"Stand to." A shout from the trench outside—repeated all along until it died away in the distance. The Major gulped his rum and dived for the door—while Jim groped for his cap. Suddenly out of the still night there came a burst of firing, sudden and furious. The firing was taken up all along the line, and then the guns started and a rain of shrapnel came down behind the British lines.
Away—a bit in front on the other side of the road to Jim's trench there were woods—woods of unenviable reputation. Hence the name of "Sanctuary." In the middle of them, on the road, lay the ruined château and village of Hooge—also of unenviable reputation.
And towards these woods the eyes of all were turned.
"What the devil is it?" shouted the man beside Jim. "Look at them lights in the trees."
The devil it was. Dancing through the darkness of the trees were flames and flickering lights, like will-o'-the-wisps playing over an Irish bog. And men, looking at one another, muttered sullenly. They remembered the gas; what new devilry was this?
Up in the woods things were moving. Hardly had the relieving regiments taken over their trenches, when from the ground in front there seemed to leap a wall of flame. It rushed towards them and, falling into the trenches and on to the men's clothes, burnt furiously like brandy round a plum pudding. The woods were full of hurrying figures dashing blindly about, cursing and raving. For a space pandemonium reigned. The Germans came on, and it looked as if there might be trouble. The regiments who had just been relieved came back, and after a while things straightened out a little. But our front trenches in those woods, when morning broke, were not where they had been the previous night....
Liquid fire—yet one more invention of "Kultur"; gas; the moat at Ypres poisoned with arsenic; crucifixion; burning death squirted from the black night—suddenly, without warning: truly a great array of Kultured triumphs.... And with it all—failure. To fight as a sportsman fights and lose has many compensations; to fight as the German fights and lose must be to taste of the dregs of hell.
But that is how they do fight, whatever interesting surmises one may make of their motives and feelings. And that is how it goes on over the water—the funny mixture of the commonplace of everyday with the great crude, cruel realities of life and death.
But as I said, for the next few weeks the grey screen cloaked those crude realities as far as Jim was concerned. Rumour for once had proved true; the division was pulled out, and his battalion found itself near Poperinghe.