o study it to the
best of our ability. I spent the time with a periscope and a pair of
binoculars drinking in the scene. It's difficult to get a good view of
the intervening ground between opposing lines of trenches in the day
time, when one's only means of doing so is through a periscope. Night is
the time for this job, when you can go in front and walk about. This
ground which we had come to see was completely flat, and one had to put
a periscope pretty high over the parapet to see the sort of thing it
was. It was no place to put your head up to have a look. A bullet went
smack into the Colonel's periscope and knocked it out of his hand.
However, with time and patience, we formed a pretty accurate idea of the
appearance of the country opposite. Behind the German trench was the
remains of a village, a few of the houses of which were up level with
the Boche front line. A great scene of wreckage. Every single house was
broken, and in a crumbling state. This was the place we had to take.
Other regiments were to take other spots on the landscape on either
side, but this particular spot was our objective. I stared long and
earnestly at the wrecks in front and the intervening ground. "About a
two-hundred yard sprint," I thought to myself. We stayed in the trenches
an hour or two, and then all went back to a spot a couple of miles away
and had tea, after which we mounted the motor-bus and drove back home to
our village. We had got something to think about now all right;--the
coming "show" was the feature uppermost in our lives now. Every one keen
to get at it, as we all felt sure we could push the Boches out of that
place when the time came. We, the initiated few, had to keep our
"inside" information to ourselves, and it was supposed to be a dark
mystery to the rest of the battalion. But I imagine that anyone who
didn't guess what the idea was must have been pretty dense. When a
motor-bus comes and takes off a group of officers for the day, and
brings them back at night, one would scarcely imagine that they had been
to a cricket match, or on the annual outing.

Well, the "tumbril," as we called it, arrived each day for nearly a
week, and we drove off gaily to the appointed spot and saturated
ourselves in the characteristics of the land we were shortly to attack.
In the mornings, before we started, I took the machine-gun sections out
into the fields, and by mapping out a similar landscape to the one we
were going to attack, I