linked with advanced posts, called _postes d’écoute_, where the observer can note the least activity in the enemy’s trenches. Thus the men guarding the first-line trenches can be sensibly reduced, leaving a greater proportion to remain in the second-line trenches and in rest chambers dug out of the earth at the ends of the lines. Of course, the trenches vary considerably, and the commander takes note of the character of the soil. He makes use of a hill-side, even of the ditches with embankments on the side of the road, of every natural conformation of the soil, and the number of men necessary to defend the line varies according to these circumstances. It is true, certainly, that trench warfare has inflicted a great loss of the picturesque, of glittering movements, of kaleidoscopic effects which turned and twisted into wonderful pictures; the picture to-day is replaced by a melancholy waste of earth scored and humped into mounds. Within was life, and no end to labour, for there were trenches, always more trenches to be dug as the line swayed or curved in new forms, yielding to pressure or being broken by it. And in the trenches themselves there was a perpetual search for improvement, and the longer the troops stayed there, the more highly organised became their abodes. If there was not an abundance of hot water there was generally enough of cold, and gas on every floor; alas! too much of it. There were wooden floors and wooden walls and pictures, and even sculpture adorned them. In these subterranean passages dwelt our men in a kind of heroic enjoyment Of a battle without issue, of a sort of deadly ding-dong, only varied by the blackening of the sky with the monstrous smoke of projectiles that count a man a mere atom in their whirlwind path—fearful engines that lay waste the country, that reduce villages to a hopeless jumble of stones and bent iron and splintered wood, with derisive-looking chimneys floating in a troubled sea, like derelicts in the track of a tornado.