behind the enemy's first lines. Then the British infantry emerged from their trenches and advanced behind this furious and devastating curtain of fire and projectiles. The morning was glorious and the prospect fine. The sun shone brightly in the most beautiful of skies, clear blue flecked with pure white clouds; and as the Ulstermen came out of the wood and ranged up in lines for the push forward, they saw, in the distant view, a sweet and pleasant upland country, the capture of which was the object of the attack. In the hollows the meadows were lush with grass, thick and glossy. There was tillage even, green crops of beetroot growing close to the ground, and tall yellowing corn, far behind the main German trenches. It was like a haunt of husbandry and peace. The only sound one would expect to hear from those harvest fields was that of the soothing reaping-machine garnering the wheat to make bread for the family board of a mother and a brood of young children. But no tiller of the soil was to be seen, near or far. The countryside to the horizon ridge was tenantless, until these tens of thousands of British soldiers suddenly came up out of the ground. Even in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 the agriculturists of northern France--then, as now, the zone of conflict--remained in the homes and pursued their avocations. During the battle of Sedan, which sealed the fate of France, an extraordinary incident occurred--a peasant was observed in one of the valleys within the area of the fight calmly guiding the plough drawn by a big white horse. "Why should the man lose a day?" says Zola in _The Downfall_. "Corn would not cease growing, the human race would not cease living, because a few thousand men happened to be fighting." But war is waged differently now. It is spread along fronts hundreds of miles in extent and depth. Millions of men are engaged. They burrow underground and are armed with terrific engines of destruction. So it was that behind that green and pleasant land, bathed in sunshine, ferocity and death are skulking underground. Those elaborately interlacing white chalky lines over the face of the landscape mark the run of the German trenches. Each dip is a death-trap. The copses are barricaded with fallen timber and wired; the villages are citadels, the farmsteads are forts, the ridges of the two plateaux are each one succession of batteries. Swallows were darting to and fro hawking for flies for their young, and in the clear air soaring larks were singing to their mates brooding on their eggs in the grass, showing that Nature was still carrying on her eternal processes, but the husbandman had fled the deceiving scene, and the after-crops from his old sowings of corn and mustard were mixed with weeds in No Man's Land.