We had a ration soup and ration ham and ration prunes and cheese; what Tommy Atkins gets. When we were outside the house and starting for the trench this captain, with his wounded arm, wanted to carry my knapsack. He seemed to think that refusal was breaking the Hague conventions.
Where we turned off the road, broken finger-points of brick walls in the faint moonlight indicated the site of Neuve Chapelle; other fragments of walls in front of us were the remains of a house; and that broken tree-trunk showed what a big shell can do. The trunk, a good eighteen inches in diameter, had not only been cut in two by one of the monsters of the new British artillery, but had been carried on for ten feet and left lying solidly in the bed of splinters of the top of the stump. All this had been in the field of that battle of a day, which was as fierce as the fiercest day at Gettysburg, and fought within about the same space. Every tree, every square rod of ground, had been paid for by shells, bullets, and human life.
But now we were near the trenches; or, rather, the breastworks. We are always speaking of the trenches, while not all parts of the line are held by trenches. A trench is dug in the ground; a breastwork is raised from the level of the ground. At some points a trench becomes practically a breastwork, as its wall is raised to get free of the mud and water.
We came into the open and heard the sound of voices and saw a spotty white wall; for some of the sandbags of the new British breastworks still retained their original colour. On the reverse side of this wall lines were leaning in readiness, their fixed bayonets faintly gleaming in the moonlight. I felt of the edge of one and it was sharp, quite prepared for business. In the surroundings of damp earth and mud-bespattered men, this rifle seemed the cleanest thing of all, meticulously clean, that ready weapon whose well-aimed and telling fire, in obedient and cool hands, was the object of all the drill of the new infantry in England; of all the drill of all infantry. Where pickets watched in the open in the old days before armies met in pitched battle, an occasional soldier now stands with rifle laid on the parapet, watching.
Across a reach of field faintly were made out the white spots of another wall of breastworks, the German, at the edge of a stretch of woods, the Bois du Bies. The British reached these woods in their advance; but, their aeroplanes being unable to spot the fall of shells in the mist, they had to fall back for want of artillery support. Along this line where we stood outside the village they stopped; and to stop is to set the spades going to begin the defences which, later, had risen to a man's height, and with rifles and machine-guns had riddled the German counter-attack.
And the Germans had to go back to the edge of the woods, where they, too, began digging and building their new line. So the enemies were fixed again behind their walls of earth, facing each other across the open, where it was death for any man to expose himself by day.
"Will you have a shot, sir?" one of the sentries asked me.
"At what?"
"Why, at the top of the trench over there, or at anything you see moving," he said.
But I did not think that it was an invitation for a non-combatant to accept. If the bullet went over the top of the trench it had still two thousand yards and more to go, and it might find a target before it died. So, in view of the law of probabilities, no bullet is quite waste.