The trenches were swarming with soldiers, the reliefs who were going back to billets, and the reserves who were taking their places; the sappers and pioneers, with their picks and shovels, who, protected by the machine-guns, repair the shelters wherever they have given way; the ambulance men and the stretcher-bearers; the grave diggers; the supplying sections, who bring up the cases of grenades, before ever they appear with food. This crowd of dim men, ten feet underground, moved like a silent river. One hardly thought of talking. To-night, when they are consolidating the conquered positions, the opposing artilleries were engaged in a terrific duel. The barrage fires of the Germans followed one another every quarter of an hour, each one lasting seven minutes, and each minute an eternity, when, every second, there fell not less than 100 shells. To protect those who were at work the English artillery set up curtain fires, which smashed every preparation for a counter-attack. Marmites, shells, shrapnel, hurtled from either side of the single line which had been snatched from this Inferno. An odd scent of roasted apples catches us by the throat; our eyes begin to stream in a detestable fashion. "Look out for the acid drops!" cries our major. We know this bit of soldiers' slang, which means the lachrymatory shells. We quickly put on our masks. In perfect safety, crouched against the wall of the trench, in the company of a hundred unknown comrades, we wait until the poisonous gust of yellow smoke has blown away. Through the eye-pieces of our masks everything seems to be enveloped in some fabulous steam; the pale lightning of the guns, the ghastly discs of the English rockets, the red stars of the German. But one sound: the clatter of the machine-guns near us, a muffled thunder as of a rising sea. In this muddy ditch we are like some lost gang of divers. And in the meantime, 100 yards ahead of us, in the midst of choking gases and the tempest of the machine-guns, soldiers--heroes--have never ceased their work. They hammer nails, they drive in stakes, they sink piles, they knot together into spider nets the tangled strands of the barbed wire. All honour to them! These are the Supermen. CHAPTER IV. SURPRISES OF A MOONLIT FROSTY NIGHT. A true Walpurgis Night of heroes and warriors. It is not on the summit of the Brocken that I have witnessed it, but, looking out over the plain of the Ancre, from a tree. This tree, every evening, is wreathed with the fumes of asphyxiating shells. Its woolly streamers of shrapnel smoke are like the foliage around a heraldic crown.