But stay! Right on the cross-roads, in the centre of the village, just below the fingers of a sign-post which indicates the distance to four French townships, whose names you never heard of until a year ago, and now will never forget, there hangs a large, white, newly painted board, bearing a notice in black letters six inches high. Exactly underneath the board, rubbing their noses appreciatively against the sign-post, stand two mules, attached to a limbered waggon, the property of the A.S.C. Their charioteers are sitting adjacent, in a convenient shell-hole, partaking of luncheon. "That was a rotten place we' ad to wait in yesterday, Sammy," observes Number One. "The draught was somethink cruel." The recumbent Samuel agrees. "This little 'oiler is a bit of all right," he remarks. "When you've done strarfin' that bully-beef, 'and it over, ole man!" He leans his head back upon the lip of the shell-hole, and gazes pensively at the notice-board six feet away. It says:-- VERY DANGEROUS. DO NOT LOITER HERE. III Here is another cross-roads, a good mile farther forward--and less than a hundred yards behind the fire-trench. It is dawn. The roads themselves are not so distinct as they were. They are becoming grass-grown: for more than a year--in daylight at least--no human foot has trodden them. The place is like hundreds of others that you may see scattered up and down this countryside--two straight, flat, metalled country roads, running north and south and east and west, crossing one another at a faultless right angle. Of the four corners thus created, one is--or was--occupied by an estaminet: you can still see the sign, _Estaminet au Commerce_, over the door. Two others contain cottages,--the remains of cottages. At the fourth, facing south and east, stands what is locally known as a "Calvaire,"--bank of stone, a lofty cross, and a life-size figure of Christ, facing east, towards the German lines. This spot is shelled every day--has been shelled every day for months. Possibly the enemy suspects a machine-gun or an observation post amid the tumble-down buildings. Hardly one brick remains upon another. And yet--the sorrowful Figure is unbroken. The Body is riddled with bullets--in the glowing dawn you may Count not five but fifty wounds--but the Face is untouched. It is the standing miracle of this most materialistic war. Throughout the length of France you will see the same thing. Agnostics ought to come out here, for a "cure." IV With spring comes also the thought of the Next Push. But we do not talk quite so glibly of pushes as we did. Neither, for that matter, does Brother Boche. He has just completed six weeks' pushing at Verdun, and is beginning to be a little uncertain as to which direction the pushing is coming from.