moreover, they had saved labour in spots where no unnecessary men ought to be asked to jeopardize their lives. The bodies, where they showed through the mud, had flaked off white like plaster exposed to the wind and sun. Flies rose up in clouds as one passed; their wings filled the air with an incessant buzzing.     

       Horrors multiplied as the world grew grayer and the dawn began to break. We came to a ditch levelled nearly flat by the Hun barrage, in which Jocks and coloured troops had fought side by side. They were buried to the waist; in the process of decay the black men had turned white and the white black.     

       I watched the effect of all this on Heming. The Major watched hun. Perhaps most closely of all the signallers watched him. When a new officer joins any unit, the men are overwhelmingly eager to find out whether he has guts. They know that the day is always coming when their chance of life may depend on his judgment and courage.     

       Heming’s face was the face of a dreamer. He never was nor could have been a man of action. He imagined too far ahead. He visualized and fought the horror which lurked behind each traverse before he came to it. A thousand times that morning he must have seen himself mutilated and dead. His expression was tense and excited, but an amused smile played about the edges of his mouth. His eyes beneath his steel-helmet were brilliant and forward-looking. He seemed to contemplate his inward struggle against terror with the unimpassioned aloofness of a spectator.     

       Trenches were becoming shallower. It was some time since we had passed any sentries or working-parties. A horrible, brooding silence was over everything, broken only by the secret dripping of rain and the scuttling of rats among corpses. The Major became more frequent in the examining of his map. At last he ordered us to crouch down while he stealthily peered over the lip of the trench in an effort to get his bearings. It began to dawn on us that we had come too far and were lost in No Man’s Land.     

       While we waited, behind the mist we heard talking. The mist parted and we saw, not fifty yards away, the smoke-gray uniforms and red-cross armlets of a party of Hun stretcher-bearers. The Major was standing up. The Huns dropped the stretcher they were carrying; at the same instant a rifle rang out. The Major 

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