riends with one of the head
waiters. He said a customer had come in, giving the name of Lord
X----, and had engaged a table for dinner. He evidently had some
doubt about Lord X----, and asked me if I would know him if I saw (p. 048)
him. I said, "Certainly," as the name given was that of the son of
one of the best-known Earls in England. In he came for dinner, a very
good-looking man, wearing the Legion d'Honneur. Lord X----, the
deserter of the belfry!

The great mine at La Boisselle was a wonderful sight. One morning I
was wandering about the old battlefield, and I came across a great
wilderness of white chalk--not a tuft of grass, not a flower, nothing
but blazing chalk; apparently a hill of chalk dotted thickly all over
with bits of shrapnel. I walked up it, and suddenly found myself on
the lip of the crater. I felt myself in another world. This enormous
hole, 320 yards round at the top, with sides so steep one could not
climb down them, was the vast, terrific work of man. Imagine burrowing
all that way down in the belly of the earth, with Hell going on
overhead, burrowing and listening till they got right under the German
trenches--hundreds and hundreds of yards of burrowing. And here
remained the result of their work, on the earth at least, if not on
humanity. The latter had disappeared; but the great chasm, with one
mound in the centre at the bottom, and one skull placed on top of it,
remained. They had cut little steps down one of its sides, and had
cleared up all the human remains and buried them in this mound. That
one mound, with the little skull on the top, at the bottom of this
enormous chasm, was the greatest monument I have ever seen to the
handiwork of man.

There was another fairly large mine here, just by the Bapaume Road,
and there was a large mine at Beaumont-Hamel, and also the
"Cough-drop" at High Wood. These were wonderful, but they could not
compare in dignity and grandeur with the great mine of La Boisselle.

[Illustration: XIX. _The Butte de Warlencourt._]

Working out on the Somme, in the evenings as the sun was going down, (p. 049)
one heard constantly a drone of aeroplanes, which quickly grew louder
and louder, and before one could think, two of these great birds would
pass just over one's head, quite close to the ground. A couple of
minutes later, Bang! bang! bang! bang! and the boom and crash of the
guns. Presently you would see the two birds, high up, returning to
their aerodrom