This sordid patch of ravaged fields is the theatre of war. These crumbling ditches and broken posts, these obliterated farmsteads, these lamentable dead, and, always opposite, the long, low line of sandbags marking the German trenches, make up the setting of so many great dramas in our history of to-day. On this scene our young men gaze as they take a final look about them before plunging forward to the assault that is to lead them to their death. In these surroundings are performed those great deeds of gallantry which stir our race to the core. Whether you are in Flanders or the Argonne, in flat or undulating country, the space between the lines is always the same. It is as dead as the castle of _la Belle au Bois dormant_, the only truly neutral ground in Europe to-day. An extraordinarily untidy-looking jumble of multi-coloured sandbags, white and blue and green and stripey (like the ticking of a mattress), marks the German line. You will be disposed to think that the German trenches must be ill-constructed until you have seen our line from the outside. Then you will understand that, under the weight of the parapet and the influence of the wet, sandbags get squeezed out of their regular line, many besides being constantly ripped open by the bullets plunging through their canvas into the mud within with a sharp smack. The German trench-line looks old and untidy and weather-beaten. The only neat thing about it are the dark grey steel plates let in at intervals all along the line. These are the plates with a loophole that may be opened or shut for firing purposes. The trench-line is finite. Here England, the Empire, ends. Up to the line, by grace of the A.S.C., you may live your life as an Englishman, eat your bully beef and drink your dixie of tea, receive your two posts a day and your newspaper, and enjoy the safety of the strong iron ring which the Grand Fleet has thrown about our vast possessions. Beyond the line the _Polizei-Staat_ very soon begins. Behind the parapet across the intervening space framed in the little loophole of our firing-plate everything is _feldgrau_. As regular and universal as the drab grey uniform of the German hordes is the mentality of that people moving like one man to the wires pulled in Berlin--wires that stretch from the ugly yellow building of the _Grosser General Stab_, by the Koenigsplatz, to this narrow ditch in Flanders.