out
of a length of trench built for the purpose, and, with shrill Gaelic
yells, go swarming across a stretch of broken ground, through a tangle
of twisted wire, and over the top of the German parapet, whereupon a
row of German soldiers, stuffed with straw and automatically
controlled, spring up to meet them. If a man fails to bury his bayonet
in the "German" who opposes him, he is sent back to the awkward squad
and spends a few days lunging at a dummy swung from a beam.

Crater fighting is taught in an ingenious reproduction of a crater, by
an officer who has had much experience with the real thing and who
explains to his pupils, whose knowledge of craters has been gained
from the pictures in the illustrated weeklies, how to capture,
fortify, and hold such a position. In order to give the men confidence
when the order "Put on gas-masks!" is passed down the line, they are
sent into a real dugout filled with real gas and the entrances closed
behind them. As soon as they find that the masks are a sure
protection, their nervousness disappears. In order to accustom them
to lachrymal shells, they are marched, this time without masks,
through an underground chamber which reeks with the tear-producing
gas--and they are a very weepy, red-eyed lot of men who emerge. They
are instructed in trench-digging, in the construction of wire
entanglements, "knife-rests," chevaux-de-frise, and every other form
of obstruction, in revetting, in the making of fascines and gabions,
in sapping and mining, in the most approved methods of dugout
construction, in trench sanitation, in the location of listening-posts
and how to conceal them; they are shown how to cut wire, they are
drilled in trench raiding and in the most effective methods of "trench
cleaning." The practical work is supplemented by lectures on
innumerable subjects. As it is extremely difficult for an officer to
make his explanations heard by a battalion of men assembled in the
open, a series of small amphitheatres have been excavated from the
sand-dunes, the tiers of seats being built up of petrol tins filled
with sand. In one of these improvised amphitheatres I saw an officer
illustrating the proper method of using the gas-mask to a class of 600
men.

On these imitation battle-fields, any one of which is larger than the
field of Waterloo, the men are instructed in the gentle art of
bombing, first with "dubs," which do not explode at all, then with
toy-grenades which go off harm