the deadlock may
be broken.

But on that February night I put my faith in this agreement, and it
held.

The tall Belgian officer asked me if I was frightened. I said I was
not. This was not exactly the truth; but it was no time for the truth.

"They are not shooting," I said. "It looks perfectly safe."

He shrugged his shoulders and glanced toward the German trenches.

"They have been sleeping during the rain," he said briefly. "But when
one of them wakes up, look out!"

After that there was little conversation, and what there was was in
whispers.

As we proceeded the stench from the beautiful moonlit water grew
overpowering. The officer told me the reason.

A little farther along a path of fascines had been built out over the
inundation to an outpost halfway to the German trenches. The building
of this narrow roadway had cost many lives.

Half a mile along the road we were sharply challenged by a sentry.
When he had received the password he stood back and let us pass.
Alone, in that bleak and exposed position in front of the trenches,
always in full view as he paced back and forward, carbine on shoulder,
with not even a tree trunk or a hedge for shelter, the first to go at
the whim of some German sniper or at any indication of an attack, he
was a pathetic, almost a tragic, figure. He looked very young too. I
stopped and asked him in a whisper how old he was.

He said he was nineteen!

He may have been. I know something about boys, and I think he was
seventeen at the most. There are plenty of boys of that age doing just
what that lad was doing.

Afterward I learned that it was no part of the original plan to take a
woman over the fascine path to the outpost; that Captain F---- ground
his teeth in impotent rage when he saw where I was being taken. But it
was not possible to call or even to come up to us. So, blithely and
unconsciously the tall Belgian officer and I turned to the right, and
I was innocently on my way to the German trenches.

After a little I realised that this was rather more war than I had
expected. The fascines were slippery; the path only four or five feet
wide. On each side was the water, hideous with many secrets.

I stopped, a third of the way out, and looked back. It looked about as
dangerous in one direction as another. So we went on. Once I slipped
and fell. And now, looming out of the moonlight, I could see the
outpost which was the object of our visit.

I have always been gr