Any traveller is bound to meet men whom he has met before in the travelled British army.  At the brigade headquarters town, which, as one of the officers said, proved that bricks and mortar can float in mud, the face of the brigadier seemed familiar to me.  I found that I had met him in Shanghai in the Boxer campaign, when he had come across a riotous China from India on one of those journeys in remote Asia which British officers are fond of making.  He was “all there,” whether dealing with a mob of Orientals or with Germans in the trenches.  I made myself at home in the parlour of the private house occupied by himself and staff, while he went on with his work.  No flag outside the house; no sign that it was headquarters.  Motor-cars stopped only long enough for an officer to enter or alight.  Brigade headquarters is precisely the target that German aeroplanes or spies like to locate for their guns.

“Are you ready?  Have you your rubber boots?” the brigadier asked a few minutes later, as he put his head in at the parlour door.  It would not do to approach the trenches until after dark.  Of course, I had rubber boots.  One might as well try to go to sea without a boat as to trenches without rubber boots in winter.  “I’ll take my constitutional,” he added; “the trouble with this kind of war is that you get no exercise.”

He was a small man, but how he could walk!  I began to understand why the Boxers could not catch him.  He turned back after we had gone a mile or more and one of his staff went on with me to a point where, just at dusk, I was turned over to another pilot, an aide from battalion headquarters, and we set out across sodden fields that had yielded beetroot in the last harvest, taking care not to step in shell-holes.  Dusk settled into darkness.  No human being was in sight except ourselves.

“There’s the first line of German trenches before the attack,” said my companion.  “Our guns got fairly on them.”  Dimly I saw what seemed like a huge, long, irregular furrow of earth which had been torn almost out of the shape of a trench by British shells.  “There was no living in it when the guns began all together.  The only thing to do was to get out.”

Around us was utter silence, where the hell of thunders and destruction by the artillery had raged during the battle.  Then a spent or ricochet bullet swept overhead, with the whistle of complaint of spent bullets at having travelled far without hitting any object.  It had gone high over the British trenches; it had carried the full range, and the chance of its hitting anyone was ridiculously small.  But the nearer you get to the trenches, the more likely these strays are to find a victim.  “Hit by a stray bullet!” is a very common saying at the front.

At last we felt the solidity of a paved road under our feet, and following this we came to a peasant’s cottage.  Inside, two soldiers were sitting beside telephone and telegraph instruments, behind a window stuffed with sandbags.  On our way across the fields we had stepped on wires laid on the ground; we had stooped to avoid wires stretched on poles—­the wires that form the web of the army’s intelligence.