standing freshly cut, and stuck into the ground as if to mark the stand for guns at a cover shoot.

In front the unencumbered ground, cultivated in narrow strips, sloped evenly down to a main road which crossed our front diagonally, and formed an angle on the left, but out of sight, with the road we had just left. At this point the angle of the roads held by C Company on our left flank was hidden from view by a piece of rising ground. On the right flank and at a lower level, No. 14 platoon had already started digging their trench in a stubble field: beyond this, and in the same line, was a plantation of tall trees, with thick undergrowth.

The Route Nationale, with its usual border of poplar-trees, cuts diagonally across the patchwork of roots, stubble, and meadow. The distance at its nearest point to our trench, which is now traced out on the edge of the cabbage field, is just about 400 yards; 50 yards farther down to the right, on the far side of the road, there is a large white house.

Beyond the road the fields carry a heavy crop of beetroot, but there is here no great width of cultivated land. The irregular border of the forest reaches in some places to within four or five hundred yards of the road, forming a barrier to the searching of a field-glass at 1000 yards from our position. Away to the right the valley opens out like a map, with villages dotted here and there among green plantations in the middle distance, and beyond a great rolling stretch of country looking to the naked eye like some large barren heath, but showing in the field-glass the patch-quilt effect of innumerable tiny strips of variegated cultivation.

On such a day as this, when the sun is shining in the distant valley, while thick clouds above shade and tone the light, one can see farther yet to where fields and woods and villages fade together in the blue distance, with here and there a darker tone of shadow, and sometimes the sparkle of sunlight on a distant roof.

There was nothing in all the prospect to give the slightest hint of war. No traffic stirred down the straight avenue of poplars; distant patches of open country away to the right where the sun was shining remained still and deserted. Overhead the clouds had been gathering. The trench was nearly completed, when the rain came suddenly and with almost tropical force, blinding all view of the landscape.

I determined to pass away the time with a visit to the white house by the roadside, and at the same time get a look at our trench from what might soon be the enemy's point of view.

The village on the road and on our flank (half left) consisted of a dozen houses. Every house was shut up. The warm rain poured in torrents, and the village appeared to be deserted. I turned and walked slowly down the road towards the white house.

I can still see in my mind's eye the picture of this roadside inn as I saw it that morning, as none will ever see it again.

The house stood back a little from the road; two steps above the ground-level one entered the estaminet, a large airy room, a long table down the centre covered with a red-and-white check oilcloth. Outside stood a number of iron tables and chairs on each side of a sanded level space for playing bowls or ninepins. Beyond this a garden, or rather series of rose bowers, each with its seat, a green patch of long grass in the centre, and high hedges on the side nearest the road, and on the side nearest the cultivated fields and the woods beyond. In one of the rose bowers in the garden I found a sentry peering through the hedge. I was struck with the air of conviction with which, in answer to my question, he said he had seen nothing. The tone showed how convinced he was that this was simply the old old game of morning manœuvres and finish at lunch-time.

In my own mind such an impression was fast fading. The barricaded silent village up the road had helped to create a sense of impending tragedy. But the mask of make-believe did not quite fall from my eyes until I met the woman of the estaminet, a woman who came out of the white house weeping and complaining aloud, with her children clinging to her skirt. Her words I have never forgotten, though at the time I did not realise the whole meaning they contained, nor that this woman's words were the protest of a nation.

The Germans were close at hand, she said, and would destroy everything. What was to be done, where was she to flee for safety? Her frightened, sobbing voice, and the frightened faces of the children, these were, indeed, the first signs of war! I told her the truth that I knew nothing, and could give no advice as to whether it was safe to stay or flee, and as I left the tidy sanded garden and stepped on to the main road she raised her voice again with prophetic words: "What have we done, we poor people, 'paisible travailleurs'? What have we done that destruction should now fall upon our heads? Qu'est ce que nous avons fait de mal!"

The warm sunshine was pleasant after the rain. Not a sign of life on the long straight road. Four hundred yards away a soldier was still planting cabbages along the top of our parapet. I watched his work for a moment through my field-glasses, and then turned and looked across the road at the thick undergrowth beyond the cultivated ground. If the woman of the estaminet was right, even now those woods might conceal a German scout.

If at the time such a thought passed through my mind, it scarcely obtained a moment's consideration, so difficult it was then to realise the change that had already come upon the world. How incredible it is now that at the last moment of peace the prospect of real fighting could have still seemed so remote.

Somewhere hidden in the memory of all who have taken part in the war there is the remembrance of a moment which marked the first realisation of the great change—the moment when material common things took on in real earnest their military significance, when, with the full comprehension of the mind, a wood became cover for the enemy, a house a possible machine-gun position, and every field a battlefield.

Such an awakening came to me when sitting on the roadside by the White Estaminet. The sound of a horse galloping and the sight of horse and rider, the sweat and mud and the tense face of the rider bending low by the horse's neck, bending as if to avoid bullets. The single rider, perhaps bearing a despatch, followed after a short space by a dozen cavalrymen, not galloping these, but trotting hard down the centre of the road, mud-stained, and also with tense faces. A voice crying out above the rattle of hoofs on the roadway: "Fall back and join H.Q."

Now that the sound of cavalry had passed away the road was quiet again. There was no stir around the white house, no peasants or children to see the soldiers, no stir in the fields and woods beyond.

Behind the closed shutters of the white house the tearful woman of the estaminet listened in terror to the sound of horses' hoofs, and crouched in the silence that followed. I returned slowly across the drenched fields filled with the new realisation that this trench of ours was "the front."

The trench, three feet deep and not much more that eighteen inches broad, formed a gradual curve thirty to forty yards in length, and sheltered three sections of the platoon. The fourth section was entrenched on higher ground a hundred yards back, protecting our left flank.

At some distance to the rear stood a pile of faggots, which we laid out in a straight line and covered with a sprinkling of earth to form a dummy trench.

The dinners were served out and the dixies carried away, still in peace. The quiet fields and woods, with the sun now high in