ervation posts, sleeping for
the night in one of the dugouts behind the front trench instead of in
the billet below.

The way to the observation post was sometimes a little vague, especially
in frost-and-thaw weather, when parts of the communication trenches
slithered down under the weight of sand-bags.

The young officer who walked with luminous eyes and eager step found it
necessary to crawl on his stomach before he reached his lookout station
from which he looked straight across the enemy's trenches. But, once
there, it was pretty comfortable and safe, barring a direct hit from
above or a little mining operation underneath.

He made a seat of a well-filled sand-bag (it was rather a shock when
he turned it over one day to get dry side up and found a dead Frenchman
there), and smoked Belgian cigars for the sake of their aroma, and sat
there very solitary and watchful.

The rats worried him a little--they were bold enough to bare their teeth
when they met him down a trench, and there was one big fellow called
Cuthbert, who romped round his dugout and actually bit his ear one
night. But these inconveniences did not seem to give any real distress
to the soul of youth, out there alone and searching for human targets to
kill... until one day, as I have said, everything snapped in him and the
boy was broken.

It was on the way back from Kemmel village one day that I met a queer
apparition through a heavy snowstorm. It was a French civilian in
evening dress--boiled shirt, white tie, and all--with a bowler hat bent
to the storm.

Tomlinson, the great Tomlinson, was with me, and shook his head.

"It isn't true," he said. "I don't believe it... We're mad, that's
all!... The whole world is mad, so why should we be sane?"

We stared after the man who went into the ruin of Kemmel, to the noise
of gun-fire, in evening dress, without an overcoat, through a blizzard
of snow.

A little farther down the road we passed a signboard on the edge of a
cratered field. New words had been painted on it in good Roman letters.

Cimetiere reserve

Tomlinson, the only Tomlinson, regarded it gravely and turned to me with
a world of meaning in his eyes. Then he tapped his forehead and laughed.

"Mad!" he said. "We're all mad!"

XVIII

In that winter of discontent there was one great body of splendid men
whose spirits had sunk to zero, seeing no hope ahead of them in that
warfare of trenches and barbed wire. The cavalry belie