laintive voice followed him.

"Beg pardon, sir, where shall _I_ go now?"

Ayling answered the question explicitly, and moved off, feeling much
better. The late conductor of the party trailed disconsolately in the
rear.

"I should like to know wot I'm 'ere for," he murmured indignantly.

He got his answer, like a lightning-flash.

"For tae carry _this_," said the man with the tripod, turning round.
"Here, caatch!"

II

The day's work in trenches begins about nine o'clock the night
before. Darkness having fallen, various parties steal out into the
no-man's-land beyond the parapet. There are numerous things to be
done. The barbed wire has been broken up by shrapnel, and must be
repaired. The whole position in front of the wire must be patrolled,
to prevent the enemy from creeping forward in the dark. The corn has
grown to an uncomfortable height in places, so a fatigue party is told
off to cut it--surely the strangest species of harvesting that the
annals of agriculture can record. On the left front the muffled
clinking of picks and shovels announces that a "sap" is in course of
construction: those incorrigible night-birds, the Royal Engineers, are
making it for the machine-gunners, who in the fulness of time will
convey their voluble weapon to its forward extremity, and "loose off
a belt or two" in the direction of a rather dangerous hollow midway
between the trenches, from which of late mysterious sounds of digging
and guttural talking have been detected by the officer who lies in
the listening-post, in front of our barbed-wire entanglement, drawing
secrets from the bowels of the earth by means of a microphone.

Behind the firing trench even greater activity prevails. Damage
done to the parapet by shell fire is being repaired. Positions and
emplacements are being constantly improved, communication trenches
widened or made more secure. Down these trenches fatigue parties are
filing, to draw rations and water and ammunition from the limbered
waggons which are waiting in the shadow of a wood, perhaps a mile
back. It is at this hour, too, that the wounded, who have been lying
pathetically cheerful and patient in the dressing-station in the
reserve trench, are smuggled to the Field Ambulance--probably to find
themselves safe in a London hospital within twenty-four hours. Lastly,
under the kindly cloak of night, we bury our dead.

Meanwhile, within various stifling dug-outs, in the firing trench or
support-trench