te--or unfortunate enough, as the case
might be--to be squatting in a front-line trench this fine morning
and looking through a periscope, you wouldn't see much. Just over
the top, not more than twenty feet away, would be your barbed-wire
entanglements, a thick network of wire stretched on iron posts
nearly waist high, and perhaps twelve or fifteen feet across. Then
there would be an intervening stretch of from fifty to one hundred
fifty yards of No Man's Land, a tortured, torn expanse of muddy
soil, pitted with shell craters, and, over beyond, the German wire
and his parapet.

There would be nothing alive visible. There would probably be a
few corpses lying about or hanging in the wire. Everything would be
still except for the flutter of some rag of a dead man's uniform.
Perhaps not that. Daylight movements in No Man's Land are somehow
disconcerting. Once I was in a trench where a leg--a booted German
leg, stuck up stark and stiff out of the mud not twenty yards in
front. Some idiotic joker on patrol hung a helmet on the foot, and
all the next day that helmet dangled and swung in the breeze. It
irritated the periscope watchers, and the next night it was taken
down.

Ordinarily, however, there is little movement between the wires,
nor behind them. And yet you know that over yonder there are
thousands of men lurking in the trenches and shelters.

After dark these men, or some of them, crawl out like hunted
animals and prowl in the black mystery of No Man's Land. They are
the patrol.

The patrol goes out armed and equipped lightly. He has to move
softly and at times very quickly. It is his duty to get as close
to the enemy lines as possible and find out if they are repairing
their wire or if any of their parties are out, and to get back word
to the machine gunners, who immediately cut loose on the indicated
spot.

Sometimes he lies with his head to the ground over some suspected
area, straining his ears for the faint "scrape, scrape" that means
a German mining party is down there, getting ready to plant a ton
or so of high explosive, or, it may be, is preparing to touch it
off at that very moment.

Always the patrol is supposed to avoid encounter with enemy
patrols. He carries two or three Mills bombs and a pistol, but not
for use except in extreme emergency. Also a persuader stick or a
trench knife, which he may use if he is near enough to do it
silently.

The patrol stares constantly through the dark and get