"We never say good-bye up here. It does not sound pleasant. Make it au revoir." He, too, had a twinkle in his eye. By this time, one leg ought to have been so much longer than the other that one would have walked in a circle if he had not had a guide. That battery which had been near the dug-out kept on with its regular firing, its shells sweeping overhead. We had not gone far before we came to a board nailed to a tree, with the caution, "Keep to the right!" If you went to the left you might be seen by the enemy, though we were seeing nothing of him, nor of our own trenches yet. Every square yard of this ground had been tested by actual experience, at the cost of dead and wounded men, till safe lanes of approach had been found. Next was a clearing station, where the wounded are brought in from the trenches for transfer to ambulances. A glance at the burden on a stretcher just arrived automatically framed the word, "Shell-fire!" The stains over-running on tanned skin beyond the edge of the white bandage were bright in the sunlight. A khaki blouse torn open, or a trousers leg or a sleeve cut down the seam, revealing the white of the first aid and a splash of red, means one man wounded; and by the ones the thousands come. Fifty wounded men on the floor of a clearing station and the individual is lost in the crowd. When you see the one borne past, if there is nothing else to distract attention you always ask two questions: Will he die? Has he been maimed for life? If the answers to both are no, you feel a sense of triumph, as if you had seen a human play, built skilfully around a life to arouse your emotions, turn out happily. The man has fought in an honourable cause; he has felt the touch of death's fingers. How happy he is when he knows that he will get well! In prospect, as his wound heals into the scar which will be the lasting decoration of his courage, his home and all that it means to him. What kind of a home has he, this private soldier? In the slums, with a slattern wife, or in a cottage with a flower garden in front, only a few minutes' walk from the green fields of the English countryside? But we set out to tell you about the kind of inferno in which this man got his splash of red. We come to the banks of a canal which has carried the traffic of the Low Countries for many centuries; the canal where British and French had fought many a Thermopylae in the last eight months. Along its banks run rows of fine trees, narrowing in perspective before the eye. Some have been cut in two by the direct hit of a heavy shell and others splintered down, bit by bit. Others still standing have been hit many times. There are cuts as fresh as if the chips had just flown from the axeman's blow, and there are scars from cuts made last autumn which nature's sap, rising as it does in the veins of wounded men, has healed, while from the remaining branches it sent forth leaves in answer to the call of spring.