old ones. The trench, like all the others,
was excavated in short, zigzag lengths, so that no point, either to
right or left, commanded more than a score of yards of it.

In front, from just outside the parapet to a depth of some twenty yards,
stretched the spider-web of wire entanglements, and a little farther
down on the right there had been a copse of horn-beam saplings. An
attempt had been made by the enemy during the morning to capture and
entrench this, thus advancing their lines, but the movement had been
seen, and the artillery fire, which had been so incessant all the
morning, denoted the searching of this and the rendering of it
untenable. How thorough that searching had been was clear, for that
which had been an acre of wood was now but a heap of timber fit only for
faggots. Scarcely a tree was left standing, and Michael, looking out
of one of the peep-holes by the light of a star-shell saw that the wire
entanglements were thick with leaves that the wind and the firing had
detached from the broken branches. In turn, the wire entanglements had
come in for some shelling by the enemy, and a squad of men were out now
under cover of the darkness repairing these. There was a slight dip in
the ground here, and by crouching and lying they were out of sight of
the trenches opposite; but there were some snipers in that which had
been a wood, from whom there came occasional shots. Then, from lower
down to the right, there came a fusillade from the English lines
suddenly breaking out, and after a few minutes as suddenly stopping
again. But the sniping from the wood had ceased.

Michael did not come on duty till six in the morning, and for the
present he had nothing to do except eat his rations and sleep as well as
he could in his dug-out. He had plenty of room to stretch his legs if he
sat half upright, and having taken his Major's advice in the matter of
bringing his fur coat with him, he found himself warm enough, in spite
of the rather bitter wind that, striking an angle in the trench wall,
eddied sharply into his retreat, to sleep. But not less justified than
the advice to bring his fur coat was his Major's assurance that the
attack of the horrors which had seized him after dinner that day, would
pass off when the waiting was over. Throughout the evening his
nerves had been perfectly steady, and, when in their progress up the
communication trench they had passed a man half disembowelled by a
fragment of a shell, and