But with the sun the mist rolled up like a blind at one’s window and the larks rocketed into the clear blue as though those trenches were indeed deserted. Away on the left was a town, rising from the curling river in terraces of battered ruins, an inexpressible desolation, silent, empty, dead. Terrible to see that gaping skeleton of a town in the flowering countryside. Far in the distance, peeping above the ridge and visible only through glasses, was a faint pencil against the sky--the great factory chimney outside Lille. Peace seemed the keynote of it all in the soft perfumed heat of that early summer. Yet eyes looked steadily out from every chimney and other eyes from the opposite ridge; and with just a word down the wire trenches went in smoking heaps, houses fell like packs of cards touched by a child’s finger, noise beat upon the brain and Death was the master whom we worshipped, upon whose altar we made bloody sacrifice. We hadn’t been there much more than a week when we had our first hint of the hourly reality of it. The third subaltern, who hadn’t properly recovered from the effect of his wound, was on his way up to the O.P. one morning and had a misadventure with a shell. He heard it coming, a big one, and sought refuge in the nearest house. The shell unfortunately selected the same house. When the dust had subsided and the ruins had assumed their final shape the subaltern emerged, unwounded, but unlike his former self.--The doctor diagnosed shell shock and the work went on without him. It seemed as though that were the turning point in the career of the peace sector. The Hun began a leisurely but persistent destruction of chimneys with five-nines. One heard the gun in the distance, not much more than the popping of a champagne cork at the other end of the Carlton Grill. Some seconds later you thought you heard the inner circle train come in at Baker Street. Dust choked you, the chimney rocked in the frightful rush of wind, followed by a soul-shaking explosion,--and you looked through the black aperture of the chimney to see a pillar of smoke and falling earth spattering down in the sunshine. And from the lower deck immediately beneath you came the voice of the signaller, “They ought to give us sailor suits up ’ere, sir!” And passing a finger round the inside of your sticky collar which seemed suddenly a little tight, you sat down firmly again and said, “Yes.--Is the steward about?” Within sixty seconds another champagne cork popped. Curse the Carlton Grill!