But now we were near the trenches; or, rather, the breastworks.  We are always speaking of the trenches, while not all parts of the line are held by trenches.  A trench is dug in the ground; a breastwork is raised from the level of the ground.  At some points a trench becomes practically a breastwork, as its wall is raised to get free of the mud and water.

We came into the open and heard the sound of voices and saw a spotty white wall; for some of the sandbags of the new British breastworks still retained their original colour.  On the reverse side of this wall lines were leaning in readiness, their fixed bayonets faintly gleaming in the moonlight.  I felt of the edge of one and it was sharp, quite prepared for business.  In the surroundings of damp earth and mud-bespattered men, this rifle seemed the cleanest thing of all, meticulously clean, that ready weapon whose well-aimed and telling fire, in obedient and cool hands, was the object of all the drill of the new infantry in England; of all the drill of all infantry.  Where pickets watched in the open in the old days before armies met in pitched battle, an occasional soldier now stands with rifle laid on the parapet, watching.

Across a reach of field faintly were made out the white spots of another wall of breastworks, the German, at the edge of a stretch of woods, the Bois du Bies.  The British reached these woods in their advance; but, their aeroplanes being unable to spot the fall of shells in the mist, they had to fall back for want of artillery support.  Along this line where we stood outside the village they stopped; and to stop is to set the spades going to begin the defences which, later, had risen to a man’s height, and with rifles and machine-guns had riddled the German counter-attack.

And the Germans had to go back to the edge of the woods, where they, too, began digging and building their new line.  So the enemies were fixed again behind their walls of earth, facing each other across the open, where it was death for any man to expose himself by day.

“Will you have a shot, sir?” one of the sentries asked me.

“At what?”

“Why, at the top of the trench over there, or at anything you see moving,” he said.

But I did not think that it was an invitation for a non-combatant to accept.  If the bullet went over the top of the trench it had still two thousand yards and more to go, and it might find a target before it died.  So, in view of the law of probabilities, no bullet is quite waste.

“Now, which is my house?” asked Captain P------.

“I really can’t find my own home in the dark.”

Behind the breastwork were many little houses three or four feet in height, all of the same pattern, and made of boards and mud.  The mud is put on top to keep out shrapnel bullets.

“Here you are, sir!” said a soldier.