The subaltern commanding this section of the trench sat in a hunched position in the narrow corridor of earth topped with sandbags. His knees drawn up to serve as a support for the writing-pad, he wrote quickly between long pauses when he bit the end of his pencil and stared reflectively at the brown clay wall some two feet in front of his nose. At his side a man stood, bent and motionless, peering into the lower end of a long box, very narrow in proportion to its length, which he held against the side of the trench so that the other end just rose above the wall of sandbags. Further view down the trench in that direction was barred by the traverse--the thick dividing-wall of earth that would localise the effect of a shell-burst or a bomb. All was quiet. The subaltern might have imagined that only he and the look-out at his side remained buried in this flat landscape where once two armies had flung fire and noise and steel at one another, hidden from the sight of those who should have come to tell him that the war was over and the armies stolen away. He did not so imagine. Ever present to his mind was the parallel line of sandbags, some fifty yards away, between him and which stretched a tangle of wire overgrown with rank grasses and tufts of corn. That parallel line was the great permanent fact in his existence. He knew it in its every aspect better than he had ever previously known anything on this earth. Not a spot on that apparently deserted wall might change without his being interested to the quick. Even as he wrote, the feeling and the knowledge of it were concrete in his brain, constraining him to this cramped attitude. Since October this wall of his had fronted the other wall and now it was June. For nine long months, through snow and rain and sunshine, from the long nights to the long pitiless days, these two walls had remained the same, sheltering the same lurking enmities though the individuals who temporarily incarnated them came and went. Sometimes ablaze with stabs of darting flame, erupting bombs lobbed with a deceptive innocent slowness through the air, belching a mass of men who ran and stumbled and fell in an infinite variety of ways--men who shouted and who screamed so that their voices pierced the appalling uproar; sometimes stretching blank across the fields in a deathly stillness as to-day; their position had never altered. The quagmire between them, criss-crossed with barbed wire, had grown up into a waste of grass and nodding poppies that nearly hid what looked like bundles of weather-stained old clothes whence came a sickening, all-pervading smell. Behind each wall, hundreds of men had died or been carried away, maimed and broken, a lifelong burden for some human heart. Not a sandbag of those piled to make the parapet which sheltered the subaltern, but might have had a man's name written on it in memoriam of a life suddenly extinguished. The necrology of the opposing parapet would have been as full.