Once or twice, with a queer, screeching sound, a shell, like a little puff of white smoke, passed high over the car and fell somewhere in the grey valley below.

In the distance he could see the movements of a body of troops through the trees, soldiers on the way to relieve their comrades in the trenches.

As the morning broke, the trenches themselves came into view--long, zig-zag lines, silent, and with no sign of the men who crawled about inside like ants.

He passed a great brewery transformed into a canteen, from which a line of waggons, going and returning, were passing all the time backwards and forwards into the valley.

Every now and then through the stillness came the sharp crack of a rifle from the snipers lying hidden in the little stretches of woodland and marshland away on the right.