its black nose thrust through a net of branches.  Sometimes the roof of the tunnel was so low that we had to bend nearly double; and at intervals we came to heavy doors, made of logs and sheeted with iron, which shut off one section from another.  It is hard to guess the distance one covers in creeping through an unlit passage with different levels and countless turnings; but we must have descended the hillside for at least a mile before we came out into a half-ruined farmhouse.  This building, which had kept nothing but its outer walls and one or two partitions between the rooms, had been transformed into an observation post.  In each of its corners a ladder led up to a little shelf on the level of what was once the second story, and on the shelf sat a dragoon at his peep-hole.  Below, in the dilapidated rooms, the usual life of a camp was going on.  Some of the soldiers were playing cards at a kitchen table, others mending their clothes, or writing letters or chuckling together (not too loud) over a comic newspaper.  It might have been a scene anywhere along the second-line trenches but for the lowered voices, the suddenness with which I was drawn back from a slit in the wall through which I had incautiously peered, and the presence of these helmeted watchers overhead.

We plunged underground again and began to descend through another darker and narrower tunnel.  In the upper one there had been one or two roofless stretches where one could straighten one’s back and breathe; but here we were in pitch blackness, and saved from breaking our necks only by the gleam of the pocket-light which the young lieutenant who led the party shed on our path.  As he whisked it up and down to warn us of sudden steps or sharp corners he remarked that at night even this faint glimmer was forbidden, and that it was a bad job going back and forth from the last outpost till one had learned the turnings.

The last outpost was a half-ruined farmhouse like the other.  A telephone connected it with Head-quarters and more dumb dragoons sat motionless on their lofty shelves.  The house was shut off from the tunnel by an armoured door, and the orders were that in case of attack that door should be barred from within and the access to the tunnel defended to the death by the men in the outpost.  We were on the extreme verge of the defences, on a slope just above the village over which we had heard the artillery roaring a few hours earlier.  The spot where we stood was raked on all sides by the enemy’s lines, and the nearest trenches were only a few yards away.  But of all this nothing was really perceptible or comprehensible to me.  As far as my own observation went, we might have been a hundred miles from the valley we had looked down on, where the French soldiers were walking peacefully up the cart-track in the sunshine.  I only knew that we had come out of a black labyrinth into a gutted house among fruit-trees, where soldiers were lounging and smoking, and people whispered as