The moon was not due to rise till about eleven that night, so I decided to go out at nine. The Company Sergeant-Major asked if he could come, so I arranged to take him and one Platoon scout from each Platoon. They had none of them been out as yet, and we wanted them to have practice. Getting out into No Man's Land marks a distinct epoch in a man's training for trench warfare, you know. If it happens that he has some considerable time in trenches without ever going over the parapet, he's apt to be jumpy when he does get out. I fancy that must be one reason why the Boches make such a poor show in the matter of individual effort of an aggressive sort. They're so trench-bound that their men seem no use out of trenches, except in massed formation. Don't make any mistake about it; there's some excuse for a man being jumpy over the parapet when he's never had a chance of getting accustomed to it. That's why I think our O.C. is very wise in the way he tries to give all the men a turn at work over the parapet, wiring, patrolling, improving saps, and what not: because it's a pretty eerie business until you get used to it. Behind our line you have graves and crosses, and comparatively friendly things of all kinds--rubbish, you know, and oddments discarded by fellow humans no longer ago than a matter of hours. But out in No Man's Land, of course, the dominant factor is the swift, death-dealing bullet, and the endless mass of barbed-wire entanglements which divides Boches from Britons and Frenchmen for so many hundreds of miles. There are plenty of dead things out there, but, barring the rats, when you get any other movement in No Man's Land you may reckon it's enemy movement: creeping men with bombs and daggers, who may have been stalking you or may not have seen you. But it wouldn't do to reckon much on anyone's not having seen you, because if there's one place in the world in which every man's ears and eyes are apt to be jolly well open it's out there in the slimy darkness of No Man's Land.