Here and there in the wire, among the tin cans and things, you can see fluttering bits of weather-worn uniform and old rags, and, at times, things more gruesome. Beyond the wire you see the strip of No Man's Land. Where we are, the average width of it is round about a hundred yards. In some places it's more, and in one place we can see, perhaps a mile off, it narrows down to much less than half that. Then begins the Boche wire, and through and across that you see the Boche front line, very much like your own, too much like your own to be very easily distinguished from it at night. But that's a wonderful thing, that strip we call No Man's Land, running from the North Sea to Switzerland, five hundred miles. All the way along that line, day and night, without a moment's cessation, through all these long months, men's eyes have been glaring across that forsaken strip, and lead has been flying to and fro over it. To show yourself in it means death. But I have heard a lark trilling over it in the early morning as sweetly as any bird ever sang over an English meadow. A lane of death, five hundred miles long, strewn from end to end with the remains of soldiers! And to either side of it, throughout the whole of these five hundred miles, a warren of trenches, dug-outs, saps, tunnels, underground passages, inhabited, not by rabbits, but by millions of rats, it's true, and millions of hiving, busy men, with countless billions of rounds of death-dealing ammunition, and a complex organisation as closely ordered and complete as the organisation of any city in England! It's also inhabited at this moment by one man who simply must stop scribbling, and have some grub before going on duty. This one among the millions, with the very healthy appetite, manages, in despite of all the strafing, to think quite a lot about you, and hopes you will go on thinking equally cheerily of him--your "_Temporary Gentleman_." THE DUG-OUT