Moonlight now was stronger through the mist which hung fold over fold over the forbidden land between the opposing battle lines. At intervals nervous machine guns chattered their ghoulish gibberish or tut-tut-ted away chidingly like finicky spinsters. Their intermittent sputtering to the right and left of us was unenlightening. We couldn't tell whether they were speaking German or English. Occasional bullets whining somewhere through that wet air gave forth sounds resembling the ripping of linen sheets.
Artillery fire was the exception during the entire night but when a shell did trace its unseen arc through the mist mantle, its echoes gave it the sound of a street car grinding through an under-river tunnel or the tube reverberations of a departing subway train.
We were two hundred yards from the German front lines. Between their trenches and ours, at this point, was low land, so boggy as to be almost impassable. The opposing lines hugged the tops of two small ridges.
Fifty yards in front was our wire barely discernible in the fog. The Major interrupted five wordless reveries by expressing, with what almost seemed regretfulness, the fact that in all his fighting experience he had never seen it "so damn quiet." His observation passed without a remark from us.
The Major appeared to be itching for action and he got into official swing a hundred yards farther on, where a turn in the trench revealed to us the muffled figures of two young Americans, comfortably seated on grenade boxes on the firing step.
From their easy positions they could look over the top and watch all approaches without rising. Each one had a blanket wrapped about his legs and feet. They looked the picture of ease. Without moving, one, with his rifle across his lap, challenged the Major, advanced him, and received the countersign. We followed the Major in time to hear his first remark:
"Didn't they get the rocking chairs out here yet?" he said with the provoked air that customarily accompanies any condemnation of the quartermaster department.
"No, sir," replied the seated sentry. "They didn't get here. The men we relieved said that they never got anything out here."
"Nor the footstools?" the Major continued, this time with an unmistakable tone.
The man didn't answer.