it on the 25th March 1918, and the thoughtful Germans have given their monument a concrete base. From the top of the Butte there is a complete circle of view, and one sees a light railway going from it towards Eaucourt lined with dead desperate trees, one sees once more as it were waves of the sea on leagues of no-man's land, black ruins of woods, wrecks of villages--a wonderful standing point and vantage ground in the great Somme scene. [Illustration] It is two miles to the entrance to Bapaume. The route nationale from Albert runs smooth and level below the Butte, a track for space-devouring motors. On the right of the road the luscious brownness of the massed timber of an infinite array of new wooden crosses; on the left, swarthy and scraggy, thistle-swallowed, the decaying memorials of the German dead--Hier ruht Friedrich Blohm, Paul Vogel, August Dill and the rest, till Germany comes and takes them back again or in time they are forgotten and lost. Bapaume is just ahead, but the Army stops short of it--like flies dragging their limbs across a little fly-paper they tire and can go no further. There they stick for the dreadful winter of 1916-17 in the most loathsome trenches of the war, in foul and deepening liquescence, living and dead and rats in a fiendish domesticity. Leagues of destruction behind them; an enemy wall of flesh and bayonet in front; rain or cloud or mist, and only occasionally a mocking sun above. A fresh-faced new officer from the Caithness coast joined in the late autumn of '16. He arrived at the line at night. His first duty was to superintend a burying party--some three hundred sodden green bundles to be disposed of--three hundred gleaned from the mud and the pits and the verges of no-man's land. He came to the front imbued with the faith of Donald Hankey, and the belief that under him he would find "the everlasting arms." He could not endure the ribaldry of the mess and the war-bred cynicism of those who believed in letting _others_ be heroic. He brought a Kingsley-Carlylean fervour with him, and believed in "putting his back into it," and doing even the meanest duty as if it were infinitely worth while. He tried to know his sergeants and his men. He was so energetic in the football field playing officers versus sergeants that the onlookers laughed. He tried to stop bad language and gambling, and he routed out people to go to the padre's voluntary Sunday evening services at the back of the lines. He came in 1916; he lasted till 1918. What was the effect on this man? This, that by 1918 he used such bad language himself that even the N.C.O.'s were surprised. He exhausted the conventional execrations of the mess-room, and used expressions which would never be heard there. We carried him to his grave at C---- and his sergeants remarked how commonly he had come to use expressions which no officer would ordinarily employ. Withal he had his drink and his bet, and became what is called by males, _entre eux_,