century. The fighting together in a close disciplined order, shoulder
to shoulder, which has held good for thousands of years as the best and
most successful fighting, has been destroyed; the idea of _breaking_
infantry formation as the chief offensive operation has disappeared, the
cavalry charge and the cavalry pursuit are as obsolete as the cross-bow.
The modern fighting man