ut there was no sign of life in them. In the other
lines there seemed the better part of two brigades, and the first
trench was stiff with bayonets. My first thought was that Home Forces
had gone dotty, for this kind of show could have no sort of training
value. And then I saw other things--cameras and camera-men on platforms
on the flanks, and men with megaphones behind them on wooden
scaffoldings. One of the megaphones was going full blast all the time.

I saw the meaning of the performance at last. Some movie-merchant had
got a graft with the Government, and troops had been turned out to make
a war film. It occurred to me that if I were mixed up in that push I
might get the cover I was looking for. I scurried down the hill to the
nearest camera-man.

As I ran, the first wave of troops went over the top. They did it
uncommon well, for they entered into the spirit of the thing, and went
over with grim faces and that slow, purposeful lope that I had seen in
my own fellows at Arras. Smoke grenades burst among them, and now and
then some resourceful mountebank would roll over. Altogether it was
about the best show I have ever seen. The cameras clicked, the guns
banged, a background of boy scouts applauded, and the dust rose in
billows to the sky.

But all the same something was wrong. I could imagine that this kind of
business took a good deal of planning from the point of view of the
movie-merchant, for his purpose was not the same as that of the officer
in command. You know how a photographer finicks about and is
dissatisfied with a pose that seems all right to his sitter. I should
have thought the spectacle enough to get any cinema audience off their
feet, but the man on the scaffolding near me judged differently. He
made his megaphone boom like the swan-song of a dying buffalo. He
wanted to change something and didn't know how to do it. He hopped on
one leg; he took the megaphone from his mouth to curse; he waved it
like a banner and yelled at some opposite number on the other flank.
And then his patience forsook him and he skipped down the ladder,
dropping his megaphone, past the camera-men, on to the battlefield.

That was his undoing. He got in the way of the second wave and was
swallowed up like a leaf in a torrent. For a moment I saw a red face
and a loud-checked suit, and the rest was silence. He was carried on
over the hill, or rolled into an enemy trench, but anyhow he was lost
to my ken.

I bagged his m