Eames did not even realize that his head was above the parapet. The hardest thing to teach a soldier is not to expose himself. Officers keep iterating warnings and then forget to practise what they preach. That morning a soldier had been shot through the heart and arm sideways behind the trench. He had lain down unnoticed for a nap in the sun, it was supposed. When he awoke, presumably he sat up and yawned and Herr Schmidt, from some platform in a tree, had a bloody reward for his patience.
The next morning I saw the British take their revenge. Some German who thought that he could not be seen in the mist of dawn was walking along the German parapet. What hopes! Four or five men took careful aim and fired. That dim figure collapsed in a way that was convincing.
As I swept the line of German trenches with the glasses I saw a wisp of 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, 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 wheatfield, 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: