look like a furnished flat. The officer of the day
joined us here, and to him the lieutenant resigned the post of guide. My
new host wore a steel helmet, and at his belt dangled a mask against
gas. He led us to the end of what had been a street, and which was now
barricaded with huge timbers, steel doors, like those to a gambling
house, intricate cat's cradles of wire, and solid steel plates.

To go back seemed the only way open. But the officer in the steel cap
dived through a slit in the iron girders, and as he disappeared,
beckoned. I followed down a well that dropped straight into the very
bowels of the earth. It was very dark, and only crosspieces of wood
offered a slippery footing. Into the darkness, with hands pressed
against the well, and with feet groping for the log steps, we tobogganed
down, down, down. We turned into a tunnel, and, by the slant of the
ground, knew we were now mounting. There was a square of sunshine, and
we walked out, and into a graveyard. It was like a dark change in a
theatre. The last scene had been the ruins of a town, a gate like those
of the Middle Ages, studded with bolts, reinforced with steel plates,
guarded by men-at-arms in steel casques, and then the dark change into a
graveyard, with grass and growing flowers, gravel walks, and hedges.

The graves were old, the monuments and urns above them moss-covered, but
one was quite new, and the cross above it said that it was the grave of
a German aviator. As they passed it the French officers saluted. We
entered a trench as straight as the letter Z. And at each twist and turn
we were covered by an eye in a steel door. An attacking party advancing
would have had as much room in which to dodge that eye as in a bath-tub.
One man with his magazine rifle could have halted a dozen. And when in
the newspapers you read that one man has captured twenty prisoners, he
probably was looking at them through the peep-hole in one of those steel
doors.

We zigzagged into a cellar, and below the threshold of some one's front
door. The trench led directly under it. The house into which the door
had opened was destroyed; possibly those who once had entered by it also
were destroyed, and it now swung in air with men crawling like rats
below it, its half-doors banging and groaning; the wind, with ghostly
fingers, opening them to no one, closing them on nothing. The trench
wriggled through a garden, and we could see flung across the narrow
strip of sky abo