with traverses every twenty or thirty paces, so as to make it impossible for an enemy on your flank to get what is called enfilade fire down and along the trench. Enfilade fire is deadly, of course. Fire from the front, on the other hand, if it falls short or overshoots the mark even by a yard lands in front of or behind your trench. You get that? And what does it look like when one stares out from one's front trench? Well, it depends. It's always pretty queer, but it's queerest at night, when the Boche is sending up his ghostly flares, or when there's enough moonlight to make you fancy all the time you can see all manner of things. First, there's your own parapet, anything from five to five-and-twenty feet of it, sloping gradually down to the open grass of No Man's Land. That's what stops the bullets destined for your head. When Boche shells are well enough placed to blow it in, you must build it up again as soon as you can, or the bit of trench behind it will be exposed, and as your men pass to and fro there will be casualties. Well, then, anything from ten to twenty or thirty feet beyond the lip of your trench, your wire entanglements begin, and extend, say a good thirty or forty paces out into No Man's Land. You've seen barbed-wire entanglements in pictures: row after row of stakes (some of ours are iron screw standards now, that can be set up silently) laced together across and across by barbed wire, forming an obstacle which it is particularly difficult and beastly to get through, especially at night, which, of course, is the only time you could even approach it without being blown to bits. Here and there all through our wire are old bells, tin cans, bits of flattened tin, and oddments of that sort hanging loosely, so that when even a rat begins cavorting about in the wire at night your sentries know about it, and the Boche is neither so slim nor so agile as a rat. Say that he comes by night with bombs in his hand. One cannot throw a bomb with any accuracy of aim more than twenty or thirty yards. Boche finds himself stopped by our wire, say fifty or sixty yards from our line. If he slowly worms himself in, say twenty paces, without being heard--and he won't--and lobs a bomb at our line, imagine the hail of lead that's coming about him as he tries to wriggle his way back through the wire after shying his bomb! But, as a matter of fact, the Boche is not good at that game. He does not shine at all at creep-in on our line. When he leaves his trenches at all he seems to prefer coming out in pretty close formation, rubbing shoulders with his pals. Our fellows are a good deal better at sculling about over the sticks than he is.