His growing beard did not conceal his smiling mouth. I wondered at his easy dialect, spoken without the London accent noticeable in so many Prussian officers. I asked him where he had learned to speak American. He told me he had worked in the Bronx—which those who are not New Yorkers may or may not know—and that he was a joiner in a piano factory. Every Sunday afternoon he played baseball in Claremont Park; his team had won a Church League championship. Bullets began to whistle overhead. Doubtless thinking that a reckless officer had exposed himself, the French were covering the pit. "Do you hear them?" grinned the Bronx piano joiner, as the whistle of the bullets kept up. "Fine, isn't it?"
"You like to hear bullets?" I asked. He nodded. Well, I suppose it's a cultivated taste, like German hors d'œuvres. I began to think of him as of the Saxonians whom I saw drilling in the courtyard in Vis en Artois. Of course he liked this better than piecing together colorless bits of wood in a factory. Not a day passed, probably, but that he got his little thrill, and when the war was over he could go back to the Bronx—if he lived—and be a hero among his friends for the rest of his days. And as I wished him good luck and turned to overtake the others I wondered if this war is going to change the workingman in this way; if he is going to become so accustomed to a spicy existence that he never tasted before, that he will not follow to the humdrum of shops and mills as inevitably as before; rather demanding something more?
Beside the door to a dugout I saw on the wall a page torn from a French periodical L'Illustration. It was a lay-out of actresses and bicycle riders and it struck you as incongruous until you remembered that the trench had been captured from the French. I saw a profusion of mottoes lettered by the soldiers on their writing paper—Gott mit uns. You could not pass a rifle pit—and they are about ten yards apart—without seeing those words of the Emperor that have become the slogan of the German army; and you thought as you saw them, not printed under some official orders and sent to the soldiers so that they would ever have them before them, but written by the men themselves out of the feeling in their hearts, you thought that it is going to be a tremendous job to hold at bay an army, that thinks the Divine is on its side.
I noticed that the soldiers try to outdo each other in the individuality of their dugouts. There was one that had a little sign over the door "Gasthaus zur Kron" and the soldier inside told me that it was the name of the hotel he owned in his home town. I saw another with three inches of stove pipe protruding from the roof that billed itself as the Schmaltz Kuchen Bäckerie, under which was modestly written in pencil "Here is the best kitchen in the world." Delightful these signs, for presently I came upon an exceedingly frank one, the tenant of a dugout having stuck over the door, a shingle upon which was written "Gasthaus der Wilde Wanze," which means "The Inn of the Wild Bed Bug."
I went down into one of the dugouts. I saw a square hole in the earth where one had to move about stooped. A candle flickered on an empty box and in the corner I saw two piles of mud-caked blankets. A pair of wet socks hung from a string that had been fastened in some miraculous way from wall to wall and a soldier was straining his eyes in the candlelight, reading the tiny Bible which is part of the equipment of every German private. Perhaps I do the man an injustice but I imagined he was reading because he was bored; and that by the time this war is over, more Germans will know their Bible from cover to cover because of hours in the trenches when they had nothing else to do. I saw no crucifix in that room in the ground—and I have seen crucifixes in bombproofs—but I saw another cross, the Maltese outlines of the Iron Cross dug in the dirt wall, and I thought of it as that soldier's dream.
At the next passage to a rifle pit, the officers stopped and I saw that here were no soldiers on watch and that a narrow passageway opened up into the field.
"That is the way we advance our trenches," explained the Captain. "At different points we dig out like this and then after we have gone out awhile, we dig sideways in both directions, parallel to this trench. Soon the different little trenches that are being dug that way, meet. Then they are deepened and the soldiers leave pits here and take the new position."
It was the method, as old as fortifications that the Japanese gave perfected, to the military world at Port Arthur and that the Bulgarians copied around Adrianople, and it is the way by which the —th Infantry finally closed in Arras, the way the whole German line, meter by meter, is moving France, creeping this time, not running wild over the country side, as during those wild August days, but gaining slowly here, losing slowly there, instead of being driven back across their own frontier, as the English newspapers promised they would be long before this writing. I went up into one of the little outpost trenches. The approach was shallow and you had to walk doubled over. I passed a door of solid iron that slid into a groove dug in the mud, and through another gate, this one of wood and tangled with barbed wire.
"In case anything should happen during the night," offered the Captain with a smile; and then we came to the new trench where soldiers were digging, while a squad of eight stood guard with leveled rifles and a machine gun lest the French attack by surprise. It was not yet a trench in the military sense; only a ditch in which you dared not stand erect for even your chest would be exposed above the bags of sand that lined the top. Crouched beside a soldier I peered through an opening between the bags. I felt that the gray stone house that I had seen before, was approaching nearer. Where were the French? I stared across the plowed field. Finally I made out a furrow that was different from the others. It seemed higher and more gray than the color of dirt and I saw that it extended as far as the eye could see, and as I watched it I suddenly saw a speck of blue. It was the hat I had seen by the thousands in the prison camps. I had seen the French.
The soldier beside me seemed engrossed in the gray stone house. He muttered something to the next man—there were not separate rifle pits here—just a line of men. I too watched the gray house. I saw on the roof the rack of a wireless, and in the middle of the wall where the garret must be, a circular open window looked almost as if it had been made as a shell. I became conscious that there was somebody in that room and the next moment I saw a figure slowly approach the big gaping window, and a head cautiously appeared. I had a glimpse of a pallid blank face and then a rifle roared in my ear, and three more went off in a salvo. "French officers in that room," remarked the soldier wisely. "We get them."