“Trained owls would be the most valuable scouts we could have,” said the young officer. “They would be more useful than aeroplanes in locating the enemy’s gun positions. A properly reliable owl would come back and say that a German patrol was out in the wheat-field at such a point and a machine gun would wipe out the German patrol.”
We turned into a side trench, an alley off the main street, leading out of the front trench toward the Germans.
“Anybody out?” he asked a soldier, who was on guard at the end of it.
“Yes, two.”
Climbing out of the ditch, we were in the midst of a tangle of barbed wire protecting the trench front, which was faintly visible in the starlight. There was a break in the tangle, a narrow cut in the hedge, as it were, kept open for just such purposes as this. When the patrol returned it closed the gate again.
“Look out for that wire—just there! Do you see it? We’ve everything to keep the Boches off our front lawn except ‘keep off the grass!’ signs.”
It was perfectly still, a warm summer night without a cat’s-paw of breeze. Through the dark curtain of the sky in a parabola rising from the German trenches swept a brilliant sputter of red light of a German flare. It was coming as straight toward us as if it had been aimed at us. It cast a searching, uncanny glare over the tall wheat in head between the trenches.
“Down flat!” whispered the officer.
It seemed foolish to grovel before a piece of fireworks. There was no firing in our neighbourhood; nothing to indicate a state of war between the British Empire and Germany; no visual evidence of any German army anywhere in France except that flare. However, if a guide, who knows as much about war as this one, says to prostrate yourself when you are out between two lines of machine guns and rifles—between the fighting powers of Britain and Germany—you take the hint. The flare sank into the earth a few yards away, after a last insulting, ugly fling of sparks in our faces.
“What if we had been seen?”