losion, and what looked like a public school in the main
street sagged suddenly in the centre. With no entre-acte came a
succession of explosions, and the building was prone upon the
ground--just a jagged pile of broken stones.

We turned our glasses on the other end of the village. A column of
black smoke was rising where the church had caught fire. We watched it
awhile in silence. Ruins were getting very common. I swept the glasses
away from the hamlet altogether and pointed out over the distant
fields to the left.

"Where are the German trenches?" I rather uninterestedly asked the
Major.

"I'll show you--just a moment!" he answered, and at the same time
signaling to a soldier squatting in the entrance to a trench near by,
he ordered the man to convey a message to the telephone station which
connected with a "seventy-five" battery at our rear. I was on the
point of telling the officer not to bother about it. The words were on
my lips. Then I thought "Oh, never mind! I might as well know where
the trenches are, now that I have asked."

The soldier disappeared. "Watch!" said the officer. We looked intently
across the field to the left. In less than a minute there were two
sharp explosions behind us, two puffs of smoke out on the horizon
before us, about a mile away.

"That's where they are!" the officer said. "Both shells went right in
them."

"Ah! Very interesting!" I replied.

Away to the right of the village, now reduced to ruins, was another
larger village; we squared around on our mud bank to look at that.
This town was more important; it was Neuville-St. Vaast, which is
still occupied by both French and Germans, the former slowly retaking
it, house by house. We were about half a mile away. We could see
little; for, strangely, in this business of house-to-house occupation,
most of the fighting is in the cellars. But I could well imagine what
was going on, for I had already walked through the ruins of Vermelles,
another town now entirely in French possession, but taken in the same
fashion after two months' dogged inch-by-inch advances.

So, when looking at Neuville-St. Vaast, I suddenly heard a tremendous
explosion and saw a great mass of masonry and debris of all
descriptions flying high in the air, I knew just what had happened.
The French--for it is always the French who do it--had burrowed,
sapped and dug themselves laboriously, patiently, slowly, by tortuous,
narrow underground routes from one row of