As I swept the line of German trenches with the glasses, I saw a wisp of a flag clinging to its pole in the still air far down to the left. Flags are as unusual above trenches as men standing up in full view of the enemy. Then a breeze caught the folds of the flag and I saw that it was the tricolour of France.
“A Boche joke!” Tommy explained.
“Probably they are hating the French to-day?”
“No, it’s been there for some days. They want us to shoot at the flag of our ally. They’d get a laugh out of that—a regular Boche notion of humour.”
“If it were a German flag?” I suggested.
“What hopes! We’d make it into a lace curtain!”
Even the guns had ceased firing. The birds in their evensong had all the war to themselves. It was difficult to believe that if you stood on top of the parapet anybody would shoot at you; no, not even if you walked down the road that ran through the wheat-field, everything was so peaceful. One grew sceptical of there being any Germans in the trenches opposite.
“There are three or four sharpshooters and a fat old Boche professor in spectacles, who moves a machine gun up and down for a bluff,” said a soldier, and another corrected him:
“No, the old professor’s the one that walks along at night sending up flares!”