e all watchful, unseen
presence mounted on the horse in the shadow of the wall. Automatically,
the section spouted red arcs that fell to the road on either side in a
shower of sparks.

"It's a damn shame to do that." Major Griffith spoke to me standing
beside his horse. "You can't see a cigarette light fifty yards away, but
if there were no orders against smoking, the men would be lighting
matches or dumping pipes, and such flashes can be seen."

There was need for caution. The enemy was always watchful for an
interval when one organisation was relieving another on the line. That
period represented the time when an attack could cause the greatest
confusion in the ranks of the defenders. But that night our men
accomplished the relief of the French Moroccan division then in the line
without incident.

* * * * *

Two nights later, in company with a party of correspondents, I paid a
midnight visit to our men in the front line trenches of that first
American sector. With all lights out, cigarettes tabooed and the siren
silenced, our overloaded motor slushed slowly along the shell-pitted
roads, carefully skirting groups of marching men and lumbering supply
wagons that took shape suddenly out of the mist-laden road in front of
us.

Although it was not raining, moisture seemed to drip from everything,
and vapours from the ground, mixing with the fog overhead, almost
obscured the hard-working moon.

In the greyness of the night sight and smell lost their keenness, and
familiar objects assumed unnatural forms, grotesque and indistinct.

From somewhere ahead dull, muffled thumps in the mist brought memories
of spring house cleaning and the dusting out of old cushions, but it was
really the three-year-old song of the guns. Nature had censored
observation by covering the spectacle with the mantle of indefiniteness.
Still this was the big thing we had come to see--night work in and
behind the front lines of the American sector.

We approached an engineers' dump, where the phantoms of fog gradually
materialised into helmeted khaki figures that moved in mud knee-deep and
carried boxes and planks and bundles of tools. Total silence covered all
the activity and not a ray of light revealed what mysteries had been
worked here in surroundings that seemed no part of this world.

An irregular pile of rock loomed grey and sinister before us, and,
looking upward, we judged, from its gaping walls, that i