first
shot and soon was out of range. Archibald had served the purpose of
his existence. He had sent the prying aerial eye home.

A fight between planes in the air very rarely happens, except in the
imagination. Planes do not go up to fight other planes, but for
observation. Their business is to see and learn and bring home their
news.

XIX
Trenches In Summer

It was the same trench in June, still a relatively "quiet corner," which I
had seen in March; but I would never have known it if its location had
not been the same on the map. One was puzzled how a place that
had been so wet could become so dry.

This time the approach was made in daylight through a long
communication ditch, which brought us to a shell-wrecked
farmhouse. We passed through this and stepped down at the back
door into deep traverses cut among the roots of an orchard; then
behind walls of earth high above our heads to battalion headquarters
in a neat little shanty, where I deposited the first of the cakes I had
brought on the table beside some battalion reports. A cake is the right
gift for the trenches, though less so in summer than in winter when
appetites are less keen. The adjutant tried a slice while the colonel
conferred with the general, who had accompanied me this far, and he
glanced up at a sheet of writing with a line opposite hours of the day,
pinned to a post of his dug-out.

"I wanted to see if it were time to make another report," he said. "We
are always making reports. Everybody is, so that whoever is superior
to someone else knows what is happening in his subordinate's
department."

Then in and out in a maze, between walls with straight faces of the
hard, dry earth, testifying to the beneficence of summer weather in
constructing fastnesses from artillery fire, until we were in the firing-
trench, where I was at home among the officers and men of a
company. General Mud was "down and out." He waited on the winter
rains to take command again. But winter would find an army prepared
against his kind of campaign. Life in the trenches in summer was not
so unpleasant but that some preferred it, with the excitement of
sniping, to the boredom of billets.

"What hopes!" was the current phrase I heard among the men in
these trenches. It shared honours with strafe. You have only one life
to live and you may lose that any second--what hopes! Dig, dig, dig,
and set off a mine that sends Germans skyward in a cloud of dust--