of a line of infantry hacking at a barrier of barbed wire, running frantically up and down to find a gap in it, and falling, perhaps, under curtains of fire, but no longer, thank God, before clouds of the poisonous gas which used to burst the lungs and plunge down the throat like bars of burning steel.
Our way is now westward, past one of the great London hospitals, and through the dark zone of the city, which, thronged with millions by day, is nearly deserted during the night. It is eleven o'clock by this time, the theatres are emptying, the supper-rooms are filling, and London, with its lowered lights, is looking like old Cairo under its dark mantle of night, with the difference that taxis are hooting through the principal thoroughfares, and in the silence of some of the narrower streets, which flank the great railway stations, lines of ambulance wagons are waiting for their nightly toll of our wounded from the front.
The first factory we visit in the western
