ds a scuffle, a
sound as of steel clashing in steel, and then subdued laughter. What
had happened? Next day we heard that a sergeant and three men of the
--th were out on patrol and went too near the enemy's lines. Suddenly
they were confronted by several dark forms with fixed bayonets and the
usual sentry's challenge was yelled out in English. Believing that he
had fallen across one of his own outposts, the unsuspecting sergeant
gave the password for the night, approached those who challenged him
and was immediately made prisoner. Two others met with the same fate,
but one who had been lagging at the rear got away and managed to get
back to his own lines. Many strange things happen between the lines at
night; working parties have no love for the place and hundreds get
killed there.

The slightest tinge of dawn was in the sky when our party slipped back
over the parapet and stood to arms on the banquette and yawned out the
conventional hour when soldiers await the attacks which so often begin
at dawn.

We go out often as working parties or listening patrols.

From Souchez to Ypres the firing line runs through a land of (p. 257)
stinking drains, level fields, and shattered villages. We know those
villages, we have lived in them, we have been sniped at in their
streets and shelled in the houses. We have had men killed in them,
blown to atoms or buried in masonry, done to death by some damnable
instrument of war.

In our trenches near Souchez you can see the eternal artillery
fighting on the hills of Lorette, up there men are flicked out of
existence like flies in a hailstorm. The big straight road out of a
village runs through our lines into the German trenches and beyond.
The road is lined with poplars and green with grass; by day you can
see the German sandbags from our trenches, by night you can hear the
wind in the trees that bend towards one another as if in conversation.
There is no whole house in the place; chimneys have been blown down
and roofs are battered by shrapnel. But few of the people have gone
away, they have become schooled in the process of accommodation, and
accommodate themselves to a woeful change. They live with one foot on
the top step of the cellar stairs, a shell sends them scampering down;
they sleep there, they eat there, in their underground home they (p. 258)
wait for the war to end. The men who are too old to fight labour in a
neighbouring mine, which still does some work althou