Yesterday, when I went to that neighbourhood, I saw four German soldiers who had come out into the open, rather risking death there than by staying in their dungeon. They appeared for a minute round the corner of some brick-stacks in the Cité St.-Auguste. I was watching the German lines there, and staring at the ruined houses and slag-heaps and broken water-towers of Harnes and Annay, beyond the outer fields of the mining city. The church towers in both those villages still stand, though a little damaged, and some of the red roofs are still intact. The German lines were away beyond a strip of No Man's Land, and here not a soul was to be seen, no trace of life in all this land of death until suddenly I saw those four figures come stealthily up behind the brick-stacks. They stood up quite straight and looked towards our ground, and then after a second crouched low so that only their heads showed above a little dip in the ground. A few minutes later I saw two more Germans. They ran at a jog-trot along a hedge outside the Cité St.-Auguste and made a bolt through a gap. It was as strange to see them as though they were visitors from another planet, for, in this district of Lens, no man shows his body above ground unless he is careless of a quick death, and one may stare for days at the empty houses and the broken mine-shafts and the high black slag-heaps without seeing any living thing. On our side of the lines, during a long walk yesterday to the crest of Hill 70, I saw only a few lonely figures above ground, although below ground there were many, and in one dug-out where I was lucky to go I found a luncheon-party of officers discussing the psychology of Kerensky and news of the world one day old, and the chances of three years more of war or thirty, as men do round a London dinner-table, though there were loud, unpleasant noises overhead, where German shells were in flight to a trench which had been recommended to me as a nice safe place for a Sunday walk. Somehow, I did not believe in the safety of any walk in this neighbourhood, because there were fresh shell-holes along the tracks between the ruined houses which could not inspire the simplest soul with confidence. There is not a house there which has not been knocked edgewise or upside down, and the little village church I passed is no longer a place for worship but a nightmare building, inhabited by the menace of death. The German gunners cannot leave these mining villages alone, though they are as deserted as the Polar regions, with no cheerful Tommy's face to be seen through any of the empty window-frames, or through any of the holed walls or down any of the sand-bag shelters which used to be the homes of British soldiers when the fighting was closer this way.