So we enter the village through what was once a street. Here for fifty yards are barricades of bricks and dirt interlaced with farm instruments and carts. Barbed-wire entanglements which only leave a narrow, difficult, zigzag passage between them are evidences of the bitter fights which took place here. We reach the church which is the beginning of the communication trench which leads to the front lines. The church! There is absolutely nothing left of it. One might think that the savagery of the German cannon raged with a special hate on the buildings created for rest, meditation and prayer. The church has fallen down and the naves are now only a mass of stones on which the briers are already beginning to grow. A sort of arched door still stands at the entrance, without a scratch. It is nearly new and its brilliant ironwork seems a challenge in the midst of this destruction. The communication trench starts on the spot where the high altar used to stand. We follow it under the ruins, through the orchards which it furrows, adjusting our steps to each other, and keeping our eyes on the man ahead. Above our heads nature awakes; the sky appears clear now; and branches of trees with their buds and blossoms hang over the parapets. It is five o’clock and broad daylight when we reach the proposed emplacement. It is on a knoll in the middle of an orchard which is bordered some hundred yards away by hawthorn and privet hedges. Behind the hedges are the Boche lines. The engineer in charge of laying out the works is on the ground. He tries to profit by the only salient which permits firing on a sufficiently wide sweep of ground. On the right it commands the entrance to the village by a road. We see its white windings where it unrolls through the gardens, and then it plunges into a small wood and loses itself. Opposite us the emplacement commands an entire sector. They will scoop out the place underneath, and they will keep the green shell of grass and bushes which make the most fortunate and natural sort of camouflage. A communication trench grafted on the main trench from the church will give access to it. Orders are given rapidly, measurements are taken, and the tasks laid out. It is hardly expedient for us to delay in this corner, for our movements would betray our intentions, and already bullets, which are by no means spent bullets, cross above our heads singing their unappreciated buzz. We make our way back through the trench.