growing against the wall, looking southwards all through the summer.  There is no way whatever of telling which it was; it is all one in war; whatever was there is gone; there remain to-day, and survive, the names of those three trees only.  We come next to Apple Lane.  You must not think that an apple tree ever grew there, for we trace here the hand of the wit, who by naming Plum Lane’s neighbour ``Apple Lane’’ merely commemorates the inseparable connection that plum has with apple forever in the minds of all who go to modern war.  For by mixing apple with plum the manufacturer sees the opportunity of concealing more turnip in the jam, as it were, at the junction of the two forces, than he might be able to do without this unholy alliance.

We come presently to the dens of those who trouble us (but only for our own good), the dugouts of the trench mortar batteries.  It is noisy when they push up close to the front line and play for half an hour or so with their rivals:  the enemy sends stuff back, our artillery join in; it is as though, while you were playing a game of croquet, giants hundreds of feet high, some of them friendly, some unfriendly, carnivorous and hungry, came and played football on your croquet lawn.

We go on past Battalion Headquarters, and past the dugouts and shelters of various people having business with History, past stores of bombs and the many other ingredients with which history is made, past men coming down who are very hard to pass, for the width of two men and two packs is the width of a communication trench and sometimes an inch over; past two men carrying a flying pig slung on a pole between them; by many turnings; and Windmill Avenue brings you at last to Company Headquarters in a dugout that Hindenburg made with his German thoroughness.

And there, after a while, descends the Tok Emma man, the officer commanding a trench mortar battery, and is given perchance a whiskey and water, and sits on the best empty box that we have to offer, and lights one of our cigarettes.

``There’s going to be a bit of a strafe at 5.30,’’ he says.

What Happened on the Night of the Twenty-Seventh

The night of the twenty-seventh was Dick Cheeser’s first night on sentry.  The night was far gone when he went on duty; in another hour they would stand to.  Dick Cheeser had camouflaged his age when he enlisted:  he was barely eighteen.  A wonderfully short time ago he was quite a little boy; now he was in a frontline trench.  It hadn’t seemed that things were going to alter like that.  Dick Cheeser was a plowboy:  long brown furrows over haughty, magnificent downs seemed to stretch away into the future as far as his mind could see.  No narrow outlook either, for the life of nations depends upon those brown furrows.  But there are the bigger furrows that Mars makes, the long brown trenches of war; the life of nations depends on these too; Dick Cheeser had never pictured these.  He had heard talk about a big navy and a lot of Dreadnoughts; silly nonsense he called it.  What did one want a big navy for?  To keep the Germans out, some people said.  But the Germans weren’t coming.  If they wanted to come, why didn’t they come?  Anybody could see that they never did come.  Some of Dick Cheeser’s pals had votes.