ding about two hundred yards in front of him; and it was a German.

Imagine the factory hand from Saxony set down to do outpost duty in this
sort of wilderness. I spoke the other day to a little tailor or
bootmaker, with a neck that you could have put through a napkin ring, a
tremendous forehead, and big, startled eyes. "Yes, we were put out there
to dig an outpost trench," he said. "The sergeant gave us a wrong
direction, I think. We took two days' rations and went out hundreds of
yards. No one came near us. There was firing on all sides, and we did
not know where we were. Our food was finished--we saw men working--we
did not know who they were--but they were English, and we were
captured."

CHAPTER XXI

ANGELS' WORK

_France, August 28th._

It had been a wild night. Not a first-rate full-dress attack on a big
front, but one of those fierce struggles on a small front which have
been so frequent in the stubborn fight northwards, up the Pozieres Ridge
towards Mouquet Farm. Along a good part of the line the troops were back
in the trenches they had left, or had dug themselves a new trench only
slightly in advance of it. At other points they were in the trenches
they had gone out for.

The bombardment, which had been turned on as though somebody held the
key to the thunderstorm, and which had crashed and flashed into the
hill-side nearly all the night, had gradually died down. The artillery
Staff officers on both sides had long since read the last pink signal
form, and had given instructions to cover any possible trouble, and had
turned into bed. The normal early morning gun was sending its normal
shell at intervals ranging up the long valley--_rattle, rattle, rattle_,
until the echo died away up the slopes, like that of a vanishing railway
train, or the long-drawn bark of a dog. As it died another gun would
bark, and another, until for a few seconds the noise dwindled and died
altogether, and there was a silence; as if somebody, just for a second
or two, had stopped the battle. The German artillery Staff had left its
gun barking too--every now and again the little shell came and spat over
the hill-side.

The morning broke very pale and white through the mist--as though the
earth were tired to death after that wild nightmare. The soft white hand
of the fog covered the red land, so that your sight ranged no more than
three hundred yards at most, and often not a hundred. We were stumbling
over ground smashed