‘Presently our trench crossed No Man’s Land—at least, it once was No Man’s Land; now it belongs to us until we can turn it over to its proper owners. We examined Fritz’s handiwork where he had spent months of watching and fighting. We could see what British fighting was like by the evidence there.... At one place we were within forty yards of him, but we heard no sound. The only sound that broke the stillness of that beautiful day was the bang of our own guns and the swish of our crumps overhead. At one point, close to the tangled wire of Fritz’s front line, we saw a sad sight, perhaps the saddest sight of war, groups of our own lads, sleeping, sleeping, sleeping. Heroes, they had done their bit and there they lie. They have died so that others can live to be free from the yoke of a monster in human form, whose greed for power must be stifled.’ ‘Sleeping, sleeping, sleeping’: this iterated note conveys, now that the war is over and the maps are folded and put away, a tender thought properly keyed, at which to close our account of the Somme battlefield. It is a field of great achievement and of pious memories, hallowed for all time in English history, and the ‘more’ that remained to be done, as foreseen in the vision of this writer, could not be more worthily accomplished than in the spirit of the heroes of the Somme. II. WINTER, 1916-17. It was the peculiarity of the war in France and Flanders that there was no clear ending to any battle. At Ypres, at Verdun, and on the Somme, the tide of war flowed with full flood, and ebbed away without definite decision. There was a little more erosion of the trenches on one side or the other, a few more miles of territory submerged, or disengaged from the invader, revealing, when the tide rolled back, the waste and ravage and destruction, and then a temporary lull, till ‘The tide comes again, And brims the little sea-shore lakes, and sets Seaweed afloat, and fills The silent pools, rivers, and rivulets, Among the inland hills.’ We reach such a coign of observation, such a lull, less real than apparent, for brave men were being killed every day, in the period from November to January, 1916-17. It lay between the exhaustion of the Somme offensive and the refluent wave of battle-fury up and down the line in early spring; and this brief interval may be utilized to pick up a few stray threads. Let us look at home in the first instance.