14 
LAND 6? WATER 
October 24, 1918 
dues about one in the morning — of a singular stillness. A 
sense of solitude seemed to pervade the place, and it came 
on me tliat I hadn't seen a sentry for at least ten minutes. 
" Imagine yourself arriving from nowhere in London as we 
know it, but finding it desolate, a tomb of memories, silent 
with the silence of the grave, and imagine yourself pacing 
the deserted streets, hoping desperately, as you rounded 
every corner, for some face to show itself — to hear even 
the echo of an unseen step. . . . Well, ten minutes of the 
front line on a night like this, without a sound or a sight of 
life, is enough to drive one as near to desperation as that 
would be — waiting in the antechamber of eternity with 
nothing very particular in one's pocket in the way of an intro- 
duction to the Almighty. You can imagine it. I looked over 
the parapet, and tried to pick up the familiar outline of the 
enemy's front line. I was looking into the waste. 
"In the reflected half-light of the moon I could see 
No Man's Land clearly in front of me — see it for about 
four hundred yards or more^and the Turkish line was 
nowhere. I stayed there for some minutes. Instinctively 
I had loosed my revolver in my holster, and had my hand 
on the trigger. I was standing on a crumbling square foot 
of fire-step, and the trench from which I had stepped was 
only a foot or so" across at that particular point. I was 
stepping down, had decided with an effort that it was clearly 
my duty to return to my headquarters, and Broderson's 
to continue the investigation of the trench, when my heart 
turned to stone. I had stepped down not into the trench 
bottom, but on to a biscuit-tin. In the utter quiet of that 
spot the noise was hideously jarring. It was as pitiless as 
the descending light of a flare, a discord in that enveloping 
harmony with which night attunes even the battle-field to 
the craving of the soul for peace. 
"I took a half-sheet of notepaper out of my pocket — a bill 
of Sullivan and Powell's, as a matter of fact, . . . one remem- 
bers moments like that . . . and stuck it into p. sandbag to 
mark the spot, and turned my back on the place. I had, thank 
God, been soldier enough to seek no far-fetched or romantic 
explanation of my failure to see the Turkish trenches in 
front of me. Had nature intended me for a peet or a dreamer 
I should have analysed the situation as it seemed, and faced 
it. To a psychologist, indeed, the situation as it seemed 
to me, and I facing it as I saw it, would have been the only 
ingredients of the problem. That's how Broderson en- 
visaged it later. 
" But I was different from Broderson ; you must see 
that, surely. I had made a mental note of my impressions, 
I admit ; but, setting these on one side, I had, faced 
the problem by realising that it didn't exist. If the 
two opposing lines of trenches run parallel and are two 
hundred yards apart, and a man gets to a point in one of 
them when he can see four hundred j^ards and there are no 
trenches' ahead, there is only one explanation : that he is 
in reality looking between the two lines of trenches, and 
not from one to the other. But the biscuit-tin. . . . This 
was a different matter. It is true that the only explanation 
which fitted the facts was that it had been all the time 
exactly where it was when I first noticed it. But I refused 
— no, that's too harsh a word — but I was loath to accept 
that explanation. I had made one sacrifice on the altar of 
disillusion, and I felt disinclined for another. A rare savour 
of adventure clung about that biscuit-tin, whether I liked it 
or not, and I turned back, to talk it over with Broderson. 
"To talk it over. Innocent enough, even the ordinary 
soldier would say ; and positivel}' desirable, Spencer suggests, 
to have imagination enough to suppose that a biscuit-tin 
— of all absurd, prosaic objects — can have not only relevance, 
but a positive significance. Yet it was fatal. It was a 
fatality. And I, of all people, didn't realise it — not till 
it was too late. 
"I had found my way back to Broderson, confirming, as 
I did so, that I had wandered, on coming towards the end 
of his line, into a disused communication trench (we had 
only captured the first Turkish trench on July 13th), and 
found him, to all appearance, normal, prosaic, collected, 
and, as a matter of fact, a trifle anxious about my where- 
abouts. I was always supposed to wander alone into rather 
dangerous places of a night time. 
"I told him I'd just been having a look at the old com- 
munication trench, ... no more than that, mind you. 
"'Did you find the post all right, sir?' he asked, quite 
casually. 
