le hastily scraped dug-outs in the sides of
it. They were more than three parts filled with earth; but in them,
every now and again, there showed a patch of muddy grey cloth above the
debris. It was part of the uniform of a German soldier buried by the
shell that killed him. It must have been an old German trench taken by
our men some weeks before. It can scarcely have been visited since, for
its garrison lay there just as the shells had buried them. Probably it
had been found too broken for use and had been almost forgotten.

The trench led on through these relics of battle until even they were
lost altogether; and it came out into a region where it was really a
puzzle to say what was trench and what was not. Around one stretched a
desert of shell craters--hole bordering upon hole so that there was no
space at all between them. Each hole was circular like the ring of earth
at the mouth of an ants' nest several thousand times magnified, and they
stretched away like the waves of the sea. Far to the left was a bare,
brown hill-side. In front, and to the right, billows of red shell-holes
rose to the sharp-cut, white skyline a hundred yards away.

You feel as a man must feel in a very small boat lost in a very wide
ocean. In the trough of a shell-hole your horizon was the edges of the
crater on a level with your head. When you wandered over from that
shell-hole into the next you came suddenly into view of a wide stretch
of country all apparently exactly the same as that through which you
were plunging. The green land of France lay behind you in the distance.
But the rest of the landscape was an ocean of red craters. In one part
of it, just over the near horizon, there protruded the shattered dry
stubble of an orchard long since reduced to about thirty bare, black,
shattered tree stumps. Nearer were a few short black stakes protruding
among the craters--clearly the remains of an ancient wire entanglement.
The trench was still traceable ten or twelve paces ahead, and there
might be something which looked like the continuation of it a dozen
yards farther--a line of ancient parapet appeared to be distinguishable
there for a short interval. That was certainly the direction.

It was the parapet sure enough. There, waterlogged in earth, were the
remains of a sandbag barricade built across the trench. A few yards on
was another similar barrier. They must have been the British and German
barricade built across that sap at the end o