s trench or a battery commander of
his gun-position, which is the same kind of human pride that a man has
in the improvements on his new country estate.

There was a bench to sit on facing the narrow observation slit, similar
to that of a battleship's conning tower, which gave a wide sweep of
vision. A commonplace enough _mise-en-scene_ on average days, now
significant because of the stretch of dead world of the trench systems
and No Man's Land which was soon to be seething with the tumult of
death.

Directly in front of us was Beaumont-Hamel. Before the war it had been
like hundreds of other villages. Since the war its ruins were like
scores of others in the front line. Parts of a few walls were standing.
It was difficult to tell where the debris of Beaumont-Hamel began and
that of the German trench ended. Dust was mixed with the black bursts
of smoke rising from the conglomerate mass of buildings and streets
thrown together by previous explosions. The effect suggested the regular
spout of geysers from a desert rock crushed by charges of dynamite.

Could anybody be alive in Beaumont-Hamel? Wasn't this bombardment
threshing straw which had long since yielded its last kernel of grain?
Wasn't it merely pounding the graves of a garrison? Other villages,
equally passive and derelict, were being submitted to the same
systematic pounding, which was like timed hammer-beats.

"We keep on softening them," said the observer.

Soldiers have a gift for apt words to describe their work, as have all
professional experts. Softening! It personified the enemy as something
hard and tough which would grow pulpy under enough well-mapped blows
striking at every vital part from dugouts to billets.

All the barbed-wire entanglements in front of the first-line trenches
appeared to be cut, mangled, twisted into balls, beaten back into the
earth and exhumed again, leaving only a welt of crater-spotted ground in
front of the chalky contour of the first-line trenches which had been
mashed and crushed out of shape.

"Yes, the Boche's first line looks rather messy," said the officer.
"We've been giving him an awful doing these last few days. Turning our
attention mostly to the second line, now. That's our lot, there," he
added, indicating a cluster of bursts over a nest of burrows farther up
on the hillside.

"Any attempts to repair their wire at night?" I asked.

"No. They have to do it under our machine gun fire. Any Boches who have
sur