" I was grateful for the information that there was a post 
— it must have been further up, of course, than I had gone — 
but the biscuit-tin preyed on my mind. Yet I knew Broder- 
son ; he was in a dangerous part of the line, and it was my 
business to see that he kept — well — self-possessed, and 
when I had caught him half an hour he had not been . . . 
precisely in that conditi/jn. Yet I felt I should mention 
that biscuit-tin. It might, after all. . , . Well, my God, 
ahd so it might have ! . . . Yet that flash of imagination 
was a fatality. 
" 'I only w^ent," I said, as I thought normally, in a plain 
matter-of-fact tone— the sort of tone a soldier should use — 
oh, yes, I was collected -enough to realise my peculiar respon- 
sibility in the matter — 'I only went as far as the biscuit-tin.' 
"Behcve me, the boy's face literally froze with horror.. 
I recovered myself with an effort, and asked, still more- 
normally — if possible — what the matter was. You must under- 
stand there v.'as something inhuman about that trench out of 
which 1 had emerged, as out of a dream. And soldiers 
must live in "the present, bhnd to the call of romance— deaf 
to the fascination of the unknown, or the terror. A studied 
banalite of phrase was my weapon, for I had not only to 
disarm myself of my once-baulked imagination, but to bring 
Broderson back on to that lower -plane when a biscuit-tin 
is a common laughable utensil of life — not a thing imbued 
with significance. The significant in war is precisely that 
which can be appreciated by the average' man with the 
average mind ; the unknowable, the improbable, even, has 
a significance only for the visionary ; and I can swear to 
you, Spencer, a visionary in the trenches will sec more than 
the eye of God Himself could meet with an unflinching gaze ! 
"I succeeded with Broderson, beyond imagination, as 
I thought. He became at once the respectful young officer, 
said good-night in the most normal of voices, and turned 
on his heel. And I flattered myself that it was only fcr a 
minute, at the most, tlrat Broderson had believed just what 
I had finally refused to believe ; that he had not missed 
that biscuit-tin in his last walk along the trench. 
"Broderson's company had three more days in the line. 
When r left, I flattered myself that he was normal again. 
As a matter of fact, he went straight to the trench, to the 
point I had marked, and took bearings busily for half an 
hour ; we found all this out afterwards, you must under- 
stand. Then he set off across No Man's Land. It was 
three-quarters of an hour's crawl to the Turki.'.h wire . . . 
they were sending up flares all the time . . . and when he 
came back by our barricade he was nearly shot by his own 
post. , 
"Then he went to sleep. The second day he had the 
mysterious biscuit-tin removed, never telling anyone the 
whole time that he attached any importance to it whatever. 
But it is clear that he still clung to his theory. His patrol 
the night before had told him nothing definite ; but it con- 
firmed his suspicions that it was possible to get from the biscuit- 
tin to 'the Turkish line without being seen either by the post 
at the barricade or bj' the sentries in his own front line. 
"The third morning he spent making maps, plotting 
bearings, writing orders. He was -often apt to be a trifle 
mysterious, with his officers, to give queer inconsequential 
instructions, to throw over the humdrum present the shadow 
of coming events. 
"This evening he was in one of these moods, and he sent 
for his officers, and hinted at the imminence of danger. He 
had reason to believe that a raid might be expected that 
evening. He gave orders for a Lewis gun or two to be put 
in new positions, and he withdrew his advanced post to that 
ill-fated spot where I had halted the first night. 
"Everything was quiet that night till three in the morning, 
when the Turks started their intolerable rapid fire ; intoler- 
able, I say, not because it was particularly damaging, but 
because of its utter futility. It was the sort of thing which 
made war really undignified, a deliberate breach of professional 
etiquette which was really . humiliating. They hadn't put 
up this wretched performance since June 4th, and some of 
the later drafts may excusably have expected it to be a 
prelude to something. Broderson should have known 
better ; instead, they told me that his face lit up with 
pleasure, tlirilled with the fulfilment of his hopes. He 
called to his men to stand ready, and leapt to his point of 
vantage on that very square foot of crumbling where I had 
stood three nights before. 
"'My God,' he cried, in a really triumphant voice, 'here 
they . . .' His voice died away, to the staccato accom- 
paniment of splintering bullets, and he fell forward. 
"One stray bullet, one of the half-million fired that night, 
had found its mark. That was all that happened. And, 
would you believe it, Broderson's men — the men actually 
with him in the sap — really believed there had been a raid ? 
And I had to recommend two of them for decorations. You 
see, I had no evidence . . . not a shred. They had been 
there, and I had not, . . . yet I knew." 
"You knew?" I said, almost mechanically. 
"I tell you, yes, I knew," Alderson answered hotly- — 
Alderson, the man who distrusted imagination, 
