“I dunno what they send you chaps out for”—began the Infantry Colonel, a wiry resolute man, square of chin and square of forehead—“you can’t _do_ anything. How do you propose getting your messages back?” “Runner to beyond Trônes Wood, sir. Then telephone.” “Hm. We can do as well as that ourselves. What’s the use of information two hours old? These new creeping barrages are the very devil. No stopping ’em once they start. Where are you going to observe from?” Peter told him; and they discussed details for ten minutes. The Colonel’s servant brought him tea. “Have some?” asked the Colonel. Peter, wet through and shivering, accepted gratefully. Asked the doctor, watching him as he drank: “Do you go over the top with the first attack?” “He’s supposed to come with me,” interrupted the Colonel. Then to Peter: “You’d rather be on your own I expect.” “I think so, sir.” “Right”—the Colonel dabbed a finger at the map—“I shall make for here. Join me if you can. I must be off now. It’ll take me the best part of an hour to go round the front line.” He took his helmet from the wall behind him; gripped a stout stick; and scrambled off up the mud-chute. “Shouldn’t like your job much,” commented the doctor. “Shouldn’t like his,” observed Peter; looking at the disappearing soles of the Colonel’s boots. . . . By now it was nearly nine o’clock. Above, all seemed quiet. Peter finished his tea; said _au revoir_ to the doctor; hauled himself—breast on mud—into the upper air again; found Finlayson and Mucksweat waiting in the narrow mud-floored trench from which he had elected to observe; rested elbows on parapet; peered cautiously over. Immediately beneath him a smashed railway-line curved northwards, ending in the heap of twisted metal, upcurved like the ribs of a skeleton horse, which had been Guillemont Station. Over the railway, straight to his front, bare ground dipped to green—cut by the narrow brown cleft of our own front line. Beyond this, four hundred yards away, great molehills of white chalk marked the enemy’s position. But between the narrow brown cleft and the white molehills, lay the sunken road which had so often defied assault. At that distance it was hardly visible; showed only as a discolouration on the drab landscape—a discolouration which ended at skyline in the three-cornered bush-clump of Arrowhead Copse. Right of the Copse—our ground—rose the trees of Trônes Wood: left of it, beyond sunk road and white molehills, the enemy’s territory stretched in colourless desert tossed to occasional fountains by long-range shell-fire. Of what had been Guillemont village nothing showed except four tree-tops on the extreme left of the shell-tossed desert. . . . It still lacked two and a half hours to the time of the attack; and Peter, having shown the ground and explained his plans to the Bombardier and Mucksweat, sat down to wait.