The trenches were buttressed with timber and sandbags, and much of the day was spent bracing sagging walls, fire steps and parapets. There were also rotting duckboards to be replaced, stagnant water to be drained, and sanitation details. The wire, of course, could only be laid at night. Beyond the wire lay three hundred yards of open land gently rising to the German trenches. There were shell craters here and patches of scorched earth, but there were also some still-unbroken fields, actually beautiful at certain hours of the day.

Gray made sketches of this landscape, chiefly long views of poppies and skeletal trees. He would work at odd hours, usually between stand-to and breakfast, and tended to concentrate on the intricacies of light reflected off wire and scattered debris absorbed by charred stumps.

On the whole it was an insular war, medieval in certain respects. Many of the weapons—jam-pot bombs, gas-pipe mortars—were primitive, often constructed by the soldiers themselves. Tactics were still in a transitional phase, evolving on a trial-and-error basis. Eventually the British would pay for overmanning the firing lines, and everybody would pay for the frontal assault against machine-gun emplacements. As the accuracy of artillery improved there was greater emphasis on sapping and a subterranean existence.

In this war of attrition engagements were generally brief and conducted at night. The raiding parties were small, rarely more than a few dozen men. The objectives were intimidation and the mostly symbolic dominance of no-man's-land. As an officer of the line Gray was expected to lead three raids a month and any number of reconnaissance patrols.

Even during quiet interludes there were at least a dozen random fatalities a week, mostly from sporadic artillery, mortar, and machine-gun fire, but also from neglect and fatigue—pointless deaths from failing to clean a rifle, guard a light, observe the half-inch margin while moving along a communication trench.

Still, the most upsetting deaths were those inflicted by the German snipers. Unlike the British commanders, who tended to regard sniping as contemptible—not quite cricket—the Germans were enthusiastic, with elaborate training programs, camouflaging, and telescopic sights. Working in pairs behind concealed steel loopholes, the snipers always accounted for four or five casualties a day that tended to linger in everyone's mind . . .

Gray's first experience with a sniper came two days after his arrival in the line. It was a relatively quiet evening, with only intermittent fire to the south. Gray had spent the afternoon in a dugout with a friend from the depot, a quiet young lieutenant named Arthur Child. Toward dusk the two men had wandered out to a rear traverse for a breath of air and privacy. There were birds in the surrounding grass, sparrows and titmice. An easy breeze from the west brought odors of coffee and hawthorn, and there was a low bone-white moon above the ridge.