"Now I'm here," she went on, "I want to see for myself just what you poor men have to put up with. How awful it must be to live in a trench like this. And can't you show me a German?" She smiled up into Alf's face. That smile galvanized him as before, into a display of rash gallantry. "So you shall, miss," he said. "Just step along the trench 'ere, and we'll show you all we can." Isobel surveyed the trench doubtfully and then looked down at her delicately shod feet. "Couldn't we walk along the top?" she asked. "It all seems so quiet and peaceful--surely there'd be no danger. We must be a long way from the Germans, aren't we?" "It's not Fritz, miss," interposed Bill earnestly. "It's our sergeant. 'E mustn't see us with you. A fair terror, 'e is." "Oh," said Isobel easily, feeling that she could deal with these dream-people of hers as she pleased. "I'll see you don't get into trouble. This is _such_ an opportunity--I mustn't waste it ... here's a flight of steps, if you'll give me your hand again and...." She reached the top and her voice ceased as suddenly and uncannily as a voice ceases when it is cut off in the middle of a word on the telephone. She stood staring dumbly across the old No-Man's-Land, making in her dainty furs the strangest picture that battle-scarred strip of land had seen. Alf and Bill, one on each side of her, gazed, too. "There ain't much to see 'ere, I'm afraid, miss," said the latter apologetically. According to his lights, Bill spoke the truth. To his accustomed eyes there was nothing to be seen worthy of special mention; but to Isobel--pitch-forked straight from her sheltered, mindless life into the very heart of the battle area--it was far otherwise. Her first feeling was that her dream had suddenly turned to horrible nightmare. Surely nothing but distorted fancy could have produced the scene before her eyes! It was as though the earth had been some stricken monster, which had stiffened into death in the very midst of the maddened writhings of its last agony. For the most part it was a land without landmarks--a land featureless, but torn and tortured, poisoned and pulverized, where the eye could find no certain resting-place and the mind no relief. On every side lay the same desolate waste, pockmarked with shell-holes, each of which was half filled with stagnant and stinking water, on the surface of which was an oozing and fetid scum. Here and there the ragged remains of a barbed-wire entanglement stood out above the general welter; here and there--but very rarely--a few scattered stones indicated where once had stood a cottage; here and there fluttered decayed rags of blue or khaki or field-gray.... Cartridge-cases, bits of equipment, bully-beef tins--all kinds of abandoned rubbish were scattered about.