vived are lying doggo."

How many dugouts were still intact and secure refuges for the waiting
Germans? Only trench raids could ascertain. As well might the observer
with his glasses or an aeroplane looking down try to take a census of
the number of inhabitants of a prairie dog village who were all in their
holes.

The officer spread out his map marked "Secret and confidential,"
delimiting the boundaries of a narrow sector. He had nothing to do with
what lay to the right and left--other sectors, other men's business--of
the area inclosed in the clear, heavy lines crosswise of British and
German trenches--a slice out of the front, as it were. Speaking over the
telephone to the blind guns, he was interested only in the control of
gunfire in this sector. The charge to him was lines on the map parallel
with the trenches which would be at given points at given moments--lines
which he must support when their soldier counterparts were invisible
through the shell-smoke in the nice calculation of time and range which
should put the shells into the enemy and never into the charging man.

To infantry commanders with similar maps those lines were breathing
human lines of men whom they had trained, and the gunfire a kind of
spray which the gunners were to adjust for the protection of the
battalions when they should cross that dead space. Once the British were
in the German front trenches, details which had been told off for the
purpose were to take possession of the dugouts and "breach" them of
prisoners and disarm all other Germans, lest they fire into the backs of
those who carried the charge farther on to the final stage of the
objective. What awaited them they would know only when they climbed over
the parapet and became silhouettes of vulnerable flesh in the open. Yes,
one had the system in the large and the small, by the army, the corps,
the division, the brigade, the battalion, and the man, the individual
infantryman who was to suffer that hazard of marching in the open toward
the trenches which not guns, or motor trucks, or trench-mortar shells
could take, but only he could take and hold.

The advantage of watching the attack from this O.P. in comparison with
that of other points was mooted; for the spectator had to choose his
seat for the panorama. This time we sought a place where we hoped to
see something of the battle as a whole.

"_C'est arrive!_" said the old porter to me at the door when I left the
hotel before d