Hour by hour I watched the "75's." Their marksmanship was wonderful. The rapidity with which the guns were served was an eye-opener. The French gunners burst shrapnel practically over the heads of our men in the front trenches, to cover the area twenty-five yards beyond them. One trooper swore a French shell, aimed to worry sapping operations by the Huns a short distance in front of our trenches, came so close that it knocked the top sandbag off our parapet. Certain it was that the word was frequently passed to "lie low while the '75's' fire just above us." My day to go up to the trenches came at last. My guide was Captain Bretherton, the Staff Captain of the 1st Cavalry Brigade. [Illustration: Scenes of battle of olden time in colours on the shattered walls of Ypres Cloth Hall] [Illustration: A communication trench leading to the front-line position in the Sanctuary Wood] Leaving my car at the "Halte," a point where the railway crosses the Menin Road, and the Zillebeke Road branches off to the south, we were soon slipping, sliding and ploughing along through the muddy fields. We followed no particular pathway, avoiding where possible fields where enemy shells were falling. The rotting mangel-wurzels dotted the ground all about us. Shell-holes in thousands, positions where French or British batteries had made a stand, trenches in lines and circles, and barbed wire entanglements, caught my attention at every step. Sprinkled everywhere were all manner of pieces of projectile--from complete 6-inch German shells, unexploded, to blue shrapnel cartridges, bright-nosed timing fuses, and jagged bits of all shapes and sizes. Cavan's House was but a wall, a pile of shapeless bricks and mortar beside it. Cavan's Dug-out, a series of holes in the road bank, roofed with sandbags, held a signal party. Every day a storm of shell visited the spot, and Hun snipers made one wary thereabouts. We walked on, up the roadway, our objective the Sanctuary Wood. The bullets sang over us, and shells burst in front with a continuous din. A path led through the scrub. Entering the wood, we passed innumerable little individual funk holes. The trees were in splinters and tatters. Here I saw an abandoned shirt, there a khaki cap. My foot hit against a regulation mess tin, and as it turned I saw a rifle-hole drilled in its bottom. Now we were ankle, now knee, deep in sticky mud. Bullets became more plentiful overhead. A turn down a muddy path led us through a last piece of woods, across sloughs of slime, over a creek, up a slight slope, and there we were at General Briggs's Brigade Headquarters. These were a line of dug-outs in the hillside, a corduroy road winding from entrance to entrance. A deep approach trench, looking like a drain, led one hundred and fifty yards further to the front trenches. Shells fell all the afternoon on our right and behind us, and the song of the Mauser bullets never ceased. At dusk, I was "safe" back in Ypres.