What the eye focusses is merely a scene of some disorder, where the communication trench debouches into the open and fades away opposite a line of sandbags. Here is all the bustle of the bivouac, soldiers grouped about fires on which pots are simmering, others polishing accoutrements, “cleaning up,” writing letters. But the eye does not take in this picture. It is looking farther afield to where, on a low platform behind a neat row of sandbags, the sentries are standing immobile beside their rifles. Their bandoliers are strapped across them, their bayonets are fixed. Their backs are turned to you. They look forward with an air of strained attention. They are the look-out men in the fire-trench. Piles of sandbags and a great deal of timber-work, timber flooring, and timber supports, as neat and prosaic as a street excavation in London, is what the eye sees. But my first view of that line of men standing on guard at the parapet stimulated my imagination more than any other picture I have seen in this war; for I realized that these quiet figures behind their stout rampart are the bulwark of our civilization, an infinitesimal fraction of the line which the Allies have flung from the Channel to the Alps. “Our world has passed away, In wantonness o’erthrown. There is nothing left to-day But steel and fire and stone.” Here, in the firing-line, one stands on the ruins of that world of ours, in Kipling’s fine symbolism, that passed away at the menace of the Hun. The little strip of parapet before us, like all the rest of the line winding its way from the sands of Nieuport to the frontier of Switzerland, is the boundary-line between civilization and barbarism, the bourne which marks the frontier between idealism and materialism. Beyond the parapet is broken ground, utterly uninteresting, utterly prosaic, for all that it is the realm of death. Immediately in front of the trench is barbed wire, new and taut and cleanly grey, fastened in a perplexing criss-cross work to lines of stout wooden posts driven deep in the ground; beyond that a stretch of flat field, of corn or grass or stubble, with a ditch here and a tree there, and maybe a pile of blackened bricks that once was a farm. Between corn and grass and stubble the earth has been turned up in places--you may see it brown or white beneath its cloak of scarlet poppies or azure cornflowers. An irregular cluster of posts from which hang jagged fragments of barbed wire, a whitish line in the ground marking an old trench, something like an old grey coat lying humped up on the grass or a pair of boots thrust out from a hole in the ground, which, if you have seen a battlefield before, you know to be unburied corpses--all these are relics of former fighting.