There was an end of white-capped grandmothers in doorways; an end of people working in the fields.  Rents in the roofless walls of unoccupied houses stared at the passer-by.  We were in a dead land.  One of two soldiers whom we met coming from the opposite direction pointed at what looked like a small miner’s cabin half covered with earth, screened by a tree, as the next headquarters which we were seeking in our progress.

It was not for sightseers to take the time of the general who received us at the door of his dug-out.  German guns had concentrated on a section of his trenches in a way that indicated that another attack was coming.  One company already had suffered heavy losses.  It was an hour of responsibility for the general, isolated in the midst of silent fields and houses, waiting for news from a region hidden from his view by trees and hedges in that flat country.  He might not move from headquarters, for then he would be out of communication with his command.  His men were being pounded by shells and the inexorable law of organization kept him at the rear.  Up in the trench he might have been one helpless human being in a havoc of shells which had cut the wires.  His place was where he could be in touch with his subordinates and his superiors.

True, we wanted to go to the trench that the Germans had lost and his section was the short cut.  Modesty was not the only reason for not taking it.  As we started along a road parallel to the front, the head of a soldier popped out of the earth and told us that orders were to walk in the ditch.  I judged that he was less concerned with our fate than with the likelihood of our drawing fire, which he and the others in a concealed trench would suffer after we had passed on.

There were three of us, two correspondents, L------ and myself, and
R------, an officer, which is quite enough for an expedition of this kind. 
Now we were finding our own way, with the help of the large scale
army map which had every house, every farm, and every group of
trees marked.  The farms had been given such names as Joffre,
Kitchener, French, Botha, and others which the Germans would not
like.  We cut across fields with the same confidence that, following a
diagram of city streets in a guidebook, a man turns to the left for the
public library and to the right for the museum.

Our own guns were speaking here and there from their hiding-places; and overhead an occasional German shrapnel burst.  This seemed a waste of the Kaiser’s munitions as there was no one in sight.  Yet there was purpose in the desultory scattering of bullets from on high.  They were policing the district; they were warning the hated British in reserve not to play cricket in those fields or march along those deserted roads.