but in them, every now and again, there showed a patch of muddy grey cloth above the debris.  It was part of the uniform of a German soldier buried by the shell that killed him.  It must have been an old German trench taken by our men some weeks before.  It can scarcely have been visited since, for its garrison lay there just as the shells had buried them.  Probably it had been found too broken for use and had been almost forgotten.

The trench led on through these relics of battle until even they were lost altogether; and it came out into a region where it was really a puzzle to say what was trench and what was not.  Around one stretched a desert of shell craters—­hole bordering upon hole so that there was no space at all between them.  Each hole was circular like the ring of earth at the mouth of an ants’ nest several thousand times magnified, and they stretched away like the waves of the sea.  Far to the left was a bare, brown hill-side.  In front, and to the right, billows of red shell-holes rose to the sharp-cut, white skyline a hundred yards away.

You feel as a man must feel in a very small boat lost in a very wide ocean.  In the trough of a shell-hole your horizon was the edges of the crater on a level with your head.  When you wandered over from that shell-hole into the next you came suddenly into view of a wide stretch of country all apparently exactly the same as that through which you were plunging.  The green land of France lay behind you in the distance.  But the rest of the landscape was an ocean of red craters.  In one part of it, just over the near horizon, there protruded the shattered dry stubble of an orchard long since reduced to about thirty bare, black, shattered tree stumps.  Nearer were a few short black stakes protruding among the craters—­clearly the remains of an ancient wire entanglement.  The trench was still traceable ten or twelve paces ahead, and there might be something which looked like the continuation of it a dozen yards farther—­a line of ancient parapet appeared to be distinguishable there for a short interval.  That was certainly the direction.

It was the parapet sure enough.  There, waterlogged in earth, were the remains of a sandbag barricade built across the trench.  A few yards on was another similar barrier.  They must have been the British and German barricade built across that sap at the end of some fierce bomb fight, already long-forgotten by the lapse of several weeks.  What Victoria Crosses, what Iron Crosses were won there, by deeds whose memory deserved to last as long as the race endures, God only knows—­one trusts that the great scheme of things provides some record of such a sacrifice.

Here the trench divided.  There was no sign of a footprint either way.  Shells of various sizes were sprinkling the landscape impartially—­about ten or fifteen in the minute; none very close—­a black burst on the brown hill—­two white shrapnel puffs five hundred yards on one side—­a huge brick-red cloud over the skyline—­an angry little high-explosive whizzbang a quarter of a mile down the hill behind.  It is so that it goes on all day long in the area where our troops are.