by lines of pollarded willows on which some sappers had strung a field telephone.  Raindrops hung on the copper wire like a string of pearls, and the heavy clay of the fields was scooped and moulded by the rain into little saucer-like depressions as if by a potter’s thumb.  Behind us lay the reserve trenches, their clay walls shored up with wickerwork, and their outskirts fringed with barbed wire whose intricate and volatile coils looked like thistledown.  The village behind whose walls we now sheltered lay in a No Man’s Land between the enemy’s lines and our own, and the sodden fields were not more desolate.

A tornado of artillery fire had swept over it, and of the houses nothing was left but indecencies, shattered walls and naked rafters, beneath which were choked heaps of household furniture, broken beds, battered lamps, and a wicker-chair overturned as in a drunken brawl.  What had once been the street was now a quarry of broken bricks, with here and there vast circular craters as though a gigantic oak-tree had been torn out of the earth by the roots.  And now the weird silence was broken by sounds as of some one playing a lonely tattoo with his fingers upon a hollow wooden board, but the player was invisible, and as we looked at each other the sound ceased as suddenly as it began.  Our practised ear told us that somewhere near us a machine-gun was concealed, but these furtive sounds were so homeless, so impersonal, that they eluded us like an echo.

It was this complete absence of visible human agency that impressed us most disagreeably, as with a sense of being utterly forlorn amid a play of the elements, like Lear upon the heath.  There came into my mind, as our eyes groped for some human sign in the brooding landscape, the thought of the prophet upon the mount amid the wind and the earthquake and the fire seeking the presence of his God and finding it not.  And here too all these assaults upon our senses were fugitive and ghostly, and we felt ourselves encompassed about as by some great conspiracy.  We walked curiously up the little street until we reached the last house in the village, and came out beyond the screen of its wall.  At the same instant something sang past my ear like the twang of a Jew’s harp, my foot caught in a coil of wire, and I fell headlong.  My companion, lagging behind and not yet clear of the friendly wall, stopped dead and cried to me not to stand up.  I crawled back among the rubbish to the cover of the house.  We took counsel together.  To retreat were perilous, but to advance might be fatal.  We lowered our voices as, cowering behind walls, and picking our way delicately among the debris, we crept back to our car behind the entrance to the village.  The driver started the engine and we moved forlornly along the narrow causeway, skirting the unfathomable mud that lay on either side, until we spied a ruined farmhouse where a company had made its billet and mud-coloured knots of soldiers stood