Like the Cyclopes they dwelt in hollow caves, and each Colonel uttered the law to his children and recked not of the others except when the Brigadier came round.  True there were two and a half battalions in their line of 2700 yards, but all they knew was that the next battalion to their own was the Highlanders; it was only when the five days were up and they were marched back to billets that they were able to cultivate that somewhat exclusive society.  Their trenches were like the suburbs, they were faintly conscious that people lived in the next street, but they never saw them.  Their neighbours were as self-contained and silent as themselves, except when their look-outs or machine-guns became loquacious.  Then they too became eloquent, and the whole line talked freely at the Germans 200 yards away.  By day the men slept heavily on straw in hollows under the parapet, supported with crates and sprinkled with chloride of lime; by night they were out at the listening posts, in the sap-heads, or behind the parapet, with their eyes glued to the field of yellow mustard in front of us.  They had watched that field for three months.  They knew every blade of grass therein.  No experimental agriculturist ever studied his lucerne and sainfoin as they have studied the grasses of that field.  They have watched it from winter to spring; they have seen the lesser celandine give way to pink clover and sorrel, and the grass shoot up from an inch to a foot.  They have, indeed, been studying not botany but ethnology, searching for traces of that species of primitive man known to anthropologists as the Hun.  They have never found him except once, when one of our look-outs saw something crawling across that field about midnight and promptly emptied his magazine.  In the morning they saw a grey figure lying out in the open; the days passed and the long grass sprang up and concealed it till nothing was left to attest its obscene presence except a little cloud of black flies.  Their horizon is bounded by rows of sand-bags, and their interest in those sand-bags is only equalled by their interest in the field in front of them.  Occasionally one of our men finds them more than usually interesting.  There is a loud report, the click of a bolt, and the pungent smell of burnt cordite.  Then all is still again.

The tangent-sight on the standard of their machine-gun is always at 200, and they have not altered the range for three months.  Occasionally at night the N.C.O. seizes the traversing-handles, and with his thumb on the button slowly sweeps that range of sand-bags, till the feed-block sucks up the cartridge-belt like a chaff-cutter and the empty cartridge-cases lie as thick round the tripod as acorns under an oak.  The Huns reply by taking a flashlight photograph of us with a calcium flare, and then all is still again.  In such excursions and alarms do they pass the long night.