ad down, sir," was his last
remark. So bending nearly double, I proceeded. As a further precaution,
I kept my man behind me at a distance of about twenty yards. Several
times high explosives and shrapnel came unpleasantly near.

Presently I came upon a wooden tramway running at right angles to the
road. My instructions were to proceed along it until I came to "Signpost
Lane." Why it was so dubbed I was unable to discover, but one thing I
was certainly not kept in ignorance of for long, and that was that it
was perpetually under heavy shell-fire by the Germans. They were
evidently under the impression that it was the route taken by our relief
parties going to the trenches at appointed times during the day, and so
they fairly raked it with shell-fire.

Unfortunately I happened to arrive on one of these occasions, and I knew
it. Shells dropped all round us. Hardly a square yard of ground seemed
untouched. Under such conditions it was no good standing. I looked round
for cover, but there was none. The best thing to do under the
circumstances was to go straight on, trust to Providence, and make for
the communication trenches with all speed. I doubled like a hare over
the intervening ground, and I was glad when I reached the trenches, for
once there, unless a shell bursts directly overhead, or falls on top of
you, the chances of getting hit are very small.

I was now in the sniping zone, and could continually hear the crack of a
Hun rifle, and the resulting thud of a bullet striking the mud or the
sandbags, first one side then the other. The communication trenches
seemed interminable, and, as we neared the front line, the mud got
deeper and parts of the trench were quite water-logged.

Plod, plod, plod; section after section, traverse after traverse.
Suddenly I came upon a party of sappers mending the parapet top with
newly filled sandbags. At that particular section a shell had dropped
fairly near and destroyed it, and anyone walking past that gap stood a
very good chance of having the top of his head taken off. These men were
filling up the breach. "Keep your head well down, sir," shouted one, as
I came along. "They" (meaning the Germans) "have got this place marked."

Down went my head, and I passed the gap safely.

We were now well up in the firing trench. Fixing the camera, and the
rest of the apparatus, I began taking scenes of actual life and
conditions in the trenches--that mysterious land about which millions
h