The trouble began two months ago, when our Divisional Artillery arrived.  Unversed in local etiquette, they commenced operations by “sending up”—­to employ a vulgar but convenient catch-phrase—­a strongly fortified farmhouse in the enemy’s support line.  The Boche, by way of gentle reproof, deposited four or five small “whizz-bangs” in our front-line trenches.  The tenants thereof promptly telephoned to “Mother,” and Mother came to the assistance of her offspring with a salvo of twelve-inch shells.  After that.  Brother Boche, realising that the golden age was past, sent north to the Salient for a couple of heavy batteries, and settled down to shell Bunghole village to pieces.  Within a week he had brought down the church tower:  within a fortnight the population had migrated farther back, leaving behind a few patriots, too deeply interested in the sale of small beer and picture postcards to uproot themselves.  Company Headquarters in Bunghole Wood ceased to grow primroses and began to fill sandbags.

A month ago the village was practically intact.  The face of the church tower was badly scarred, but the houses were undamaged.  The little shops were open; children played in the streets.  Now, if you stand at the cross-roads where the church rears its roofless walls, you will understand what the Abomination of Desolation means.  Occasionally a body of troops, moving in small detachments at generous intervals, trudges by, on its way to or from the trenches.  Occasionally a big howitzer shell swings lazily out of the blue and drops with a crash or a dull thud—­according to the degree of resistance encountered—­among the crumbling cottages.  All is solitude.

But stay!  Right on the cross-roads, in the centre of the village, just below the fingers of a sign-post which indicates the distance to four French townships, whose names you never heard of until a year ago, and now will never forget, there hangs a large, white, newly painted board, bearing a notice in black letters six inches high.  Exactly underneath the board, rubbing their noses appreciatively against the sign-post, stand two mules, attached to a limbered waggon, the property of the A.S.C.  Their charioteers are sitting adjacent, in a convenient shell-hole, partaking of luncheon.

“That was a rotten place we’ ad to wait in yesterday, Sammy,” observes Number One.  “The draught was somethink cruel.”

The recumbent Samuel agrees.  “This little ’oiler is a bit of all right,” he remarks.  “When you’ve done strarfin’ that bully-beef, ’and it over, ole man!”

He leans his head back upon the lip of the shell-hole, and gazes pensively at the notice-board six feet away.  It says:—­

  VERY DANGEROUS. 
  DO NOT
  LOITER
  HERE.

III

Here is another cross-roads, a good mile farther forward—­and less than a hundred yards behind the fire-trench.  It is dawn.