oss the cavity,
and with his legs wide apart, laboriously balanced, he grips the
stretcher and begins to draw it across, calling on his companion to
help him.

A little farther we see the stooping form of a hooded officer, and as
he raises his hand to his face we see two gold lines on his sleeve. He,
surely, will tell us the way. But he addresses us, and asks if we have
not seen the battery he is looking for. We shall never get there!

But we do, all the same. We finish up in a field of blackness where a
few lean posts are bristling. We climb up to it, and spread out in
silence. This is the spot.

The placing of us is an undertaking. Four separate times we go forward
and then retire, before the company is regularly echeloned along the
length of the trench to be dug, before an equal interval is left
between each team of one striker and two shovelers. "Incline three
paces more--too much--one pace to the rear. Come, one pace to the
rear--are you deaf?--Halt! There!"

This adjustment is done by the lieutenant and a noncom. of the
Engineers who has sprung up out of the ground. Together or separately
they run along the file and give their muttered orders into the men's
ears as they take them by the arm, sometimes, to guide them. Though
begun in an orderly way, the arrangement degenerates, thanks to the ill
temper of the exhausted men, who must continually be uprooting
themselves from the spot where the undulating mob is stranded.

"We're in front of the first lines," they whisper round me. "No."
murmur other voices, "we're just behind."

No one knows. The rain still falls, though less fiercely than at some
moments on the march. But what matters the rain! We have spread
ourselves out on the ground. Now that our backs and limbs rest in the
yielding mud, we are so comfortable that we are unconcerned about the
rain that pricks our faces and drives through to our flesh, indifferent
to the saturation of the bed that contains us.

But we get hardly time enough to draw breath. They are not so imprudent
as to let us bury ourselves in sleep. We must set ourselves to
incessant labor. It is two o'clock of the morning; in four hours more
it will be too light for us to stay here. There is not a minute to lose.

"Every man," they say to us, "must dig five feet in length, two and a
half feet in width, and two and three-quarter feet in depth. That makes
fifteen feet in length for each team. And I advise you to get into it;
the soone