As day grew whiter and the sunrise reddened, we learnt a good deal about the condition of affairs that night had masked. Every few yards through the standing wheat new lines of defences had been dug. Trench-system behind trench-system stretched for miles, scarring the greenness of the landscape. They were all of recent construction, for the earth had been but newly turned. Here, behind a wood or a rise of ground, a battery position had been selected and gun-pits laid out. One came to what looked like a hay-stack or a pile of tumbled logs, only to find that it was a machine-gun nest, cunningly chosen to command a valley down which an advancing enemy must march. Beneath grass in ditches wire-entanglements had been hidden, so contrived that they could be set up across the road at a moment’s notice, to obstruct pursuing cavalry. One could follow the reasoning of the stealthy mind which had woven this maze of destruction. The enemy would have maps of our back-country worked out from their aeroplane photographs. They would know beforehand each dip and hollow where artillery and machine-gun resistance might be expected; consequently they would try to neutralise such resistance with their heavies before they sent their infantry forward. The stealthy mind had argued every probability; very often it had arranged its strong points in open places, where the position was so badly chosen that it would not be suspected. It became plain that whatever our game might be, this time it was to be neck or nothing. The Allies might be planning to attack; but, if they had to retire, they were reckoning on selling every yard of land at the highest cost in lives. All the machinery for the shambles was ready, only the bodies were lacking. One did not require to be highly imaginative to picture the murder holes these woods and valleys would become when once the slaughter started. For someone disaster was brewing; whether for ourselves or the Germans, it was impossible to guess. Now that it was daylight, we recognised the country; it had been quiet and unwarlike when last we had passed through it. The rapid transformation enabled us to realise the terror of the fighting which had been taking place to the south—the desperate few, digging their toes in, determined not to budge, British, American, French, hanging on in the hope of reinforcements which could not come. The landscape lying smiling in the August dawn lost its peacefulness; one saw it as it might become—a hell ensanguined by death, through which men crawled from rifle-pit to rifle-pit like dogs with their spines broken.